I never actually wrote a review of Interstellar, at least not one longer than your average Facebook post. So I guess we'll start off with a quick summary of how I felt after watching that movie for the first time.
Really pretty, excellent cinematography, okay performances, odd dialogue, baffling story, ballistically terrible music.
I'll actually be touching on more specifics in most of those cases as we go, but my purpose here isn't a pure review of Interstellar, but rather a comparison. Because I'm not sure if you were aware of this, but Interstellar did not spring from a creative vacuum. Christopher Nolan never claimed that it did, to his credit. It is, basically, Nolan's love letter to the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, a Stanley Kubrick movie based on the Arthur C. Clark book of the same name. So we're gonna talk about how the inevitable comparison colors my perception of Interstellar, because I don't consume movies in a vacuum any more than Nolan creates them in one.
We all gots to breathe, yo.
Also, my main talking point is the end-game of both movies. So spoilers ahead.
I want to start with a basic summary of my current thoughts regarding 2001 after a recent re-watch. I'll be concise, I promise. In short, it's slow, about 1/3rd incomprehensible, and also has generally terrible music. That last point is somewhat offset by the inclusion of some quality classical music at various points, which is sometimes a bad decision, but other times works really well. In the end, though, there are really only two things 2001 does well. Science with its accompanying sense of wonder and exploration, and the visuals.
For being old, 2001 looks really good. It's also refreshingly grounded in science. In no small part I expect that's because Arthur C. Clark was involved at least to the extent where they were pulling their spaceship designs directly from his descriptions in the book. There's no doubt they did a pretty good job with that.
Now, I think it's fair to say that as visually stunning as 2001 was back in "the day," Interstellar was equally stunning when it was released a few years ago. The movie looks really, really good. And while, sure, they took some liberties with how things we've never observed might actually look, keep in mind that uh, we've never actually observed those things. So all we've got is educated guesses, and Interstellar does a pretty good job at depicting those guesses.
And as far as everything else goes, Interstellar parallels 2001 in many, many ways. The performances are fine, if not exactly amazing, the screenplay is a little odd, between Nolan's characters narrating their emotions directly and Kubrick's montage of apes learning to use tools. The music in Interstellar is actually worse than 2001, though they're both so far down the back end of the bell curve in terms of actual entertainment value that they're basically equivalent anyway. In the end I think there's one thing in particular that separates these movies from each other, and that's uh... how they end.
Nolan set his sights on recreating 2001, and in many ways he just absolutely nailed it. Both movies appeal to me visually, impress me with their attention to detail on minor things nobody cares about, and feel about an hour too long for their story. Both movies also completely fly off the handle for the last 45 minutes.
So here's my biggest problem with Interstellar. At the end of 2001, the main character flies into a thing, experiences some stuff that makes absolutely no sense, and then is transported back to the solar system as a space baby. At the end of Interstellar, the main character flies into a thing, experiences some stuff that makes absolutely no sense, and then is transported back to the solar system as a dude who's 120 years younger than his own daughter. Summed up, they're pretty equivalent. The difference is that 2001 doesn't try to explain what the heck happens. It happens, it's beyond the comprehension of our main character, and therefore it's beyond us as well. The suggestion is that there is still a lot of stuff that we don't understand and can't explain, and 2001 is fine to just leave it at that. The movie ends and we sit there wondering where we really fit, cosmically, in terms of our understanding.
Also we sit there recovering from an acid trip. It's not a bad way to end.
Interstellar, on the other hand, is afraid to leave unanswered questions, but also wants to give us an ending equally as bizarre as 2001. So we get explanations for what's going on, it just turns out that they're stupid. Instead of unexplainables, we get the interior of a singularity constructed by future humans which is composed of a 5-dimensional tesseract rendered as a 3-dimensional series of bookshelves that allows communication across time by controlling gravity through the power of love. That's what happens. It's not that I don't get it, it's just really, really stupid.
So I don't love 2001. It's too slow, and unlike Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which it inspired) doesn't have excellent music to keep me entertained. But Kubrick wasn't afraid to take risks and end his blockbuster movie the same way as the hard sci-fi novel it was based on, with questions. That's why 2001 is a classic.
Nolan chickened out and gave us a transparently Hollywood ending that was garbage. That's why I'll bet this is the first time you've thought about Interstellar in well over a year.
Really pretty, excellent cinematography, okay performances, odd dialogue, baffling story, ballistically terrible music.
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| There you go. Short and to the point. Unlike this movie. |
I'll actually be touching on more specifics in most of those cases as we go, but my purpose here isn't a pure review of Interstellar, but rather a comparison. Because I'm not sure if you were aware of this, but Interstellar did not spring from a creative vacuum. Christopher Nolan never claimed that it did, to his credit. It is, basically, Nolan's love letter to the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, a Stanley Kubrick movie based on the Arthur C. Clark book of the same name. So we're gonna talk about how the inevitable comparison colors my perception of Interstellar, because I don't consume movies in a vacuum any more than Nolan creates them in one.
We all gots to breathe, yo.
Also, my main talking point is the end-game of both movies. So spoilers ahead.
I want to start with a basic summary of my current thoughts regarding 2001 after a recent re-watch. I'll be concise, I promise. In short, it's slow, about 1/3rd incomprehensible, and also has generally terrible music. That last point is somewhat offset by the inclusion of some quality classical music at various points, which is sometimes a bad decision, but other times works really well. In the end, though, there are really only two things 2001 does well. Science with its accompanying sense of wonder and exploration, and the visuals.
For being old, 2001 looks really good. It's also refreshingly grounded in science. In no small part I expect that's because Arthur C. Clark was involved at least to the extent where they were pulling their spaceship designs directly from his descriptions in the book. There's no doubt they did a pretty good job with that.
Now, I think it's fair to say that as visually stunning as 2001 was back in "the day," Interstellar was equally stunning when it was released a few years ago. The movie looks really, really good. And while, sure, they took some liberties with how things we've never observed might actually look, keep in mind that uh, we've never actually observed those things. So all we've got is educated guesses, and Interstellar does a pretty good job at depicting those guesses.
And as far as everything else goes, Interstellar parallels 2001 in many, many ways. The performances are fine, if not exactly amazing, the screenplay is a little odd, between Nolan's characters narrating their emotions directly and Kubrick's montage of apes learning to use tools. The music in Interstellar is actually worse than 2001, though they're both so far down the back end of the bell curve in terms of actual entertainment value that they're basically equivalent anyway. In the end I think there's one thing in particular that separates these movies from each other, and that's uh... how they end.
Nolan set his sights on recreating 2001, and in many ways he just absolutely nailed it. Both movies appeal to me visually, impress me with their attention to detail on minor things nobody cares about, and feel about an hour too long for their story. Both movies also completely fly off the handle for the last 45 minutes.
So here's my biggest problem with Interstellar. At the end of 2001, the main character flies into a thing, experiences some stuff that makes absolutely no sense, and then is transported back to the solar system as a space baby. At the end of Interstellar, the main character flies into a thing, experiences some stuff that makes absolutely no sense, and then is transported back to the solar system as a dude who's 120 years younger than his own daughter. Summed up, they're pretty equivalent. The difference is that 2001 doesn't try to explain what the heck happens. It happens, it's beyond the comprehension of our main character, and therefore it's beyond us as well. The suggestion is that there is still a lot of stuff that we don't understand and can't explain, and 2001 is fine to just leave it at that. The movie ends and we sit there wondering where we really fit, cosmically, in terms of our understanding.
Also we sit there recovering from an acid trip. It's not a bad way to end.
Interstellar, on the other hand, is afraid to leave unanswered questions, but also wants to give us an ending equally as bizarre as 2001. So we get explanations for what's going on, it just turns out that they're stupid. Instead of unexplainables, we get the interior of a singularity constructed by future humans which is composed of a 5-dimensional tesseract rendered as a 3-dimensional series of bookshelves that allows communication across time by controlling gravity through the power of love. That's what happens. It's not that I don't get it, it's just really, really stupid.
So I don't love 2001. It's too slow, and unlike Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which it inspired) doesn't have excellent music to keep me entertained. But Kubrick wasn't afraid to take risks and end his blockbuster movie the same way as the hard sci-fi novel it was based on, with questions. That's why 2001 is a classic.
Nolan chickened out and gave us a transparently Hollywood ending that was garbage. That's why I'll bet this is the first time you've thought about Interstellar in well over a year.
Actually, I watched it again, this time with my kids. They felt the same way you (and I) did about the ending--perhaps more so. But I actually liked it a lot better the second go round. I may watch it a third time.
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