Chris Nolan likes to play with theories on the perception of Time in his screenplays, and he certainly does so with Interstellar -there are periods in this film where time seems to slow down to an absolute crawl , not only for the hands ticking on the wristwatch on screen, but also for me checking my own in the cinema.
Firstly its not at all bad, it just isn’t as brilliantly good as I expected it to be and it's logic is horribly flawed in a few places. And unfortunately there was just nothing excitingly “new” done with the story here ,indeed there were some very deliberate steals from a lot of other similar sci-fi films and that was disappointing. Oh, and there were some very silly decisions taken once again by very bright scientists doing stupid things just for the sake of adding drama to the plot.
I’ll admit I had some misgivings about the trailer a few posts back ,it just didn’t seem to punch the "right on" buttons for me and I’m sorry to say for the majority of the film that this was just as true. There are some great moments here but overall the pacing was so off throughout it, particularly at the end it made a nonsense of the entire story.
So I went into this very spoiler and review free as I did with “Inception” and that film remains one of my all time favourites,as it was absolutely thrilling and very moving in parts . Sadly “Interstellar“ tries to copy far too many of the themes from that film and therefore comes across as simply a weaker retelling, rather than a brand new work.
Secondly, the science in this is pretty poor in places and just so plain wrong and ridiculous in others I can’t tell you how many times this pulled me right out of the movie, even from the very moment it started. I am often very willing to let some things slip by if the story is good enough to hold my attention and role with it but this didn’t so many times for so many reasons that as a result the rest of screenplay just failed to hold my attention and interest. At one point it felt as if I was watching two separate movies.
Visually its OK. Just OK by today’s very high standards . Not ground breaking. Some have said it exceeds “Gravity” but I don’t see that at all. The soundtrack is ,as has been said, WAY too loud. I actually had to put my fingers in my ears at one or two points ,presumably to stop them rupturing from the volume and I could still feel the vibration throughout my body. And it was far too obtrusive at key moments of dialogue, drowning out a lot of the drama. And you needed to listen to what was being said here, there was just so much clunky Basil exposition.
I had only had one real issue with the acting, which was competant throughout and that was because that actor was just the wrong person to use at that particular moment in the film and his role and actions were so predictable as a result of his appearance I knew what was coming a mile off.
I could go on but I won’t without giving much more away to those who want to see it . I think if people approach this less as a hard sci-fi themed story of space exploration and go with expectations of more of a meta physical drama about human relationships through time travel it will work better for them. I won’t being see this again because I’ve already seen and read work that does it much better.