Movie Review: Interstellar

I'm not a die-hard fan of Christopher Nolan to begin with, but I really enjoy some of his works. My favorite one would be The Prestige, followed by Inception. Memento is hard to enjoy since the story is back and forth so I need to stick my eyes to the screen during more or less 2 hours of the movie. And Batman Trilogy loses its element of comic book vibe in the hand of Nolan. Don't get me wrong, I love The Dark Knight Rises. It's just I prefer the old Batman, with Tim Burton as its director. It's just the vibe is different.

Then Interstellar was released. Given so little details and minimal trailers & spoilers, I read this somewhere "In Nolan we trust", which might be a praise that too much and too high. My expectation was too high when I sit at the theater and start to watch Interstellar. What can go wrong when you get a dozen of first-class actors and actresses, plus it is Christopher Nolan was the one who sat on the director's chair. Then it goes 169 minutes of the well-made movie in front of my eyes.

Warning: Spoiler Alert!

As always, Nolan (Christopher and the other Nolan) gave a wonderfully written story that sometimes needs to be repeated several times to make us understand what they really wants to tell us. Same goes with Inception. At the first glance, Interstellar was magnificent! The technique, well I don't need to say anything. And I also read in a magazine, that Jonathan Nolan was actually attending class to study relativity at the California Institute of Technology while writing the script (talk about dedication). And not to mention that this movie's idea was originally from Kip Throne's work (he also involved creating wormhole and black hole in this movie). So maybe, if it's not right, Interstellar was scientifically almost right, and since I don't understand at all about science, so I'm not going to gives comments on the science part of this movie.

I generally enjoyed movies about space, outer space, wormhole and so on (special thanks to Star Wars installment and Star Trek after), so this movie is enjoyable for me. I go wow in every minute of this movie. And I even said to my friend "So, this was before Star Trek since the spaceship looks older and not that sophisticated". We even squeal at the word "Tesseract" and expecting that Loki will pop up somehow later on the movie. Back on the movie, it was enjoyable. But, if you are not watch sci-fi movie a lot, you'll get easily confused. I mean, what? 23 years on the ship while Amelia and Cooper was only away for not more than 2 hours. And why did Cooper saw Amelia before he was rescued? So who are "THEY"? See, so many questions. So I'm just going to put an infographic (which I forgot from where do I downloaded this).

According to this infographic, and as my understanding after watching the movie, "THEY" is just TARS and Cooper. After all, he was the one who send the code to Murph (well, a father's love). That explain the deterioration when they passed the worm hole. It's the relativity that works there. In other words, THEY is just a paradox. That much I understand, thanks to Doctor Who and his TARDIS! The principal of this movie is not that much different from Doctor Who series, but Doctor Who tells the story about time and space travel in such a light and simple way, and Christopher Nolan gave Interstellar the more details and complicated way about it. Both Doctor Who and Interstellar also mention about relativity (TARDIS itself was sort for TIME AND RELATIVE DIMENSION IN SPACE). There is someone that told TARS the code, and who exactly that will remain a mystery for me. And how Cooper got out from that black hole? That remains unanswered to me. Maybe I need to watch it again.

Personally, I don't believe that there is something in the blackhole. There are reason why it is called BLACKHOLE, and those reasons doesn't involved saying that we will be saved there, but who knows, I'm not a science expert.

Unto the movie. Blessed with a star-studded casts, I don't feel the attachment to the character, aside from Cooper and Murph. Matthew McConaughey, without questions did a wonderful job on Cooper. I feel devastated when he found out that 23 years has already passed and that his children was already growing up and the most saddest thing is he can't send them a message.

But I don't feel the depth on Amelia's character, although I know, Anne Hathaway is such a wonderful actress. And somehow, Jessica Chastain's Murph was overshadowed by Mackenzie Foy's Murph. Adult Murph is not as dynamic and free-spirited as little Murph (maybe life changes her). And I almost called Michael Caine "Alfred" everytime he shows on the screen. From the supporting actor seat, the one who did a wonderful job is Casey Affleck, he did really good to Tom's character. The disappointment he had on his father was just marvelous. 

Somehow, I feel sorry that the script is only focused on how the story, the technical terms, the science and it went from one frame to another, without utilizing the emotions on each (main) characters. We don't even know that Amelia was in love with Edmund if Cooper didn't bring it up (I mean how did he know?). Instead of utilizing the emotions between Cooper, Brand, and Romilly, they gave us treachery of the unstable Dr. Mann, which I don't see what's the point in that anyway. If you watched The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and The Prestige, it also got the same treachery vibe (the infamous one would be Miranda Tate), so it is easy to read that Dr. Mann's planet wasn't the one they're looking for and Dr. Mann was actually distorted mentally and became a bad person. I mean they already running out of fuels and life supply, why put some new conflict instead of deepening the exist one. 

Given chance, I want to watch this again. Just to sort of some things and answer the unanswered questions. And just because I love movies about space, and this was Nolan's. My rating for Interstellar would be 8/10. I am predicting that at least Interstellar would get a nomination or two for Best Movie Score (Hans Zimmer FTW!) and Best Leading Actor for Matthew McConaughey or maybe Best Supporting Actress for Mackenzie Foy (she's young, I know, but she's good).

So there goes my review for Interstellar, I hope I'll be back soon with another movie! XOXO.

Disclaimer: Pictures uploaded was mostly downloaded from here and there on the internet. I got no right on the pictures.