Interstellar (2014)


Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
Runtime: 169 minutes

Synopsis: A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity's survival.

Performances: 8/10
Screenplay: 6/10
Editing: 7/10
Cinematography: 8/10
Score/Soundtrack: 9/10

Verdict: From masterpiece to overrated, Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" has been labeled pretty much everything. I personally was enchanted by it the first time I watched it on an IMAX screen, but a recent rewatch made me reevaluate my position on it.
It's still certainly an impressive feature, in which the visuals, score, and approach to theoretical physics were its most interesting elements. As someone with a background in science, it was refreshing to see a mainstream movie that tackles wormholes, time dilation, and black holes in the way "Interstellar" did. And despite some decisions that felt incredibly cheesy (love as a quantifiable thing, really?) and others that I believe didn't make much sense, I found it to be overall solid in that regard. Where Nolan's film really fails however is in its human element. While the relationship between Cooper and his daughter Murph was for the most part well-handled, pretty much every other relationship, including the one he had with his son, felt incredibly stern and uninteresting. The dialogue and line delivery at times reminded me of over the top action flicks released in the 1980s, and the exposition used to explain to the audience some of the film's concepts was lazy and not very efficient.
Christopher Nolan is a talented filmmaker who knows how to turn a simple story into a thought-provoking one, but I think that he still hasn't perfected the art of subtlety and human touch. In "Interstellar", these issues are more than ever highlighted, which is a shame considering how great its technical elements are.

FINAL GRADE: 7/10

Comments