Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

[JMULL222]

Just throwing my pennies in: No sound issues whatsoever, from a 35mm print (Somerville Theatre, Boston.) Not a single line lost to me.

[DarkImbecile]

I caught it in a digital IMAX screening in Little Rock, AR Friday night, before which the manager appeared to reassure the crowd that the sound had been calibrated by studio personnel and that despite what we were about to experience, we weren't at risk of hearing loss because the bass effects were the result of "pressure waves" and not sheer volume.

The bass effects, which were "designed to be felt rather than heard", I personally only felt from my dead center seat the way one feels the obnoxious thrumming of leaving only one car window partially open while driving down the highway. It did not (I hope) have the intended effect to say the least, serving as a constant distraction throughout the first five minutes or so, though I got more used to it as the film went on. I'm extremely curious as to a.) whether that was how it was "supposed" to sound; b.) if so, how the sound mix will be adjusted for home theaters (it would have blown my subwoofer out if I had the volume high enough to hear the dialogue); and c.) whether seeing it with a less distracting sound mix will improve my decidedly mixed feelings on the film.

Those portions that worked tended to work very well, but the parts that faltered kept the whole from cohering into anything more than an ambitious misfire; I respect and value ambitious failures far more than safe and easy wins, so I'll be revisiting it, hopefully under better circumstances.

Edited for syntax

[willoneill]

I wonder if there's a bit of a psychosomatic effect going on with these sound issues. I saw it last night with a buddy in digital IMAX; overall, I heard every line of dialogue, but some I had to consciously "try" to hear some of it. But I was aware of potential sound issues going in. I asked my buddy after the movie if he had any issues hearing, and he said not at all. I told him about the sound issue reports and he insisted it sounded fine.

As for the movie itself, I thought it was great. I think it's funny that some people are nitpicking about some of the physics issues, considering its a film that fictionally goes beyond what we "know" about physics. The dialogue was a little clunky, but I thought the cast (not just leads, but supporting and big parts too) did a fine job elevating the material. The organs in the score was a nice touch too, since that's not something you hear often anymore.

I do have this weird thing where extremely minor details stick with me, so I had one stupid nitpick:

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if wheat died 10 years before the movie, and most other crops are gone too, where'd they get all the beer?

[barryconvex]

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[Obscure] Spoiler:
if wheat died 10 years before the movie, and most other crops are gone too, where'd they get all the beer?

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you can make anything out of corn...how good it would taste is another matter..

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I liked Lithgow's character lamenting having a hot dog at a Yankees game, a callback to that nice scene in 2010.

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nice catch, fly...Interstellar reminded me of 2010 in a lot of ways...

[mfunk9786]

The two best films of the year, Boyhood and Interstellar, both share an almost embarassing lust for what truly makes us human. They're both raw, flawed films that have those flaws eclipsed by their profound ambition and refusal to answer life's big questions, but merely to ask them and wonder aloud. Nolan's restraint and imagination here are reminicent of his early work in Memento - finally working not in intensity and density but instead turning the camera inward onto the emotions of his characters, something much of his overstuffed, clinical, and largely overrated filmography has lacked for some time now. Sure, this is a film built upon a stack of coincidences, but much like the oft-ridiculed moment with a Hispanic handyman in Boyhood (or Nicole!), Nolan is unashamed to scrounge around for even the most tenuous connective tissue with which to hold together the disparate pieces of Interstellar, forming a profoundly humanistic and agnostic thesis ("Why are we here? Why are we?") on the level of what Linklater was able to accomplish when he edited together his 12-year masterpiece. Both films absolutely blew me away, and have made 2014 that much better than most years at the movies.

[flyonthewall2983]

Nolan on the sound mix.

[warren oates]

Many of the filmmakers I’ve admired over the years have used sound in bold and adventurous ways. I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions—I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal—picture and sound

If only he'd actually done in Interstellar what he says he's doing in that link! Ugh. I saw this a week ago, but I've avoided weighing in on this for the simple reason that the film feels like such a sprawling mess to me, that each little piece that isn't working raises dozens of new issues that spin off into scores of other directions. So much so it isn't even fun to think apart, like Gone Girl was. It just kind of leaves me exhausted and sad. This is hard sci-fi devolving into sub-Shyamalan schmaltz. But it's also Nolan doubling down on (and maybe dumbing down too) everything his detractors hate (all of those standbys that tend to work so well in his talky procedural thrillers) -- the wall to wall expositional dialogue, the twists within twists and revelations of shocking lies -- mistakenly assuming it will translate into the much different ambitions, scale and genre of this film.

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If the drafts Spielberg passed on were anything like this finished film, he made the right call. That may be the most frustrating thing about Interstellar, how it feels like there's a good film (or perhaps more than one) buried in there somewhere. The shooting script unfortunately seems like it's a year or two and many substantial rewrites away from being ready.

In films like Memento, Following, Inception and The Prestige, Nolan's characters are usually demanding to hear all that exposition, most of it is really stuff they didn't know beforehand, and there's often a sense of visual restlessness as we're moving through spaces -- past and present, real and virtual -- in a kind of ceaseless walk and talk. While in Interstellar, for all its supposedly vast cosmic scope, Nolan's talky characters are uncharacteristically still -- mostly sitting around on porches, in boardrooms and on spaceships telling each other things that, if they really don't know them, they probably should have been discussing long before.

Interstellar seems to confuse its ambitious scope with a mandate to super-size every story element: Why tell a story in two hours when you can do it in three? Why have one central father-daughter pair when you can have two? Who needs a mere wormhole or a solitary blackhole when you can have both? Why travel to just one remote planetary outpost when we can visit three? Other classic sci-fi films have one key robot (HAL) or two (R2-D2 and C3PO), so let's up our count to three! Why merely make the mastermind of the whole plan an idealistic liar when you can also have one of his astronauts be a crazy liar?

Of all Interstellar's sins, though, the worst by far is what may be the clunkiest deus ex machina I've ever seen: "they." As the old-timer challenges his partners in The Wild Bunch (both rhetorically and not): "They? They? Who the hell is they?!"

Given what "they" are ultimately revealed to want -- simply to help fellow humans from the past -- it certainly seems like "they" go through an awful lot of extra trouble that would only really make sense if they're were interested in courtside seats to the Spectacular McConaughey NASA Reality Show. Compared to the unknown unknowns in 2001 -- a superior race which at least has the plausibly mysterious motivation of probing and testing humanity -- "they" seem pretty stupid for an advanced intelligence with what feels like practically magical technology. Why not just, you know, use an anomaly to, I don't know, email the formula to Murph? Or if it has to be more elaborate, how about knocking those books off her shelf yourself (or should I say "theyself") instead of making her dad go to the edge of known space-time to do it? Or maybe just move that wormhole closer to Earth, say, Moon adjacent. Or what about solving that mysterious and unlikely* blight? Once again it feels like a film is plotted backward from "cool stuff we'd like to see," on which most of the writers' time and energy seem to have been spent, leaving any notion of coherent world building, storytelling and character motivation to a kind of jumble of retrofitted afterthoughts.

Nolan's best work is so fun to watch and so well paced. This one made me feel every minute. Even the best looking space shots made me wish I were watching other better films instead (I'd even settle for something like Prometheus). Or just a mega-budget IMAX version of Neil Degrasse Tyson's Cosmos. It's a shame how much time and thought Kip Thorne and his scientist colleagues put into this. When it finally was mercifully over all I could think was how lame that ending was emotionally. It seemed to be what the whole film was building toward, but I felt nothing and the film itself was sure ready to cut away quickly to get the hero back on his spaceship. I couldn't help comparing it to the beginning of Aliens, where Ripley discovers she's now outlived her little daughter. It's heartbreaking, but Cameron and Weaver are just getting started, jumping off at a point where Nolan can't stick his landing.

*Kip Thorne the film's resident physicist and co-producer even admits this in his companion book.

[malpractice]

Christopher Nolan on The Treatment

Interesting interview especially in the last ten minutes or so where Nolan talks about the influence of the Silent era particularly von Stroheim's Greed on Interstellar and his more recent work.

[malpractice]

The lost chapter of Interstellar, "Absolute Zero" written by Nolan and illustrated by artist Sean Murphy (Punk Rock Jesus, Joe The Barbarian).

It's nice to see one of these lost chapter comic tie-in things that isn't a waste of time to read and is actually drawn by an artist i like for once.

[YnEoS]

I've been pretty lukewarm on previous Nolan movies I've watched, but I absolutely loved Interstellar to the point I'm considering I may have been too fussy in the past and am planning on re-visiting his older films. I may have benefited from hearing a lot of the common complaints beforehand and knowing what tone to expect going in.

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I think what worked well for me about this film was how well it managed to capture the excitement and danger of space exploration while keeping the people they're trying to save back home always present. When he launched into space I was dreading that it was going to be like, okay human connection established, now scary space stuff happens for the rest of the movie. I thought the idea of time passing on earth being a resource they're spending and receiving the backlog of transmissions did a great job of connecting their mission directly to the people they're trying to save and made it so much more tangible than other similar genre films I've seen.

The idea of choosing which planet to explore and each planet having a different scientist on it to pick up also made these decisions a lot easier to connect to and made the movie feel less like astronauts have to go into space to do their planned space mission stuff and then things start blowing up and make it hard to finish the space mission stuff. I was actually able to get involved with their choices and having a real sense of being in a situation where you have no idea what to do and incredibly important decisions have to be made.

[malpractice]

Here's the best piece i have read about Interstellar here.

I have seen the film 3 times now and it's one of the few films i have seen in recent years in which things i saw as "flaws" the first time around became strengths on future viewings. I think it might be my favorite Nolan film now right behind The Prestige and Memento.

[warren oates]

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Let’s make a giant leap. I believe the most profound inversion is the very identity of “they”: the offscreen, mysterious, never seen transdimensional observers that influence events in the story. Alluded to as beings with access to an atemporal, fifth dimensionally liberated view of time, creators of a wormhole, with mastery over space, time and gravity, by the film’s end we learn that “they” is “us”: evolutionarily and technologically advanced humans far into the future.I theorize that Interstellar actually makes you one of those beings. It is us, literally. The deus ex machina in the story is you, the observer watching the movie, and science tells us that to watch something is to change it. Let me explain…

I can't decide whether to shout: "We is they, I is they!" or to get upset that, according to this blogger, by watching Interstellar I've apparently changed it into the bad movie it is. I feel totally victim blamed.

[Adam X]

I caught it in a digital IMAX screening in Little Rock, AR Friday night, before which the manager appeared to reassure the crowd that the sound had been calibrated by studio personnel and that despite what we were about to experience, we weren't at risk of hearing loss because the bass effects were the result of "pressure waves" and not sheer volume.

Except all sound is the result of "pressure waves", or more accurately, the movement or displacement of air.
Anyway... in my experience, it wasn't that the two or three scenes in question featured sound seemingly designed to be impressionistic. It simply sounded improperly mixed and TOO loud. Yes, dialogue was drowned out, but it didn't feel organic to the scene. It was if there were (and of course there literally were) separate layers to the dialogue, music, sfx etc. and the music rather than environmental noises simply drowned out the dialogue. Of course knowing that this was intentional may lead to a different experience of these scenes, but I'm not sure I really wish to see Interstellar again.

The 'Pink Room' scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk WIth Me (without the subtitles!) is I think a far better example of what Nolan was apparently aiming for with the sound mix. Here you can tell the music in the room is making it hard to hear what the characters are saying to one another. In Nolan's film, it just comes across as badly constructed.

[swo17]

The scenes where space shuttles are taking off and you can't hear the dialogue very well make sense. The scenes where you can't make out the dialogue through the overpowering organ score, not so much. Still, I respect the intention here. Peter Kubelka would be proud?

Like most people here it seems, I was really with this for the first two-thirds. I wouldn't say the ending lost me, but it was maybe a bit much.

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I'll give Nolan the survival through a black hole, because I kind of like the idea of becoming God for yourself/your family. But then to be rescued and get to actually see your daughter again? Wasn't it enough of a reunion when she realized who "the ghost" was? And then the implied reunion with Anne Hathaway's character at the end. This was maybe too many consecutive happy endings for my taste. I think I would have preferred if it had been left to the imagination what happened to the main character after exerting all of that gravity to tie back to earlier moments in the film. Leave us wondering where he ends up in the boundless, multidimensional realms of space instead of bringing him back down to our reality.

That being said, I'm in the plus column overall. It strikes me as Nolan's most mature work, aiming to be more profound than "cool" (though I like some of those films of his too). And I haven't even mentioned Topher Grace's career-best work.

[Magic Hate Ball]

The problem with the sound mix is that the rest of the film is so ordinary about its mixing, so when the "impressionistic" sequences arrive the audience hasn't been trained to expect it and it scans as a mistake, particularly with the overwhelming score.

[Roger Ryan]

No problem with the sound mix in the auditorium I saw the film in...however, the image was out-of-focus for its entirety despite me alerting the "concierge" staff to the issue as the film was beginning. I was so taken with the movie that I stayed regardless (and ended up getting my money back when I went back to complain), but I'm looking forward to seeing it again in focus.

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I agree that the film wants to do too much and that a dénouement free of Cooper would probably have been preferable, but I found the poetic nature of the story and imagery to be very appealing and it's always a treat to have actual science being addressed in a 21st century science-fiction film.

[TMDaines]

I finally got around to catching this in 70mm IMAX at the Printworks in Manchester and I can't help but wonder, whether something was wrong with the screening, if this format is indeed supposed to be the optimum way to experience the film. I was really disappointed visually for large parts.

The 35mm footage (which is then blown up to 70mm - correct?) looks really shoddy for the first half of the film. It almost had the quality that VHS does when you play it on a larger screen that magnifies its flaws or look up close at it. The colour timing looked all wrong too in these scenes; McConaughey's character was a curious dark orange. The snippets of the IMAX footage that we kept getting looked wonderful, but it isn't until the second half that you get a significant amount of it. Some of the IMAX space spots and the vistas were truly stunning, but the cuts to the 35mm-shot footage were so stark - and not just because of the change in aspect ratio. It was incredibly alienating and distracting, yet I have hard time believing that that was its intention. Thankfully, the differences between the two types of footage was seemingly not as significant for the final half of the film and this left me wondering whether there was a problem with our projection, or whether the 35mm-shot footage was intended to look the way it did, or whether it just showed its limitations on such a large screen.

I was certain that something had to have been wrong with our projection, but, searching online, it seems that other viewers have experienced the same thing it seems.

[malpractice]

I finally got around to catching this in 70mm IMAX at the Printworks in Manchester and I can't help but wonder, whether something was wrong with the screening, if this format is indeed supposed to be the optimum way to experience the film. I was really disappointed visually for large parts.

The 35mm footage (which is then blown up to 70mm - correct?) looks really shoddy for the first half of the film. It almost had the quality that VHS does when you play it on a larger screen that magnifies its flaws or look up close at it. The colour timing looked all wrong too in these scenes; McConaughey's character was a curious dark orange. The snippets of the IMAX footage that we kept getting looked wonderful, but it isn't until the second half that you get a significant amount of it. Some of the IMAX space spots and the vistas were truly stunning, but the cuts to the 35mm-shot footage were so stark - and not just because of the change in aspect ratio. It was incredibly alienating and distracting, yet I have hard time believing that that was its intention. Thankfully, the differences between the two types of footage was seemingly not as significant for the final half of the film and this left me wondering whether there was a problem with our projection, or whether the 35mm-shot footage was intended to look the way it did, or whether it just showed its limitations on such a large screen.

I was certain that something had to have been wrong with our projection, but, searching online, it seems that other viewers have experienced the same thing it seems.

I just saw it at the Lincoln Center IMAX on Saturday and it all looked fantastic for the most part, only some of the 35mm shots of the farm had that kind of degraded look like you mentioned which i didn't really notice when i saw it in a digital IMAX the week before, the color timing mostly looked consistent otherwise with how i had seen the film up until that point. After they went into space, the switching between aspect ratios was pretty seamless for the most part. I chocked it up to it showing it's limitations like you mentioned, and also the fact that they have been running this same print 4 or 5 times a day for the last month so there's bound to be a little bit of roughness here and there, i was frankly surprised at how pristine it still generally was.

[htom]

I just saw it at the Lincoln Center IMAX on Saturday and it all looked fantastic for the most part, only some of the 35mm shots of the farm had that kind of degraded look like you mentioned which i didn't really notice when i saw it in a digital IMAX the week before, the color timing mostly looked consistent otherwise with how i had seen the film up until that point. After they went into space, the switching between aspect ratios was pretty seamless for the most part. I chocked it up to it showing it's limitations like you mentioned, and also the fact that they have been running this same print 4 or 5 times a day for the last month so there's bound to be a little bit of roughness here and there, i was frankly surprised at how pristine it still generally was.

I saw this yesterday at the Cinema Banque Scotia IMAX and note the print itself was still pristine: no scratches, and clear enough that a very few random dust motes on the print would travel down the screen as small black specks before suddenly disappearing. But I have to agree that a few close up scenes (usually of Mathew McConaughey, in low light) seemed almost like a blow up of a video image, with what looked like extremely large and horizontally stretched grain substituting for detail. I assumed it had to do with the DMR process, which from my experience is like turning the sharpness up too high on my TV, but I guess it is felt that the contrast between the 70 and 35mm in terms of detail on the same screen would be too distracting.

[lacritfan]

I just back from an IMAX 70mm screening and for the moment am putting this at the top of my list. The film no one else has compared this to yet is Contact (which McConaughey was also in). Like Interstellar I let myself be totally immersed and invested in the film and "believed" all the scientific explanations until the climax when

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Jodie Foster goes into a wormhole and we find out the "aliens" have decided to communicate with her via a hologram of her dead father. (Though afterward when she finds out no time had passed on earth was a nice touch).

Totally let the sails out of the movie, like Interstellar does but the ambition and scope of everything before it impressed me enough that it doesn't matter to me. I too would have preferred something simpler like

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the pings the other astronauts sent out were sent out by Cooper in morse code (which I know wouldn't explain "the ghost") but it would've felt more "real."

[flyonthewall2983]

Blu-ray coming out March 31st.

[Lost Highway]

I only caught this recently as I'm not a Nolan devotee and the lukewarm reviews put me off. Also, almost everybody I know who went to see it hated it. So to my great surprise I really liked Interstellar. I seem to like the lesser regarded Nolan films the best, like this one, Insomnia and his least liked Batman film, The Dark Knight Returns.

I don't understand the reviews which found the film boring, I thought this was a thrilling space adventure with an unusually understated (and elegant) approach to its special effects. Unlike with Inception I didn't have a problem with the expository dialogue here. I'll probably need another watch to see how well the last half hour works for me. The only bone I have to pick at this point is Chastain's character and how she stays in that resentful state of mind towards her father from being ten years old to nearly the end of the film. She's just a walking, talking plot device. I really liked the robots and a lot of the Arthur C. Clarke style science stuff was fascinating.

[malpractice]

I don't understand the reviews which found the film boring, I thought this was a thrilling space adventure with an unusually understated (and elegant) approach to its special effects. Unlike with Inception I didn't have a problem with the expository dialogue here. I'll probably need another watch to see how well the last half hour works for me. The only bone I have to pick at this point is Chastain's character and how she stays in that resentful state of mind towards her father from being ten years old to nearly the end of the film. She's just a walking, talking plot device. I really liked the robots and a lot of the Arthur C. Clarke style science stuff was fascinating.

I think the thing you'll find upon re-watching it is how much of the film is actually silent. The "expository dialogue" is literally like 2 scenes, and i don't really see another way they could have supplied that information, they conveyed a bunch of rather complex concepts and ideas fairly quickly, and moved on.

[Lost Highway]

I think the thing you'll find upon re-watching it is how much of the film is actually silent. The "expository dialogue" is literally like 2 scenes, and i don't really see another way they could have supplied that information, they conveyed a bunch of rather complex concepts and ideas fairly quickly, and moved on.

I agree and yet I read reviews which held that against the film, lumping it in with Nolan films which had the Basil Exposition problem. I'd never thought I'll find myself in the position where I'll defend a Christopher Nolan film, but the muted critical reception of the film and outright hostility against it among many fanboys and people I know has surprised me. Sometimes a film gets caught up in a gathering backlash against a film-maker even when it turns out that its among their best works. I found the same with Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, the film which I still think is her best so far.

[flyonthewall2983]

Bill Irwin not only voiced TARS, but was it's on-set puppeteer as well.