It’s been 10 years since Christopher Nolan released his futuristic science fiction epic Interstellar.
Throughout Nolan’s storied filmmaking career, he’s had plenty of movies that were universally adored, like The Dark Knight and Inception, and he’s also had a couple that were met with a more negative reception, like the baffling Tenet and the plot-hole-riddled The Dark Knight Rises. Interstellar falls somewhere in the middle. There’s a lot about the film that’s been praised, like its groundbreaking visual effects and its un-Nolan-like emotionality, but there are also plenty of not-so-great things that stick out on a rewatch of Interstellar 10 years later.
10 Interstellar's Treacly Sentimentality Is A Stark Change Of Pace From Nolan's Other Films
Interstellar is a really sappy, sentimental movie that wears its heart on its sleeve. Sometimes, it works, like when Cooper is bidding an emotional farewell to his children, and other times, it doesn’t work, like when Brand delivers a cloying monologue about the quantifiability of love. But whether it works or not, this treacly sentimentality is drastically out of step with the rest of Nolan’s work.
Prior to Interstellar, Nolan’s films had been criticized for being cold and emotionless. The Dark Knight trilogy put a lot of emphasis on Bruce Wayne’s love life, but it always came off as dull or outright disingenuous. Inception is all about a father who wants to get home to his children, but it’s much more interested in its slick action sequences than Cobb’s quest to reunite with his kids. Interstellar was Nolan’s first foray into schmaltz.
9 Matt Damon's Interstellar Cameo Stops The Movie Dead
When the Endurance arrives at the second candidate planet, a frosty ice world, they wake up Mann, the only survivor of the NASA expedition that landed there decades ago — and he’s played by Matt Damon. On the first viewing, Damon’s cameo was a nice surprise. His casting hadn’t been announced in any of the trades and his scenes hadn’t been teased in any of the trailers; the filmmakers managed to hide it, which is a rarity in modern blockbuster cinema.
But on a rewatch, Damon’s appearance in Interstellar is so jarring that it stops the movie dead. The revelation that Mann falsified the data from the expedition to incentivize people to come and rescue him is a great twist. Damon’s casting was a good idea in theory, because audiences inherently trust him, but his star power distracts from the shock of that twist.
8 Interstellar Has Nolan's Usual Sound Design Problems
Whenever Nolan drops a new movie, he tends to be lauded by critics. They praise his eye for breathtaking imagery, his commitment to pulling off jaw-dropping action set-pieces, and his unique ability to bend time in his cinematic storytelling. But one negative criticism that comes up time and time again is that his sound design is infuriating. A lot of his dialogue is inaudible as it gets lost in the mix — and Interstellar is no different.
Hans Zimmer’s wall-of-sound compositions are truly epic, but his music often blares over the characters speaking and makes it impossible to hear what they’re saying. When the scientists are delivering crucial exposition that’s key to understanding the plot, it’s pretty frustrating when they’re drowned out by the deafening score. Interstellar’s sound mixing has the exact same problems as Tenet, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.
7 The 23-Year Time Jump Is Interstellar's Emotional Peak (& It's Much Too Early)
The most memorable moment in Interstellar is when Coop and his fellow astronauts return to the ship after checking out the water planet for a couple of hours and deeming it to be uninhabitable. Due to time dilation, in the couple of hours they were down on the planet’s watery surface, 23 years ed on the ship (and, by extension, on Earth). Coop watches 23 years’ worth of video messages left by his kids as they age up into adults in the blink of an eye.
Coop breaks down in tears as he realizes he unwittingly broke his promise to his daughter and missed his kids growing up. This is the most touching scene in the film — and maybe the most touching scene in Nolan’s entire filmography — but it arrives much too soon. It’s the emotional peak of the movie and it’s nowhere near the climax.
6 Interstellar's Bookshelf Twist Is Really Dumb
Early on in Interstellar, a couple of books fall off Murph’s bookshelf and she can’t explain why. In the climactic sequence of the movie, Nolan provides a very convoluted explanation for why Murph’s books fell from the bookshelf. Coop goes into a black hole and finds that he can move through time, almost like he’s moving through frames of film. He goes back in time to the day the books fell, appears behind Murph’s bookshelf, and pushes the books off himself.
This might be a cool way to visualize gravitational time dilation, but it’s still pretty silly for the climax of this entire intergalactic journey. Coop travels across the universe and goes inside a black hole just to communicate very poorly with his daughter in the past. It’s like a dumber version of La Jetée.
5 Tom Doesn't Add Anything To The Story
Coop has two kids in Interstellar — Murphy and Tom — but he seems to have a strong preference towards the former over the latter. The story focuses so much on Coop’s relationship with Murph that his relationship with Tom feels like an afterthought. Even the interdimensional beings who send Coop back in time seem to prefer Murph to Tom, because they send him to Murph’s bookshelf, not Tom’s. Despite being Coop’s son, Tom has very little bearing on the plot.
Tom’s scenes feel pretty pointless, especially when he’s all grown up and takes over the family’s farm. Tom’s role in Interstellar is so inconsequential that he could’ve been cut from the film entirely and almost nothing would change. If Murph was an only child, the script would’ve been streamlined and Coop’s departure, leaving her completely alone, would be even more heartbreaking.
4 Interstellar's Incredible Visual Effects Have To Do A Lot Of Heavy Lifting
Nolan innovated the visual effects process when he made Interstellar. Rather than creating the VFX in post, he had all the effects made beforehand so he could project them onto screens around the set and give the actors something to react to. In order to bring theoretical concepts like the inside of a black hole to life on the screen, Nolan’s team actually inputted the equations into a brand-new CGI rendering software (via Wired).
Interstellar is a VFX masterpiece with some of the most stunning CG effects ever put on the big screen. But the story is nowhere near as groundbreaking or awe-inspiring; it’s just a generic father-daughter tale wedged inside a standard spacefaring sci-fi epic. The visual effects have to do a lot of heavy lifting to keep the movie engaging as it trudges through that mediocre plot.
3 Anne Hathaway's Monologue About Love Is Pretty Cringeworthy
Anne Hathaway is a great actor who has deservingly won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy, but even the very best actors can’t elevate crummy material. In Interstellar, Hathaway is tasked with delivering one of the most cringeworthy monologues in movie history. Dr. Amelia Brand tells Coop, “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”
This speech is more likely to make the audience roll their eyes than tug on their heartstrings. It sums up the story and themes of the movie — Coop’s love for his daughter will allow him to break the spacetime continuum — but it’s a painfully on-the-nose way of putting the subtext right into the text. On a rewatch of Interstellar today, this goofy monologue is likely to induce cringing.
2 Interstellar Really Starts To Drag Towards The End
Interstellar has a whopping runtime of 169 minutes — nearly three hours — and it really feels that long. The first act is nice and evenly paced. It takes its time introducing futuristic Earth as a new Dust Bowl and establishes how desperate humanity is for a new home. Then, it succinctly sets up the premise of Coop being sent into space with a team of astronauts in the hope of finding a sustainable new home for the human race.
And once the movie goes to space, it keeps the audience on the hook for a while with its gorgeous intergalactic visuals. But towards the end of its second act, it really starts to drag out. The movie isn’t aimless — Nolan always knows where the story is going — but it takes way too long getting to that aim.
1 It's Really Obvious That Interstellar Was Originally Developed For Steven Spielberg
Interstellar was originally developed for Steven Spielberg to direct before Nolan took on the project. While Nolan significantly reworked the script to suit his own vision of a space adventure, there are still plenty of clues that this began as a Spielberg project. It’s really obvious that it was supposed to be directed by Spielberg before being reshaped into a Nolan movie.
From E.T. to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the absentee father is a recurring theme in Spielberg’s movies, and Interstellar is all about a father who puts the future of the human race over his own children. Like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Interstellar takes a hopeful approach to humanity’s exploration of the universe and its chances for the future. It couldn’t be clearer that Interstellar was supposed to be a Spielberg picture.
Source: Wired
Interstellar
- Release Date
- November 7, 2014
- Runtime
- 169 Minutes
- Director
- Christopher Nolan
WHERE TO WATCH
From Christopher Nolan, Interstellar imagines a future where the Earth is plagued by a life-threatening famine, and a small team of astronauts is sent out to find a new prospective home among the stars. Despite putting the mission first, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) races against time to return home to his family even as they work to save mankind back on Earth.
- Writers
- Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
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