Interstellar: Nolan, McConaughey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSWdZVtXT7E#t=137

diggin mcconaughey's carrot tan

Where's the link for tickets? I'm ready to buy one.

That looks horrible.

looks like another m night shyamanolan classic

heh m night shyamanolan is a keeper

Credit for the relativistic ray-tracing and rotational gravity. McConaughey's character can eat some high γ space dust, though.

I think I have found the most pointless, pedantic article I have ever read about a movie trailer:

http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/interstellar-trailer-isnt-a-trailer.html

Like the gist of it is that the writer is cheesed because the trailer didn't spoil everything.

I feel kind of violent now.

It’s possible the next trailer will show the promised wormholes, dimensions, and the super-cool lasery explosions that come along with that, and we’ll all be happy

ugh go away

i'd rather not see anything else until november

i don't see many movies a year, but this will be one of them (i hope)

nice use of teal & orange.

blue jeans + carhartt jacket = the teal & orange of everyday life

what you wear when you really want to POP

I didn't know until I read the AVC article that Nolan is red-green colorblind and it's why all his films have the same color palette.

i am generally angry when online magazines either don't pay their writers or pay a pathetic pittance, but whoever wrote that vulture thing about the trailer better not have gotten anything for it except an abrupt smack on the head.

I didn't know until I read the AVC article that Nolan is red-green colorblind and it's why all his films have the same color palette.

― Johnny Fever, Friday, May 16, 2014 11:37 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but this doesn't look like his other movies really, the move from Pfister looks like a much more conventionally photographed (i.e. very 2010s) movie.

"not only is it the first movie Christopher Nolan has directed in two years"

God, I know the wait for this is Kubrickian

looks dopey as hell, presuming spiritual wormhole reunion climaz

xxx

Christopher Nolan, auteur

god two threads for the new worst movie of all time are you serious

when the trailer ended i felt something weird in my ear and sure enough there it was, christopher nolan's jizz

fuck christopher nolan, fuck this movie, and fuck both its threads

― verhzleyavbtreleambreb (imago), Friday, May 16, 2014 8:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you said it better though

christ this really is the Teal-iest.

( γ )

( γ )==3

is that someone getting their hip fucked?

The wife and daughter are dressed so teal!

What annoys me about the premise of this movie is that we are realistically stuck in this biosphere and who gaf about us polluting other galaxies with our dna? I would rather see a movie in which we accepted we deserve annihilation and decided to cease from propagating this lie that we need to keep going on like we are superior to "non sentient" life and us surviving the destruction of this planet is sacrosanct.

i watched nausicaa of the valley of the wind last night and that sounds like yr jam

There are a lot of planets out there

and we could presumably learn our lesson after the first one. Maybe that's just the way things evolve. Home planet deterioration out paces intelligence?

Every branch gets one second chance?

"There are a lot of planets out there"

They are out of reach and 99.99999% inhospitable to us whilst we destroy this beautiful planet, lets entertain fairytale notions of escape, if you want.

Yeah, so it's disgusting to excuse current behavior on that hope. But I also see the human species desire for survival in a more positive light is all.

Not having a go at you, just loathe the whole premise of this movie and humanity.

haha!

i'm cool w the fantasy of interstellar exploration (man rocket seeds ur galaxy hole), but this still looks dopey as shit

it seems very important to Nolan that he be "relevant" and Addressing the Issues of Our Time.

Batman begins was good!

haven't seen insomnia but every Nolan movie up til the dark knight rises was at least good (DKR was almost a total disaster the more I think about it considering how strong the first two were.) inception I guess was the movie that really brought out his worst tendencies for some people but idk it was entertaining mumbo jumbo. Def will see this.

Loved Insomnia, actually.

insomnia sucked btw

:(

it seems very important to Nolan that he be "relevant" and Addressing the Issues of Our Time.

― display name changed. (amateurist), Sunday, May 18, 2014 3:01 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's also important that we have sexy billionaires

Honestly I don't care how stupid this movie is or isn't. I will see it anyway.

^^^

Insomnia was a great movie which is why i'm never subjecting myself to Nolan's version of it

does anyone else have the same Nolan experiences that i've had where you see the movie and you have a lot of fun and think "man, that was neat, why are people shitting on this?" and then you see it a second time and realize it actually does totally fucking suck? that's me with every single one of his movies.

yeah, it's uncanny

catching up on this thread and, yeah, that Vulture article is rage-making. i mean, if someone actually got paid real money in 2014 for typing this sentence...

Come on — get in our belly, that movie.

then maybe the death of journalism won't be such a bad thing at all

that's incredible

does anyone else have the same Nolan experiences that i've had where you see the movie and you have a lot of fun and think "man, that was neat, why are people shitting on this?" and then you see it a second time and realize it actually does totally fucking suck? that's me with every single one of his movies.

― circa1916, Sunday, May 18, 2014 4:12 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

absolutely. i think Nolan's films (especially TDK) are very effective and keeping you in such an agitated state that you don't have much mental space to think about the inanities of the plot and characterizations, the frequent limpness of the style, etc. when i saw TDK for the first time, in IMAX, I was shaken up (although my mind kind of bailed at the cross-cutting in the climactic sequence). when I saw it the 2nd time (also in the theater), the thing almost fell completely apart.

an even more drastic example of this was the hurt locker, which was just robbed of all power the 2nd time I saw it, meaning that all it really is, is a vehicle for the easiest sort of suspense. the rest of it is just window dressing.

titanic also had the same effect on me, with an added wrinkle. the 1st and 2nd times i saw it were in the theater, and i the emotion really washed over me. a few years later, i watched it at a friend's apartment on VHS, and the movie just seemed laughable. i chalk that up largely to the relative effects of a big screen + sympathetic audience vs. tiny screen + cynical audience, but I also think it also revealed some basic limitations of the film.

that said, the prestige kind of rewarded a re-viewing. which the plot clearer in mind, i could see how some aspects of the narrative were ingenious. other things just grated a lot more, though.

i just can't get worked up one way or another about Inception. I wasn't terribly bothered by all the exposition, but the visual incoherence of the action scenes toward the end just threw me out of the film entirely.

i kind of think his films would be better if he had lower budgets.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2014/07/30/interstellar-full-trailer/

I'm a little hesitant

but that opening line is v v good imo

pretty psyched tbqf. i like that the cast is generally not nolan's usual crew, beyond caine and i suppose hathaway to some extent. leah cairns is in this!

it's nolan so there's no way this can be anything but a disappointment right?

he's hit and miss but I dunno he's still interesting. I hated Inception, never saw DKR.

'the dark knight rises' is genuinely worse than inception

i thought 'the dark knight' was pretty incredible and i liked 'inception'

inception was an exquisitely-crafted turd. DKR was pretty much the same except minus the exquisite craft.

i don't want to go over my problems with DKR again but it's amazing what a fully-realized world nolan created in DK and what a half-baked underpopulated movie set-seeming world he crapped out with DKR.

^ OTM. It's like his heart wasn't in it.

I liked Inception and upon subsequent viewings it has held up way better than I thought it would.

My favorite thing he's done is still The Prestige.

looks exhausting

That was along the lines of what I was thinking..."Is this movie six hours long?"

Still, I wanna see it.

it's nolan so there's no way this can be anything but a disappointment right?

― resulting post (rogermexico.), Wednesday, July 30, 2014 7:34 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you accept that he's a terrible filmmaker who makes shitty movies and will never stop making shitty movies you'll never be disappointed you'll just hate yourself after

want to be excited for this but def not in the mood for sentimental testimonies to the indomitable human-spirit/power-of-love these days.

it's nolan so there's no way this can be anything but a disappointment right?

lol almost like being disappointed in Obama

ignoring the all-star cast, the trailer offers nothin but schmaltzy kitsch. armageddon 2

^^^ otm. I'll go see this, but despite the trailer.

yeah hoping the trailer is just doing it's trailer gobbledygook thing.

lol mcconaughey is an idiot

MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY I did not. I was very much, what’s happening on the ground was going to be enough. Until I made “Contact” [the 1997 movie about the search for extraterrestrial life]. That made me actually wonder: “O.K., it’s not just what’s happening here, east, west, in front of us. You can look up. What’s the new frontier to the north?”

Ha, he does seem to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGhLcVqxf0

he also doesn't have a problem with the washington http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG:

I know a lot of Native Americans don’t have a problem with it, but they’re not going to say, “No, we really want the name.” That’s not how they’re going to use their pulpit. It’s like my feeling about gun control: “I get it. You have the right to have guns. But look, let’s forget that right. Let’s forget the pleasure you get safely on your range, because it’s in the wrong hands in other places.”

i call him hatcat matt

It’s the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan’s state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception.

Yeah um

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/27/interstellar-first-look-review-matthew-mcconoughey

Inception was indeed about as thrilling as eighth grade earth science class

It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun.

who could have foreseen...

ha yeah.

i didn't think i could be as offended by taglines as i am by this movie's. "Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." "The end of Earth will not be the end of us." just so pompous about humanity's manifest destiny over the galaxy that i feel like agent smith.

i predict some incredible reviews from people on the right re: the supposed "agenda" of this film. i mean lots of folks went after wall-e bc it depicted an earth overrun by trash so i doubt mattcat and co will be safe.

xp the big reveal is that humanity evolves into the xenomorphs from Alien

5/5 from Time Out. they gave Gone Girl 5/5 too so 2 in a month which is.. unusual.

"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." "The end of Earth will not be the end of us." This could get turned on its head when future old man mcconaughey witnesses a future draper family picnic. The camera zooms in, and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" plays as a black border encircles old man mcconaughey's anguished face.

It’s the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan’s state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception.

looooool yes, chris "we purposely avoided learning about the science of dreaming when writing the script for inception" nolan's inception

Just going by the first two Batmans and Inception (all of which I hated; I did like Memento), maybe Nolan would be better off making silent movies, or with a bare minimum of dialogue. If this is an "answer" to 2001 it sure sounds talkier.

I did like Memento

pls expound

maybe it's more like solaris

...i wish

I liked it in 2000! You'd have to give me time for a rewatch. xp

critical roundup thus far:

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-christopher-nolans-interstellar

best part of memento after a more recent rewatch was the carrie-anne moss character and how she used the situation to her advantage. it was almost a nice short movie within a movie.

i liked it in 2001 when i was 13. i rewatched it 8 years later and realized the former me was dead

but i'm especially confused how you hate "roller coaster" movies but you ride for a movie that's just a puzzle
i really just hate memento and am fascinated by the inner workings of morbsy's opinions pls rewatch and get back to me

I blanket-hate very few genres far as I know

If I like a "roller coaster" movie I guess you could argue it's not exclusively that (eg, Indy & Temple of Doom)

Memento holds up really well.

memento has dated really badly IMO

it's also the kind of movie that diminishes greatly when you see it a second time

"The end of Earth will not be the end of us."

which song on 1989 is this from?

I can't wait to hear McConaughey talking in his enlightened Deputy Dawg accent about how fucking great humanity is, it is precisely what is needed right now.

just imagine he likes people as much as he likes lincolns

can't wait for this movie

sike!

*checks out chris marker from library again* hi chris

*checks apod.nasa.gov for daily pic*

the reason why space is cool is because it doesn't gaf about us

"The end of Earth will not be the end of us."

Professor Backwards, ladies & germs

I bet Memento aint so bad the 2nd time when you've essentially forgotten the whole thing!

Haha yes that's how I felt about it upon rewatch. It's solid, better than most twist-dependent movies.

the ending stays shit. and nolan is so self-serious you're not even allowed to search for gems in his shit.

can't help but compare it to fincher's The Game, whose ending is one of the most ridiculously shitty things i've ever seen but i can at least imagine someone more forgiving than me playing around with it and reading something more interesting into it. but nolan's ineptitude smothers every inch of everything he shits out.

the thing that bothered me most about memento last time i saw it was the near-constant voice-over which i suppose is necessary to communicate the inner state of the character (or at least was deemed such in the nolans' conception) but gets really fucking irritating once you've already seen the film and get the idea

and it's not the voice-over as such that irritates, it's the nature of it. "oh where did i put my keys? i must have forgotten them somewhere. keys, keys, keys, where are they? oh, there they are. wait, who's that knocking at the door?" etc.

Stephanie Zacharek:

"There's so much space in Christopher Nolan's nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there's almost no room for people. This is a gigantosaurus movie entertainment, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dustbowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan--who co-wrote the script with his brother, Jonathan--has front-loaded it with big themes and even bigger visuals. Interstellar is supposedly all about what it means to be human, but it's supersized in case we really are so out of touch that we need to have everything blown up IMAX-big. 'We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,' says Matthew McConaughey's farmer-astronaut-dreamer in one of his many, many proclamations about life, family, and the cosmos. 'Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.' But even the dirt in Interstellar looks spectacularly art-directed. Nolan may be invoking Walker Evans, but Interstellar is really just Jethro Bodine–sized."

http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-10-29/film/the-fault-in-his-stars/

'We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,' says Matthew McConaughey's farmer-astronaut-dreamer in one of his many, many proclamations about life, family, and the cosmos. 'Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.'

this is literally parody right, not sure I could not crack up @ this

I am corny I guess cuz I really like that line

fully aware I may not like anything else about this movie tho

Counting down till we get a good mashup. "It's all one ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space."

'Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.'

the thing is, in "True Detective" he would've been directed to say this line so that you can laugh AND recognize it'st rue.

gonna have to start a vs Armageddon poll after release

i predict some incredible reviews from people on the right re: the supposed "agenda" of this film.

Doubt it. The failure of Earth's ecosystem isn't ever definitively explained and, as evidenced by that "worry about our place in the dirt" line above, seems thematically linked to McC's lamentation that humankind moved away from celebrating pioneers and toward fostering care-givers (e.g. farmers).

Oh, and there's a pretty broad swipe at Common Core education right there front and center in the second or third scene.

nolan is such a dunderhead but i guess i will see this?

after reading the NYT Mag profile of him, i guess i admire his work ethic, energy, and commitment to nondigital projection, and that's about it. Talk about believing your own BS.

he has talent with inventive narrative design, though his brother should take half the credit there. he's kind of fun to teach. but yeah watching his films from moment to moment i find myself more irritated than anything else.

I shall most likely watch this, for the simple and sufficient reason that I would like to see a film in a theater next Saturday night and this is the least bad option I am likely to find in a halfway decent theater within striking distance of my house.

there are a bunch of other pretty good movies out right now

the jack gyllenhaal one

the keanu one

even the nicole kidman one is supposed to be not-terrible

gone girl

etc

My wife's taste must be taken into consideration and that instantly eliminates nightcrawler and gone girl. Also, the number of halfway decent theaters within reasonable striking of my house is fairly low.

"striking distance" are you some kind of assault team

big hero 6 yo

even the nicole kidman one is supposed to be not-terrible

first i've heard!

no, my wife and I are not an assault team. we are snakes.

Yeah that looks/sounds completely horrible xp

Nolan's gimmick of trying to come up with concepts that film can't really convey well reaches some sort of apotheosis at the climax of this one. Wanna see what the fourth, fifth and hell the sixth dimension look/sound/feel like? Too bad.

psyched to skip this

the 5th dimension IIRC

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/public/img/artists/8162.jpg

nolan's films can be good, but sometimes it's like 'hey! have a little fun with it, buddy! lighten up!'

just missingNO's $0.02

Goddamnit. I feel like Charlie Brown and the football - after seeing Interstellar tonight, I have to question if Nolan was ever a good director. File this in between Mission To Mars and Sunshine. A movie that's so enamored with its own high concept that the emotional weight needed as backfill is just glopped on like cheap spackle. 15 minutes in and I'm already rooting for climate change to win. And that's even after the cool drone rustling scene. Visual effects perfunctory but uncompelling.

There's a lot of crying in this movie.

Trope alert...there's an African-American astronaut. How much you wanna bet that he survives the movie?

so i read. more than Hugh Jackman in The Fountain? xp

Lots more crying.

(disclosure: I kinda liked The Fountain)

psyched to skip this

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 1:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

^

15 minutes in and I'm already rooting for climate change to win.

ok lol

christopher nolan is probably the greatest individual force for cultural stupidity that I could currently name

feel like there could be a twist ending to that post

m night shyamalan style

turns out chris nolan's been dead all along

"christopher stupidity is probably the greatest individual force for cultural nolan!"

"what are you doing??"

"improvising!"

lol

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed this. It's big, bombastic, and downright pulpy at times, but never really lost me. There were a few really odd decisions, but it captures the spirit of a particular vein of "hard" sci-fi (Arthur C. Clarke is the major touchstone, but there are elements of PKD/Stanislaw Lem in here) in a way I haven't seen a film do in a very long time (Moon is probably the last film I've seen that hits a similar tone).

weird how i just assumed i'd hate-see this out of pure zeitgeist and now that it's actually coming out i have no desire for that to ever happen even if i didn't have to pay for it

willing to bet that, say, Contact is a significantly better hard sci-fi movie than this

catching this and Birdman back to back on Friday, double feature of dudes who are really incredibly into themselves. (Nolan's made more enjoyable movies, tho)

weird how i just assumed i'd hate-see this out of pure zeitgeist and now that it's actually coming out i have no desire for that to ever happen even if i didn't have to pay for it

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Wednesday, November 5, 2014 3:42 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was thinking about doing this but it's 169 minutes.

exactly twice as long as Lucy which I hope you all threw some money at

catching this and Birdman back to back on Friday

two movies i have negative desire to see right now

if time and aging were to stop for 6 hours and i was presented with the option to see these two movies back to back free of charge i would choose to stare at a wall

willing to bet that, say, Contact is a significantly better hard sci-fi movie than this

Completely agree.

For all the bloviating about Interstellar's "hard science" there's some astonishing ignorance that has nothing to do with relativity or hyper-dimensionality .A jet-propelled drone that runs off of solar power (read that closely). A landing ship that can apparently launch itself off of a planet at the bottom of a time-dilating gravity well, but still requires a Saturn V to get off of Earth. And apparently no one at NASA read their own studies about sending out uncrewed tanker ships ahead of time.

Arthur C. Clarke would have had all that nailed down.

A jet-propelled drone that runs off of solar power (read that closely)

ok lol

just sounds like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_rocket

guess it's not truly a 'jet' then I get u

well I guess it's still a 'jet' if it's sucking in air

Hey, this planet is near a black hole. You think tidal forces are, um, dramatic? YOU THINK?

arrrghh... Want to hate-post about this some more.

crazy thing about this movie is you're in the theater for 169 minutes but outside the theater 3 years go by

please do xp lol

this is pretty dumb but not in a bad way. i was happy and engaged for most of the three hours.

max! we all expected that post.

is it just me or do ppl now equate humorless scifi with hard scifi

i have not much desire to see this. especially if ppl are like oh it's gravity for smart ppl (and still completely nonsensical) *snore*

most important question to my mind is: would roman from party down like it?

no he would hate it

then i'm in

"For all its aspiration to the sublime, Interstellar can’t escape the ridiculous. The characters, and consequently the acting, rarely transcend comic-strip simplicity; Cooper’s family inhabit their own belt of purest corn somewhere between Field of Dreams and Ray Bradbury at his folksiest. Admittedly, there’s something boldly simple about proposing to represent our apocalyptic near future and only showing us a rural patch of America, rather than cutting to the gasping multitudes from Canberra to Kolkata, as Roland Emmerich would have done. Yet my Brit sensibility recoils at the idea of an English director so wholeheartedly embracing American myth that he can cheerfully present us with the idea that the destiny of our entire species is being forged in a Midwestern cornfield."

http://filmcomment.com/entry/film-of-the-week-interstellar-christopher-nolan

Last month, during a talk at the New York Film Festival, Paul Thomas Anderson called Nolan's film "beautiful," urging audiences to " go see it in IMAX." And now Quentin Tarantino has put his very vocal support behind the picture too.

“It’s been a while since somebody has come out with such a big vision to things,” Tarantino told The Guardian. “Even the elements, the fact that dust is everywhere, and they’re living in this dust bowl that is just completely enveloping this area of the world. That’s almost something you expect from Tarkovsky or Malick, not a science fiction adventure movie.”

eh, the old boys of 'murican filmmaking always have nice things to say about one another's movies even when they suck

not that this one necessarily sucks

Doesn't suck, but it does mostly blow.

if it sucks, it's a jet i guess

the fucking thing sucks like a solar powered jet i tell u

the more I read about this movie the more it sounds like shymalan gussied up in HD

eh, the old boys of 'murican filmmaking always have nice things to say about one another's movies even when they suck

not that i think they're being disingenuous per se, but if you want hollywood to fund your indulgent 3-hour intellectual big budget epic, you'd gain nothing by telling hollywood they made a mistake by funding someone else's

and just in case a genuine brainiac takes offense i'm using "intellectual" as very loose shorthand

oh yeah, i agree 100% -- just saying that "tarantino said it was a masterpiece" should be taken with several grains of kosher salt

yeah i was just embellishing the point

huh i didn't realize nolan had dual citizenship until i looked it up just now. i guess we have to take some credit.

Tarantino said Woody Allen's Jason Biggs/Cristina Ricci movie was a masterpiece iirc

i do appreciate that when prodded tarantino (like scorsese when he was doing those reviews for directv) will focus on some novel detail that you can genuinely believe he got off on - that the idiosyncrasies of their lists are due to some personal fixations, not that they're actually trying to make some Top Ten everyone would agree on.

sadly it doesn't look like scorsese's thumbs up to spanglish (which really stuck out surrounded by more predictable tcm recommendations in his column) is online

I think that for most directors getting a film greenlit and then completed w/o studio meddling, talent meltdowns, budget overruns, and at least 33% of your original vision intact is grounds for a "masterpiece" label.

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/.a/6a0168ea36d6b2970c01b7c7004919970b-pi

is that hoth

Tarantino said Woody Allen's Jason Biggs/Cristina Ricci movie was a masterpiece iirc

― Οὖτις

I don't think this is risible necessarily...? My thoughts about this thing aside, I'm all for some college kid NOT writing another essay about watching Manhattan for the first time.

ok just got back the ol' multiples and this is my revised poster for this flick:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/A_Goofy_Movie.png

that was supposed to read "just got back from the ol' multiplex"

annnnnnyway this was very very silly (nolan doesn't really have any command of tone) but i didn't dislike it. some cool ideas/visuals and a wisecracking robot, can't really hate that.

holy fuck humor in a nolan movie??

relatively speaking

Nolan should only make batman movies, maybe. I can't get excited about going to see this.

x-post

I think McConaughey was a wise choice for the lead, he makes all the portentousness go down easy and smooth

are there aliens in this movie? i know there's dust.

the twist is that the aliens are the dust

(no spoilers)

his batman movies are probably his worst!

xpost

batman begins and the dark knight are incred, dark knight rises is a genuine disaster. yeah i don't know, i guess i tend to enjoy nolan's films on a lot of levels except that one.

(Spoiler) this is a batman movie

(Spoiler) at the end the ship keeps spinning

(Spoiler) and it's a pred ship

I wish he'd revert to making comparitively unsentimental/"cold" narrative exercices like Prestige and Memento but I guess that's just not in the cards

tthe first 2 Batmans and Inception are possibly the worst big-budget films i've ever seen.

Inception was bad, but bad with a barely passing grade: a D+ or C-. Not walk out of the theater in disgust bad.

a D within a D

a D in block letters

morbs i assume TDKR doesn't make that list only because you haven't seen it?

the robots are great in this but not as funny as bane

TDKR might be the worst movie I've ever seen, wd pay to watch Morbs watch it tho

You need to see more bad movies imago.

I've seen The Hottie And The Nottie m8, somehow left TDKR with a worse taste

yep w/ B3 i invoked Kael's "life is too short" dictum

OTM even if we were all tortoises

Life is short and this movie is long

i read the wiki plot summary and a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha dear lord

are we sure the nolans didn't ghostwrite prometheus are we sure lindelof didn't ghostwrite this mess

I smell lindelof

spoiler: matthew mconaughey turns into a giant space wheel at the end

This had a couple of good scenes and I'm not mad I watched it, but my eyes hurt from all the rolling. I hope half the budget went to compensating Dylan Thomas's estate. (Also, did anyone else who saw it have trouble making out at least a third of the dialogue? The mixing was atrocious at my screening.)

Wow, it sounds like this movie may compete with Prometheus in a dumb off.

Xpost hah ha, see I am not first to reach that destination.

I thought it was just our theater, the music completely drowned out much of the dialogue. Made some scenes tough to follow (not that that mattered a whole lot)

I'm a little surprised to see all the Nolan hate - I get that his films are cloying and often up their own asses but I don't see how you can say he's inept...dude clearly knows what he's doing a lot of the time. Yeah the bits about "love transcends the 5th dimension" were really dumb but for the most part I thought this was pretty cool, I was entertained for a lot of it and some of the plot points struck me as being really clever. I didn't understand the significance of the drone in the beginning nor did I really get what was happening with Topher Grace in the end but the movie basically worked for me. I do give it points for being really, really ambitious.

he's not inept just turgid and incapable of telling a story. always a few great shots tho.

I am off the Christopher Nolan bus.

Someone made a flowchart that makes this look like Primer.

http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2lrewv/interstellar_explained_massive_spoilers

Spoiler, Doyle deserved to die

Or whatever he was called. That was pure Prometheus.

I enjoyed this movie. Saw it in IMAX and it was the first time I saw a movie in IMAX where the sound was really loud. Especially the blastoff scenes near the beginning.... they were shaking the seats and stuff. Felt like a rocket was taking off in the theater.

too fucking loud, too much music.

everyone otm about the music and sounds drowning out the dialogue.

apparently big hero 6 is winning the weekend

Big Hero 6 ain't that great, either, but similarly (I guess?) looks awesome.

Didn't realize Big Hero 6 was an actual title of a movie and not a euphemism for the latest Marvel project.

Will it still make sense if I didn't see Big Hero 1-5? /dadjokes

dude clearly knows what he's doing a lot of the time

i hate what he's doing.

Intersmellar

Didn't realize Big Hero 6 was an actual title of a movie and not a euphemism for the latest Marvel project.

I didn't realize that Big Hero 6 was (sort of) a Marvel property itself!

Turns out I skipped going to a movie theater on Saturday and therefore did not pay to see this. The motivation was much smaller than the obstacles (and the obstacles were minimal).

lol paramount projected exactly 50m which was 2.5 more than where it ended up and that's huuuuge. def hoping their stockholders wouldn't notice.

i was briefly set on seeing innastella, but now i just don't care

Is Daft Punk in this?

they play two famous alien club owners

xpost

no, but nile rodgers shows up in the last reel to inspire mcconnahey to sacrifice himself for the benefit of makind

this movie suuuuuuuuucked

i have free tix to see this now

so

i guess i am seeing it on saturday

"yay"?

Seeing it in IMAX might have tipped it to "fun," but as it was the severe corniness and clunkiness of the story overshadowed what it offered by way of sci-fi thrills, imo.

the science is all legit and well visualized and afaict christopher nolan has never met a human, heard a recording of a human speak, seen a film that might demonstrate the typical grammar of screenwriting, or experienced an emotion

the dusty apocalyptic feel of the earth scenes in the trailer just made me want to watch the teaser for 'mad max: fury road' again

(To be fair, I should add that I somehow ended up seeing Interstellar later on the same day that I saw [the understated-to-the-point-of-dryness] Citizenfour, which sequence of viewing did not improve my receptivity to a fantasy future where humanity transcends time and space through love or whatever)

this was nowhere near as bad as some critics have made out. i think they just wanted to take shots at nolan so just took it all out on this movie, when in fact, the dark knight films were far worse. has nolan watched primer? cos he does seem to like lots of technical jargon. hes trying way too hard to make his films appear smart. but OTOH, i liked that this film was trying to approach some bigger themes, even if it never really wrestles with them enough, theyre just dropped in but not taken as far as they could be. but there were some good emotional scenes in this, and the spectacle (i advise sitting near the front) does make up for a lot. but my main gripes with it are that there is a lot of clunky dialogue, but inception was FAR worse. a lot of actors seem to not be sure what they are saying/doing exactly (again like inception) so they come off looking a bit uncertain. and a lot of the plot points were basically lifted from a dozen previous sci fi movies (alien, moon, 2001, etc) which was dissapointing. but i did feel that nolan was at least trying to do something big here, not just big in terms of visuals, but in concept, and put some broader resonances/meanings into a big blockbuster, which i liked. gravity was more novel in terms of how it made space feel/look though. got quite a bit of spielberg from this too.

the "big ideas" this movie's been lauded for tackling aren't really any more ambitious than yr average episode of Voyager really

When someone said McConaughey turns into a wheel, that has me more interested than anything else.

I'm not really into Nolan but I like bits and bobs from his films (quite liked Memento; Scarecrow, Joker and Bane made the Batman films enjoyable) a lot of this sounds like a backlash to the ridiculous hype he gets. I doubt anyone really thinks he's worse than Bay, Emerich and all the other blockbuster guys rolled into one.

absolutely he is

Haha no way

Other puzzling things I've learned here: Carey Mulligan is pure scum, some comedians I find slightly annoying are actually odious but Dazed And Confused, Poltergeist and Buffy are just plain brilliant.

bay and the rest don't work under the pretense that they're good at thinking and communicating actual thoughts

and their movies don't look so fucking dire

they look dire in different ways

I don't think I've ever seen a whole Bay film but Emerich made Independence Day (which admittedly had an amazing alien design), I don't think Nolan comes close to that. Didn't much like his Godzilla either.

i can't tell if you're putting independence day above or below nolan

stupid fun > anything nolan has ever done

Who's arguing that Poltergeist and Dazed and Confused aren't brilliant?

i don't think i can defend independence day without it looking like nostalgiawank but this is the position you're putting me in

some great visuals but the plot is dumb.

Nolan has a problem with telling instead of showing, and with telling too much. "Wouldn't it be neat if HAL went beyond the infinite with Dave so they could have a chat about what's going on?"

nolan is expert at juggling intimidatingly/seemingly complex sounding jargon to make sure he looks smart, while also sticking in tons of exposition in case anyone might be worried they dont know WTFs going on. the main flaw with the plot is that it doesnt really explore the layers of its concept enough - and it didnt really hammer its moral message home strongly enough either (trying not to use spoilers, though this thread is less active than i thought it would be). actually, after thinking about it, i think it was the score and the visuals that made me *feel* more than any part of the story or anyone in it.

i thought this was better made than some of his other recent movies. he also had a few cheesy one liners as if to show he can do hollywood humour a bit too. but the biggest dissapointment is that its nice to have a big sci fi movie around, but i dont think this one did anything that we havent seen before. it didnt really take us anywhere we havent been already.

basically, its a bit tree of life, a bit the fountain, 2001, all smashed together. i think nolan should just go back to doing some smaller movies like memento. not sure he works as a blockbuster director.

Can anyone explain why they didn't just use robots for the whole Lazarus mission? TARS was capable of doing way more than any of the human characters and even had a better sense of humor to boot. I don't see why humans had to be involved at all.

i can't tell if you're putting independence day above or below nolan

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Thursday, 13 November 2014 04:08 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stupid fun > anything nolan has ever done

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Thursday, 13 November 2014

I'm putting Indepedence Day way below Nolan. I don't think it's remotely fun. But again, the alien designs really need to be applauded.

Who's arguing that Poltergeist and Dazed and Confused aren't brilliant?

― Eric H., Thursday, 13 November 2014

ME! I think they're just okay. We went over Poltergeist quite a bit in the old horror film thread.

Other puzzling things I've learned here: Carey Mulligan is pure scum, some comedians I find slightly annoying are actually odious but Dazed And Confused, Poltergeist and Buffy are just plain brilliant.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 13 November 2014

These are all things I didn't understand why people hated or loved so much.

Yeah, just because Nolan has made blockbusters does not make him a good blockbuster maker. His small films- Memento, the Prestige - have been his best, probably because his big ideas do not work well when everything around them is big, too."Dark Knight" maybe excepted, though Joker makes it, not the big ideas, as such. first and third Batman movies actively dumb.

at the risk of seeming challopsy, i think following could be his best film.

but he might actually be the most awkward blockbuster-maker ever, which deserves some sort of credit, if not 'nolan is so subversive', which i think is what most people seem to like him for ('smuggling big ideas into tentpole releases' etc)

i don't wanna see any big ideas he's smuggling under his tentpole.

Again, I think the problem is one of scale: his big ideas don't seem so big when he seems so set on making everything else bigger.

nolan is expert at juggling intimidatingly/seemingly complex sounding jargon to make sure he looks smart, while also sticking in tons of exposition in case anyone might be worried they dont know WTFs going on. the main flaw with the plot is that it doesnt really explore the layers of its concept enough - and it didnt really hammer its moral message home strongly enough either (trying not to use spoilers, though this thread is less active than i thought it would be). actually, after thinking about it, i think it was the score and the visuals that made me *feel* more than any part of the story or anyone in it.

Lol he's expert at being inept?

Zimmer sucks shit in this movie btw, actively annoying

i saw the cover of TIME and damn, post-disaster earth sure is sending nice-looking people into space

send the grizzly man into space to make friends with alien monsters

jessica chastain is astonishingly beautiful, mcconaheyhey is looking pretty leathery lately.

saw this in imax last night, liked it a lot more than i expected to but it definitely suffers from the classic nolan syndrome of being exciting while you're watching it and then falling apart under later examination.

how long is it supposed to be between matt and his daughter finding the lazarus station and then him jetting off into space? seems like it basically happens overnight.

poor casey affleck tho - his dad returns to civilisation after 100 years in space and he doesn't even ask how his son is doing before he fucks off again? that's cold, man.

The ending was hilariously dumb even by nolan's and this film's standards. "Oh btw that scientist is still stuck on that planet, you should prob go rescue her since apparently none of us give a fuck"

yeah, it was really odd. murph is so old and infirm that she's advised against making the trip to see cooper near saturn, but she does it anyway. then when she arrives she sees her dad for the first time in decades, says hi for 30 seconds, then she's like 'cool, good talk, now go away so i can die with my kids around me'. for a movie which posits the idea that love is the strongest force in the universe it's awfully cavalier about actual human realtionships.

he doesnt really 'do' relationships though, does he?

the whole thing is better if you avoid the dialogue/plot/premise and just focus on the visuals/sound. he should have made a silent space movie really. a sci-fi the artist.

anyway, nolan is just too smart to care about things like relationships like other directors might. hes brainier than namby pamby families and stuff.

jessica chastain is astonishingly beautiful, mcconaheyhey is looking pretty leathery lately.

astonishing how he kept that farmer's tan after 2 years in space

no atmospheric protection from those UV rays out there!

anyway, nolan is just too smart to care about things like relationships like other directors might. hes brainier than namby pamby families and stuff.

i thought the scene where cooper returns to the endeavour to find the backlog of messages from his son was legit moving, which made the robotic rending feel even weirder. although i guess it's telling that mconaughey does all the work there - going from joy to heartbroken sobbing without saying a word.

astonishing how he kept that farmer's tan after 2 years in space

tbf he was in stasis for most of that time. i wonder how long cooper's whole experience lasted for him subjectively? it can't have been more than a few weeks tops, right?

self-xp er, i meant 'robotic ending' rather than 'robotic rending' there. still, some scenes of TARS tearing shit up would have been more than welcome. <3 u TARS

Oh man the pathetic robot banter in this was so fucking weeeeak, how about you nerds raise ur stfu levels to 100% cause this shit wasn't funny the 1st twenty times

I bet that's what Jonathan and Christopher Nolan sound like when they talk to each other

enh, i've got to give them some credit for designing a robot that didn't look like anything i'd seen on screen before, even if it was a transformer version of the 2001 monolith with aspirations towards standup comedy

although i guess you could say that TARS is the natural endpoint of the nolans' tendency to make their characters featureless slabs

tbf he was in stasis for most of that time.

in the future, space travelers will put their kids into stasis and then revive them when they return, so they won't miss out on attending all their ball games. kids will put their pets into stasis and revive them months later, just as a joke to confuse them. housewives will put leftovers into stasis instead of a refrigerator. laid off workers will be put in stasis to save on unemployment benefits. the possibilities are endless!

Oh lord, this movie. aaaaaaagghhhh

otm

this was like Armageddon minus hamminess and hokiness (or, the good parts), plus some self-serious "gravitas"; and then a Shyamalan ending tacked on. (that the 3rd act was the best is troublesome). it really sucked.

i have seen the future and oh my god it is very white except for one guy!

Loved it, in deep. IMAX non 70mm. Gripping, tearful, intense. Well acted. Realistic even though it's not. Great robots. Love was the message. Mixed with a bit of science, but more important was mixing the love WITH the science. Don't forget the love bit. Too much hardnosed objective science goals(Dr Mann) you got yourself a problem Houston. In the end love was the deciding factor, and that is really cool. Love saved the planet. Wow though.

My problem was the lack of environmental message in a film about a destroyed earth, or the lack of blaming humans for the dustbowl earth. He obviously had no interest in blaming humans for anything or questioning whther we deserved to have another planet to destroy. So it was chosen thou "blight" that killed our food. Why? Is Nolan a corporate shill? Did he cave into the RW in declaring environmental destruction as a political theme and decide as usual to leave his film apolitic?

And why did he put the message in the room to go to NASA base in the first place?

In the end love was the deciding factor, and that is really cool. Love saved the planet.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6WBtefrY4Ss/UaQJwuXSDdI/AAAAAAAABNo/F64QUKI0sf4/s1600/Brazil_Capa_Topo.png

why did they need a rocket to get off earth at the start if they had space planes for the other planets?

Let's be real for a sec

This is another C Nolan conservative crusade.

are you for real?

Well many of the scientists in it were willing to put human lives at risk and lie in order to prove a point. Michael Caine gambled with multiple lives in order to prove something he knew was false, and Matt Damon is willing to kill everyone to save his own skin. Only McConaughey's spiritual farmer can navigate the nth dimension.

It's interesting that they use Morse code to bridge the gap between dimensions. It is a binary system. Maybe they never went to space and this is just a fable about technology and how it is changing our perception of time through what we reveal through it. 21st Century Evangleist New Wave Mysticism.

I really liked the trippy bookcase effects, it reminded me of no-clip mode in Doom.

The movie reminds me of Iain Banks's cranky diatripe against SF dabblers: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/13/iain-banks-science-fiction-genre

It seems amazed that it includes TRAVELING TO PLANETS IN A SPACESHIP and TIME TRAVEL omg

(Also, did anyone else who saw it have trouble making out at least a third of the dialogue? The mixing was atrocious at my screening.)

This has become a widely-reported problem.

Nolan chose The Hollywood Reporter as the outlet to respond to the reported Interstellar sound problems:

“I’ve always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster, but I feel it’s the right approach for this experiential film,” the director said. “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.”

Well that certainly sounds like any points in the film where dialogue can’t be heard was intentional. He continues:

“Usually I visit six or seven theaters. I like to hear it out where people are going to see it, not just in the cocoon of the dub stage. That is something I have done for years, because everything we are doing is intended to communicate something to the audience,” he said. “The theaters I have been at have been doing a terrific job in terms of presenting the film in the way I intended. “Broadly, speaking there is no question when you mix a film in an unconventional way as this, you’re bound to catch some people off guard, but hopefully people can appreciate the experience for what it’s intended to be.”

Among the specific theaters Nolan visited and check were the TCL Chinese IMAX and Arclight Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles as well as the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX in New York. More Nolan:

“We made carefully considered creative decisions,” Nolan said. “There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is. It’s not that nobody has ever done these things before, but it’s a little unconventional for a Hollywood movie.”

On a straight-up visual, visceral level, I dug the stuff on the water planet. Those mammoth waves gave me a little burst of real-life anxiety & adrenaline and I perked up for a spell.

I can't remember the specifics of what made me think this, but does the time-relativity stuff mean that McConaughey is supposed to be 31-years-old when he first leaves Earth?

i think it was stated (indirectly) that he was ~33 years old in the first part of the film.

still think that having the music drown out the dying professor revealing a major plot point was probably a bad decision

The planets were the good bit of the film at least visually although the scenes of mild peril were the usual cack-handed idiocy. Will dr brand stop pissing about looking at debris quick enough to save random dude who is standing like a meter away from the ship yelling at her? Let's fucking hope not, if he doesn't realise that he can yell from inside the ship he's too stupid to be an astronaut even in this universe

Seriously don't get why ppl who were like properly angry at Prometheus are rating this, it may even be dumber

plus, if it really was 7 years for every hour, the data would effectively only be a couple hours old at that point. you'd think they would know that and maybe not risk everything to save it.

I'm glad I saw the flick. If nothing else, it's one of these things that makes me wanna just say to people: "So, did you dig this? Well, check out this cool movie called 'Moon'..."

how is everyone still rating this a contender for best picture

so I hated Prometheus and all the "this is stupider than Prometheus" talk makes me :(

if yer talking Oscars it's bcz 1) they suck and 2) since they went to up to 10 nominees, they 'honor' gigantic expensive pieces of box-office horseshit as a POPPPPPPULIST gesture. xp

see also Hobbits Jumping on a Bed as Best Picture

Wasn't one of the big motivating factors for the switch from 5 nominees to 10 or whatever that fanboys got all pissy when The Dark Knight didn't get a Best Pic nod in '08?

they typically stop thinking about honoring those specific MAINSTREAM TRASH!!!! FUCK SCHOOL!!! movies after rotten tomatoes and the public brand "disappointment" on it

and none of the hobbit movies have been nominated

Yeah, get your Oscar strawmen straight.

I'm talking about Best Picture winner LOTR: Return of the Bling, which had hobbits jumping on a bed as the faggiest of its baker's dozen endings, fools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6yQ8BLSncc

but that was years before the BP extension and doesn't its winning imply that it wasn't a token populist gesture but the academy is actually the hilrod2016cademy? i'm working on it

also every BP winner of the past decade wld've benefited from hobbits jumping on a bed

imagine the Tower of Sauron roaring with dismay when Colin Firth learns to talk in The King's Speech.

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.

whoa

Wasn't Dark Knight Rises known for those audio issues? Some people said Bane was difficult to hear and it got sorted out for later screenings and for DVD.

audio issues: everything i heard was crappy

I didn't have any problems with the audio.

resident pleb reporting in: i enjoyed the movie well enough. i thought the acting was pretty good (even in spite of poor dialogue in places) and i thought it handled the science pretty well up to the point where science fails to explain things, i.e. before any of the black hole ingress.

one thing i particularly liked was the idea of mcconaughey-as-bridge, between the higher dimensional beings and present day earth, to "translate" time. the canonical example used to broadly explain the simplification achieved with many modern unification theories (namely that if you keep adding dimensions into the mix the math collapses down into pretty closed forms) is of a 2D world in which any person who can perceive in 3 dimensions is effectively god, because he can immediately grasp the totality of the 2D reality and reconcile all of its physical phenomena. the spin the movie takes is that while, yes, the science may compactify to clarity for an nth dimensional perception, something is in fact lost in the generality. in this case that something is the way that a 3D being perceives time which seems irrelevant/trivial to the higher dimensional form, but is critical in this instance to the survival of humans on earth. the whole thing might fall apart under much further scrutiny, but it was an interesting concept that i hadn't seen employed in sci-fi previously.

a logical trajectory for Palmer Joss.. i found this well-watchable compared to Inception, which feels ultra-boggy/sloggy despite its interesting concept.

Nolan should just claim everything wrong or bad was on purpose, just to make you think.

Bane was Marxism.

Intersteller treats the planet as expendable, something to throw in the bin if we mess it up. Move onto the next one, without questioning our role in it. Great film, but his politics is not mine.

when a ticket is like a bottomless mimosa

http://www.cnet.com/news/amcs-unlimited-interstellar-ticket-lets-you-binge-on-black-holes/

Short video on the sound design. Worth a watch.
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/11/18/the-sound-of-interstellar/

i really wanted to like this but was pretty :I by the end of it. i'm glad i watched it though, if nothing else for the image of TARS scooping up anne hathaway and galloping away from the giant wave.

michael caine's deathbed confession was the only time when i felt like i was supposed to be understanding the dialogue but couldn't because of the music. i also think david gyasi's performance as a guy who has been stuck on a spaceship for 20 years by himself with nothing to do but study gravity was funny and undermentioned.

oh and i really liked the pipe-organ driven part of the score that started kicking in around the 2 hour mark.

also when anne hathaway is watching a video from her dad and he goes "do not go gentle into-" and she gets this look on her face like "not this shit again..."- was that how other ppl interpreted that scene or was i just desperately injecting levity where it didn't exist?

The score is incredible and innovative all through. Absolutely captures the film and, well, space, perfectly. Much better than the Odyssey classicals, which to me never worked.

Especially liked "dust" but so many great songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08TFwDKILs

Would actually argue that Zimmer's the strongest player here aside from whoever designed those waves.

still think that having the music drown out the dying professor revealing a major plot point was probably a bad decision

Inception did this too: hand over most of the explication to the guy with the hardest accent to parse, and then drown him out anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtX4DnzAU8o
recommended for fans of john carpenter's halloween 3 OST

wait that was mislabeled, this is it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNW3LPKNFh8

it would have been cool if they just played the Silver Shamrock theme

I just watched this and it exceeded my expectations. From the trailers, I thought it was going to be some wishy-washy "we are all connected" bullshit -and it got close in some parts- but thankfully, it wasn't. Only the black hole scene was a little too far fetched for me -regardless of our ignorance of what the inside a black hole might look like, it's a pretty safe bet to say it is not a view of McConaughey's daughter bedroom. I did, however, appreciate the use of serious scientific and philosophical ideas. Sometimes I feel like Nolan's movies (this and Inception, in particular) would be much better if they focused more on ideas and less on action scenes. Their main problem is that they are conceived as blockbusters.

trailers before this movie were of upcoming movies featuring Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. very time warp trippy.

WHOA

(More thoughts later, but yeah, I kinda have to thank everyone who saw this and didn't like it because that helped me calibrate my expectations somewhat - enjoyed it a great deal, first Nolan film I watched in an actual theater)

trailers before this movie were of upcoming movies featuring Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. very time warp trippy.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, November 20, 2014 7:58 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I got neither of these, but something close (in a way) - a trailer for Fast Furious 7, with Paul Walker.

I almost saw this on Friday but decided to bank it for next week when I have to get out of the house.

(A much better BEE film adaptation, though problematic in its own ways: "The Rules of Attraction.")

oops, wrong thread

Bret Easton Ellis's Interstellar, that I would watch.

Meanwhile, this story about Kip Thorne is fun

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/great-reads/la-et-c1-kip-thorne-interstellar-20141122-story.html#page=1

Though a self-described introvert, Thorne is also a born teacher, and he clearly enjoys talking. One moment he's telling the story of how, in the mid-1970s, he won a scientific bet with his friend Stephen Hawking. The prize? A subscription to Penthouse magazine. ("You have to understand, I grew up in a Mormon culture — I thought that would be a fun thing to bet for.")

With all the loud organ music, they really should have had Tim Hecker collaborate on the soundtrack

ha, when we got home I played Ravedeath for my wife. I mostly like the score, but it did feel at times like Nolan mixed two different scores together, one by Hecker, one by a more trad hollywood composer, to make it as maximalist as possible.

"Sometimes I feel like Nolan's movies (this and Inception, in particular) would be much better if they focused more on ideas and less on action scenes. Their main problem is that they are conceived as blockbusters."

basically, he wants to be making films like shane carruth, but also wants to make them mega hits, which can be an awkward fit.

Primer had very strong internal consistency, which is one of Nolan's biggest problems -- Inception falls apart when you try to analyze it. So does Interstellar.

So does Upstream Color, but I mean that in a good way.

Interstellar really does seem like two movies smashed together

yeah the "biggest problems - falls apart when you try to analyze it" tonedeaf criticism of upstream color drove me batshit insane personally

but in saying that nor do you want to fully endorse dopey comfortable moodpiece wallowing either

imo Upstream Color has a purposefully loose narrative that encourages interpretation

Nolan films have narratives that aren't really open. You can talk about the ideas presented in the film, but there's not a lot of wiggle room on the actual narrative. I have overheard people talking about, say, Inception but it's usually due to one person not understanding the plot or puzzling over whether that stupid fucking top actually fell over at the end of the movie.

so this is the funniest thing nolan's ever done yeah?

another classic damon/affleck joint

https://youtu.be/VUhA8eSx6pQ?t=4m16s

Have to say I found this strangely affecting. I know it's corny as all get out, but as someone with a rather complicated relationship with my father, the absent dad stuff really hit home. Like shooting fish in a barrel with me on that score however.

finally got around to this, glad my expectations were tempered. I felt like this was too long, which undercut the actual tension you were supposed to feel; and the special effects, tesseract aside, weren't all that great. And ultimately, the denouement didn't have much emotional resonance for me. If in the end it was 'love conquers all', then there are about 30 Doctor Who episodes that do the same thing and are more satisfying.

It was ok. But only ok.

I was surprised by how much I liked this, and it reminded me why I like The Prestige and The Dark Knight and The Following so much. I really like Nolan, and I wish all mainstream directors were like him.

Didn't like this and all I could think about during parts of the movie is that his grandson's full name was Cooper Cooper.

You know, even though there were only a couple of things I loved - the score and the robots, the latter possibly the most originally designed and smart I've seen in a while - I pretty much liked this. It was like a '50s sci-fi film with a contemporary sensibility, so less outright dumb and more just painfully earnest/new agey. It reminded me of a lot of other near-misses, specifically "Sunshine," "Gravity," and "The Abyss," with a lil' dose of "Tree of Life." Nowhere near as dumb as "Prometheus," which squandered a solid foundation and excellent FX in the service of something totally silly, risible and not-even-trying nonsensical.

Of course, for all the shady science (which tbf at least tries to make accessible some really hard to understand mad genius science), its biggest fallacy may be the mundane time travel paradox. Like, in order to survive and evolve into a higher state of consciousness (?), all the events in the movie had to take place exactly as is, which sort of results in a closed loop. Were we not to evolve into beings capable of 5th dimension travel (?), then we would not be able to lure Coop into heading out on his mission, thus ensuring his daughter solves the riddle of gravity (?) and is able to save the human race by relocating it to ... Saturn? So that it can one day evolve and ...

Unless I'm totally getting it wrong. But I like how many ellipses or confusing questions/contradictions it left in. I would have liked to see it directed by Shane Carruth in "Upstream Color" mode.

Ha, funny to see others mention Upstream Color. I'd been avoiding a close read of the thread.

Most time travel movies operate around those parameters though don't they? Looper was mostly the same way in that there was kind of an unsatisfying feeling of "it happened because it happened" but I enjoyed both these movies just cause I like time travel movies in general and honestly even if the plot doesn't make sense on some level there was so much more to enjoy about it. For Interstellar I at least dug how the whole narrative and timeline was centered around McConaughey; even though decades are happening back on Earth at least HIS story is more or less linear

That's because it's all connected by the power of his love, man.

Yeah, that's why I called it a mundane time travel paradox. Pretty much none of them bear scrutiny save Primer. And even that, iirc, leads to a Timecrimes like permanent loop.

Speaking of near-misses, Looper was another movie with a dirty farm in the future. Sci-fi trend? I'm going to write a movie about weaponizing cows in a dystopian future. It will be called The Herd, and will work as an allegory for animal rights extremists and/or activist vegetarians in a future world where only the extreme rich/assholes eat meat.

I liked the time-paradox in Interstellar, because the point is that the humans' will of life created it. No matter what, someone would have survived, so they were able to reach back in time and save all of them. It's so naive, kinda dumb, but positive and likable.

I just liked this film. I think it's likable.

It's so naive, kinda dumb, but positive and likable.

That's why I said it's like a '50s sci-fi film with a contemporary sensibility. Sorta dumb, definitely naive, but optimistic and likable. And hey, special appearance by Topher Grace, too.

doesn't like 90% of humanity die in the interim between them figuring out some equations and building space arks?

it's basically a Star Trek movie and a better one than the Abrams reboots

No, it's better than that, because mawkish or no there is some real emotion in this.I found the sequence where he was watching video messages from his kids as they age to be absolutely heartbreaking.

but yeah, it is unclear how many people on earth are even left, but they understand that the longer they take exponentially more people will die.

I thought the scene with the remains of the Yankees was meant to convey that very few people were left on the planet

Or maybe there was just very little market for baseball or pro sports post nuclear war or current dustbowl apocalypse or whatever, It was pretty unclear, but I'm cool with that. I was worried early on that the film would try to explain everything, but it left a lot of things just hanging. Much better than "Inception," in that regard.

I don't know that Inception explained that much. Did it?

Yeah, I dug that too, how Nolan just left you to figure it all out. My assumption is that it wasn't a nuclear war, just climate change run amok.

My assumption is that when the movie begins it's like 2045 or something. Nolan really likes futures, doesn't he?

I don't see what the rush was to find a habitable planet if they ended up building a gundam habitat in space anyway.

They did say nasa partly got shut down for refusing to be coopted into a war.

And yeah, Saturn or whatever base seemed fine. Maybe they needed a place to chill with supplies until Anna Hathaway grew a new civilization.

nasa had been asked to help kill off poor people, due to overpopulation I assumed.

They gave the explanation in-film that there was dramatic overconsumption in the early 21st century as developing countries became more wealthy. So, eventual resource scarcity followed by problems with crop disease leading to further famine even after the population decreased.

There is an implication that something more happened (not that it matters). When he gets the Indian drone at the beginning he make a remark about putting its tech to good use, for a change. And also TARS and CARS were former military robots, and if you recall Coop is initially highly wary of them.

NASA aside, when was the last sci-fi film that did not romanticise the military industrial complex? This one did not have so much as a police officer, let alone soldiers.

robocop reboot should have been topher with a crowbar

when was the last sci-fi film that did not romanticise the military industrial complex?

District 9?

that dopey Matt Damon movie (which I didn't see)?

Children of Men is one

yeah that was awhile ago

Beyond the Black Rainbow lol

damn, yeah almost a decade now

dopey Matt Damon = Elysium, District 9 follow up ?

that guy's next movie Chappie looks like it would also qualify

"Interstellar" didn't even have guns. I can't think of the last big budget movie I've seen that didn't have guns.

watched this on Saturday night. I enjoyed it I guess, because I tend to like this kind of movie. It's a bit frustrating because I would really like to see huge big-budget hard sci-fi epics, but actually good, instead of me having to pick out all the different elements I like (and some stuff in this movie I really liked a lot) and force myself to overlook all the really terrible stuff.

I saw this on Saturday, too. Probably my favorite Nolan movie at the moment. Which is probably damning with really faint praise as I've realized I don't really like Nolan's movies. I wouldn't say it was a good movie, but it had some nice visuals and tried to tackle some interesting (if half-baked, in that inimitable Nolan style) ideas for a mainstream flick. Dude needs a legit screenwriter in the worst way.

Are there any other sci-fi movies that play around with time dilation? Seems like an underused sci-fi premise

Knowing pretty much nothing beforehand about the plot of the movie, I was coincidentally having a total layman's conversation with my girlfriend about how higher-dimensional beings would perceive the third and fourth dimensions. And after the movie, we were trying to remember how we even got on that topic of conversation in the first place when I concluded that I must've been the ghost all along.

xpost The closest analog to this movie in recent memory, as I noted above, was I think "Sunshine." Same sort of ambitious save the world premise, same strains of space madness, same pretty cool FX and score. If this one errs sometimes on the side of mawkish, that one erred on the side of horror/thriller.

I think the negative stuff I heard about this movie beforehand was massively misplaced and over-amplified. He does need either a legit screenwriter or, a la Malick, enough faith in his ellipses to just toss out the script and go with feel. But of course Nolan is a robot, and feel isn't really programmed into his being.

Are there any other sci-fi movies that play around with time dilation? Seems like an underused sci-fi premise

i know that ridley scott was working on a movie version of joe haldeman's novel the forever war for a long time but i think it's now dead in the water. the time dilation stuff in that book is fascinating, and one of the cleverest metaphors for the experiences of soldiers returning from vietnam i've ever seen. i enjoyed interstellar but mostly it made me wish that someone would make a decent adaptation of the forever war.

I kinda thought (and sorta hoped) that the movie was going to end with McConaughey permanently stuck in that fixed point in space, watching and ghost interacting with his daughter (a plot point I called about halfway through the movie, btw) and who/whatever else existed in that same space throughout time.

I kind of thought that by the time they made it to the final planet, that because of the time dilation caused by passing so close to the black hole, they would end up being hundreds of years into the future and there would already be millions of people living on the planet.

I realized yesterday that this movie is kinda basically the Silver Surfer's origin story.

found some interstellar fan-fiction appropriately made before interstellar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCpsGGaciFo

This is a New Age nuclear-family weepie disguised as scifi. Though I have never had patience for extra dimensions, not even as a teenager. DUMB.

Bill Irwin was interviewed after the film at MoMA; he really was on the set walking around behind TARS most of the time.

Interstellar really does seem like two movies smashed together

I wish the silver nitrate had exploded.

(Did see a 35mm print, as v few audiences have apparently)

The dialogue didn't help, but Matt Damon was amazingly terrible in this

Maybe it was method, because he was acting like he just woke up.

I kinda thought (and sorta hoped) that the movie was going to end with McConaughey permanently stuck in that fixed point in space, watching and ghost interacting with his daughter (a plot point I called about halfway through the movie, btw) and who/whatever else existed in that same space throughout time.

that would have been awesome but no way does such a big budget movie end like that. btw I was with this movie up until this point, until he started speaking with TARS while in the Tesseract, which just made one of the biggest deus ex machinas in the history of cinema feel even dumber than it already was

by the way can anyone explain how the population bomb was supposed to work?

http://cdn1.smosh.com/sites/default/files/legacy.images/smosh-pit/112010/harry-finger.gif

The whole Matt Damon subplot was completely perfunctory. He probably realized as much.

really smart dude realizes that he's not destined to always be right, acts like a big whiny baby and almost ruins humanity's chance to survive

Would've maybe preferred to just see that movie.

Woulda rather watched Damon sleep.

was hoping Casey Affleck wd somehow wind up on his planet so they could do a sf sequel to Gerry.

I was predisposed to like this movie but everything about it sounds so terrible now I don't think I'll even bother watching it

It's not terrible, but...y'know. It's Nolan: pretty and stupid with pretentions beyond its station and not particularly good, but you know what you're getting into if you've seen his other stuff.

I think he's pretty erratic as a filmmaker in terms of quality

Eh, this movie is fine, don't listen to the haters.

The first half is not consistently terrible. The second half is.

Yeah the Matt Damon mark is where this started going downhill for me. He gives such a lazy, awful performance. Like indistinguishable acting from one of his evil Jimmy Kimmel skits.

Matt Damon recreating the Space Madness ep of Ren & Stimpy was my favorite part by far.

*pauses a beat* Those are the best odds I've had in years! Lol I was cracking up my dude...

Matt Damon gave me such a good and cool feeling in this

H4A OTM

Standard opinions: This was a pretty movie, the sound was stupidly loud at times, you can get away with more terrible shite if you get Matthew McConnaughy to say it than with Anne Hathaway. Also Fatt Damon was channelling a little Philip Seymour Hoffman there.

Sorry to be That Guy, but this isn't really a paradox? Everything happens because it happens, free will is a pretty illusion, but there's a thread of causality. No spoilers but Looper (as compared above) does a bunch of future-rewriting all the way through it.

God, Looper's second half was 100x more boring than this. Let's hang out on a future farm!

Anyway, it's no more a paradox than any other closed loop time travel movie - chicken, egg, etc. - but I suppose the new age stuff helped set it apart. That is, love/emotion as an aspect of interdimensionality or whatever.

I was warned about this film by my brother and his girlfriend. then thought I'd go and see it as an early bird film last week so I could at least make up my own mind about it.
It does look very good and has some semi nice touches but it does seem to have a number of happy endings tacked onto it.
Hard to talk about it without giving spoilers. But I guess its near the end of its run.

Murph knows instinctively that that's her dad? But I guess that does go with the logic of the rest of the film.

& McConaughey is destined to wind up with Hathaway despite them not interacting in that way anywhere else in the film?

& yeah that population bomb did leave me intrigued.
As did what happened with McConaughey once he went into the blackhole. I thought he wouldn't have air connected because he was in a ship which fell apart on him. So what little air did he have left when he was found. WAs the ship re-integrated when he came out around Saturn or was he floating on his own and just coincidentally close to the robot who had gone in at a different point anyway?

Also what happened with the timescale. Not sure how long anything was supposed to be relative to earth time when he was on or passed through the blackhole, but he should still have some comparable time to Hathaway wherever that planet was. In order to have the great romantic ending that nothing has built towards. But a hero has to ride off into the sunset and get the girl (that's never been his).
Like toatlly cosmic pun about riding into sunsets and passing through blackholes etc innnit?

I don't think it was a romantic ending though right? The last shot of hathway shows her robot digging up the landing pod of the dude she's in love with, who I guess is in super-sleep mode like Damon was.

Minor thing but it kind of bugged me when the camera panned in that shot to show the like mini-city Hathway already had up and running, like how did all of those buildings fit on the little shuttle she arrived in. C'mon man!

Romantic between Hathway/McCanaughy that is.

I thought Murph said go off and find the person you should be with which I read as sticking a romantic end on the film. & it was certainly implied that meant Hathaway.
Seemed to be a sudden thing, I certainly hadn't seen anything suggesting it elsewhere.
& he does go off to join her doesn't he?

I actually wouldn't mind a sequel about them raising a population of test tube babies on a desert planet

Make it a stealth prequel to Dune

Xp yeah he does, I thought it just meant go and help out on a new colony because there was nothing left for him on the big humanity tube space ship, plus some sympathy for hathaway since it would suck for anyone to be out in space alone.

McConnaughy was an only parent who needed like 2 minutes to decide to leave his family on earth at the start of the movie, cause "we used to look to the stars and give a shit" etc. Between that and the ending he seems pretty eager to put a lot of distance between himself and the people he's trying to save. Nolan's flat inhuman characters kind of suck the air out of the whole "love will save us" theme here.

I dunno, I think this movie does a lot of interesting things with time, and not even the stuff that's actually, explicitly about time. For example, I'm not sure how much time passes between McC heading to NASA and actually taking off. Or how long Hathaway had been on her planet at the end, relative to where/when everyone else is. But I did get the feeling that McC was pushed/drawn back to her because she is the only one who shares his same weird experience, with virtually everyone they know dead and kind of adrift on their own weird timeline.

Yeah for sure, well said.

Some of the chords Hans Zimmer uses in this kind of remind me of parts of The Thin Red Line soundtrack (best ever), kind of get a "Journey to the Line" vibe from the build up in this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuq5985xyfw

his family would have all been dead within a generation and his kids weren't exactly helpless and had a family member

idk, last chance for humanity seems ok over being the second wheel in a granddad-dad parenting sitch

I don't think it was a romantic ending though right? The last shot of hathway shows her robot digging up the landing pod of the dude she's in love with, who I guess is in super-sleep mode like Damon was.

i thought the robot was digging a grave for him?

Murph knows instinctively that that's her dad?

In the end? Yeah, because he looks like he did. In the tesseract? He's communicating through the watch.

I thought the last shot of Brandt was her crying and setting up a grave for Edmunds, though at that point my eyes were rolling so hard I was only seeing occasional glimpses when they came back around. (xp yeah what bg said)

In theory, most of the time dilation (the ~80 years or so missing) would probably have been the slingshotting around the black hole, which Brandt would have shared with Coop? Or something.

She would have made it over with 80% of the Endurance, with the payload of Plan B. Getting the tent city set up and starting the population bomb off is pretty much what that was designed for?

It seems like the space ship is nearly ready for blastoff when Coop comes along (sent on by his future self) - that it's the same make of ship he flew previously cuts the training down a lot.

Murph knows instinctively that that's her dad?

In the end? Yeah, because he looks like he did. In the tesseract? He's communicating through the watch.

> I thought one of the reasons she stuck around to notice that the watch was moving erratically was because she had recognised it was her dad. So the recognition came before the message. I guess she maybe would have picked up the watch knowing she was never going to beback there but I don't think that was what was said at the time.

Also his actually entering the black hole came after Brandt had been slingshotted away. I thought 7 years passed in an hour on a planet that was far enough out of the blackhole's pull to not get sucked in. He actually went into the blackhole though so there should surely be some time difference?

I dunno, it might depend on how far from the centre of the black hole he actually gets before he's tesseracted - but I am just wildly waving my hands here.

I think she's generally thinking about both her dad and the weird shit in that room - but again I was eye-rolling a bit at that point (more because it seemed like they'd telegraphed that he was the ghost for so long).

it's a grave
she's the only human left alive who knows him
nobody cares anyway

yeah I did lol that nobody else gave enough of a shit to go fetch that woman stuck on a planet by herself

this film was so dumb, I think I'd almost prefer "damon lindelof would like a minute of your time to talk about jesus" to the nolans' idea of profundity, luckily I don't have to pick

my favourite exchange from this, not sure if mentioned upthread:

scientist: now think. what's a circle in three dimensions?
engineer: (thinks for a few seconds) ...a sphere!

time is a three dimensional circle

a cylinder?

it's the thinking man's blockbuster

The last third of the movie largely undid any goodwill the first two-thirds brought. it was essentially Signs in Outer Space but with no aliens.

Not a 'fetch' though - it's still a one way trip.

even with love magic?

incidentally the wormhole paper metaphor is wrong. if a wormhole existed, space would have to remain folded. it's much harder to imagine what folded space would look like.

When I was a kid I watched a late 70's Disney b-movie called The Black Hole and I would argue it was far superior to this risible trash, and the time I spent watching the free Black Hole shrinky dink of Anthony Hopkins (that was a Shreddies gift) shrinking in the fucking oven was absolutely higher quality time spent than was watching this bollocks.

Anthony Perkins shrinky dink

The redlettermedia review compares it to the Black Hole.

scientist: now think. what's a circle in three dimensions?
engineer: (thinks for a few seconds) ...a sphere!

The classic Google Interview Question

I like the red letter summary: "I'd rather see a movie with too many ideas than none."

as i was watching, i kept thinking, who's that dude with the eyes bulging out their sockets... I know I'm supposed to think he's funny... OH, IT'S ERIC FORMAN

"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends the dimensions of time and space."

Agree with Smashed Bagels upthread: 2/3 of a flawed but idea-dense and generally entertaining science fiction epic completely wrecked by poor characterizations, overwrought melodrama and pointless mumbo-jumbo in a catastrophically dopey final act. I enjoyed the imagery & effects, the crew's adventures on the various pit-stop planets (mad Matt Damonson Crusoe), and their long-shot race to rescue humanity from extinction. McConaughey was excellent, as were both actresses playing Murphy. That relationship worked quite well for me as an emotional anchor amid all the existential angst and derring-do. Until, again, the final act, where it all came crashing down. As previously demonstrated in Inception, Nolan can't resist hammering the big emotional beats with all his might, until what might have been moving instead becomes a suffocating wallow. Felt like Murphy dithered over her box of trinkets with her bad big brother closing in for a good quarter hour while dad banged away at the slickly rendered walls between worlds. And everything after that was straight garbage. Bleck. Bad movie. Not as bad as Contact, but close.

ugh

I liked a lot more of this than I thought I would because I generally am not liking Nolan, but good lord do these characters have to be so stupid and say such stupid things and does this have to take so long.... Planets and effects were generally cool and I dug the robots and there were parts of the score that were surprisingly good (I am also generally not liking Zimmer much).

just suffered through this. very expensive and visually/acting often impressive but utterly ill conceived and just bone dumb, like moreso than gravity even. lots of huge logic leaps that are barely considered. and boring! too long! what a trainwreck.

"as a guy who has been stuck on a spaceship for 20 years by himself with nothing to do but study gravity was funny and undermentioned."

this would have been a better movie. just the guy in the ship for 20 years. i read the Coyote trilogy by allen steele - a big space opera thing - and in the first book when everyone goes into deep sleep to travel to a distant planet one guy wakes up and is alone on the ship for 30 years and he ends up painting a huge mural and writing an endless fantasy epic and he goes nuts and drinks all the booze and it was the best thing in the trilogy.

Coyote trilogy also does the time thing better than this movie. it takes the first settlers 50 years to get to the new planet but back on earth they develop really fast ship tech so the first settlers are only on the new planet for about 5 years before more humans and ships show up. its cool the way its done.

watching movies like this just makes me wish that we had the tech to clone spielberg. the beginning is such a garbled mess. dustbowl documentary people? are they from the old dustbowl or the new one? the yankees playing in a sandlot. school textbooks with moon hoax history. what year is this? why does he have a laptop that can make a drone land in his backyard? how did they figure out how to get to nasa with dust on the floor? the whole "there's a ghost, pa" thing is so rushed and unexplained. spielberg would have nailed it. you would believe a little girl had ghosts.

excuse my newbie status. just watched all 6 hours of this on hulu last night.

also wish these directors would entertain the idea of consulting with SF writers who have written this stuff a hundred different ways for decades. (liked that banks link above...)

B-b-but would that really help?

I like the idea of Spielberg as wandering sic-fi/fantasy/action-adventure consultant. "Hmm, this OK, but what if you ..." They could come stamped with a Steven Spielberg Presents seal of approval.

"B-b-but would that really help?"

couldn't hurt.

this is on prime now but i still dont know if i can bring myself to watch it. it's just gonna piss me off

it's long.

I would only rewatch this as a form of penance

vegemitegrrrrrl i wish you would watch both seasons of Helix. i'm afraid i'll never know anyone who has watched it. it's on netflix.

doomed to spend eternity alone with my thoughts on Helix...

there has to be a way to ban american astronauts in space suits in hollywood....pretty please? and i even liked gravity...but there is a vast universe out there...

Did you watch Solaris US?

I actually really liked Interstellar. And liked, iirc, the USA Solaris, too.

i did not see u.s. solaris.

i can't even think of the last sci-fi movie that i really liked. unless gravity counts. i really liked prometheus. you guys probably hated that movie to bits. but that was more sciencehorror, i guess. i didn't see the martian. but i can kinda guess what that was like. i mean i'll watch it eventually. but i doubt i would love it.

( i did like guardians of the galaxy and john carter a ton...)

(i guess i'll just take cartoon-y over DO YOU SEE pseudo-profundity since nobody manages profundity too well these days. watching Interstellar made me want to watch Contact again. also made me think: OMG! McCuckoo has been with us for awhile, hasn't he?)

i mean Contact seems like a million years ago.

also, he really needs to change his Wiki picture...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Matthew_McConaughey_Cannes_2015.jpg

fyi: there is no trailer to be seen on youtube for the sea of trees movie with big mac directed by gus van sant. i love this variety quote though:

"Nonetheless, he concludes that the film is, "Almost impressive in the way it shifts from dreary two-hander to so-so survival thriller to terminal-illness weepie to M. Night Shyamalan/Nicholas Sparks-level spiritual hokum, this risibly long-winded drama is perhaps above all a profound cultural insult, milking the lush green scenery of Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest for all it’s worth, while giving co-lead Ken Watanabe little to do other than moan in agony, mutter cryptically, and generally try to act as though McConaughey’s every word isn’t boring him (pardon the expression) to death."

Lol, thought while that was loading it was Antonio Banderas.

This movie was p good until the last 40 minutes then gtfo

I only saw the second half of this which I didn't like need to go back and see the rest to judge properly.

Intrigued by Helix.

i make no great claims for Helix other than the fact that it is completely fucking demented. i mean, i'm a fan of The 100, so, your mileage may vary GREATLY.

found this watchable (sorta) but wholly forgettable

i make no great claims for Helix other than the fact that it is completely fucking demented. i mean, i'm a fan of The 100, so, your mileage may vary GREATLY.

did anyone watch childhood's end? was there a thread?

the 2nd season of Helix feels like: hey, i think we might get cancelled. let's do drugs and write scripts!

_i make no great claims for Helix other than the fact that it is completely fucking demented. i mean, i'm a fan of The 100, so, your mileage may vary GREATLY._

I'll try that next

yeah, it's not for everyone.

the 2nd season of Helix feels like: hey, i think we might get cancelled. let's do drugs and write scripts!

oh so it's supernatural

scott I watched half of the first season of helix. (ron moore involvement was enough to interest me)

it was interesting at first but it got stupid pretty fast, i got really annoyed with it really quickly

and i haaated the 100

it's okay, you guys. i knew it was a hard sell going in. the 2nd season of Helix just goes beyond stupid for me in a way that i find transcendent. i just couldn't stop watching. just the thought of like story meetings for the show...

The 100 goes nuts like that too. in a similar way. when they get to the mountain people.

Kyle is captured by infected who dine on the uninfected. He infects himself to avoid being eaten. Sarah reveals to Amy that a transfusion of spinal fluid from an immortal will grant immortality. Amy does not trust Sarah so Landry volunteers to be the first test subject. Julia and Sergio arrive on the island in the present to find Michael's method of sterilizing mortal men. The apples are the result; they are seedless because they are all grafted from a plant called "Mother". When they go to check on Mother, they find that it is missing.

hahaha, you can SEE why i would be so captivated!

fwiw I hated The Martian way more than I was irritated by Interstellar

and Interstellar was way irritatinf

Prometheus both more watchable and lol actually better than both

Yeah, i watched the first half of season one of helix, too. Was irritated by the way you had no believable concept of how this vast base was chugging along day by day while all this mad shit went on

that's nothing. the building the 2nd season is based around is even bigger and on an island with no other power or infrastructure. but there are dozens of constantly pregnant women with no teeth or tongues in the basement so maybe they power everything somehow.

Understand why folks might be bored of Interstellar, but don't get the hate. Found Inception much more insufferable/interminable.

finally saw this since it was playing in 70mm and i figured hey, seems like the kind of movie where you'd rather do that than netflix it. some great sequences in this, and a few memorable visuals, and one very solid performance from mcconaughey but boy is this a mess. so much VERY VERY forced plotting - come hell or high water the characters are GOING to go where nolan says they have to even if it makes them all look like idiots. if it weren't three hours long you probably wouldn't have time to notice it but since there are all these elonnnnnngated scenes where you want to throw stuff at the screen going "I ALREADY FIGURED OUT THAT TWIST, DO YOU TAKE ME FOR AN IDIOT?!" you have a lot of extra time to ponder the imponderable. the three big twists (michael caine, matt damon, and identity of the 'ghost') are all paiinnnnnfully predictable and yet when they get unveiled the movie devotes endless minutes to explaining them in portentous dialog (damon's and mcconaughey's speeches are unforgivable). perhaps they're trying to evoke e the agony of burning precious time on a time-bending gravity planet.

speaking of which: i just cannot for the life of me fathom why anybody in any situation would choose the time-bending gravity planet. or why you'd even send an exploratory mission there in the first place. this is up there with the 'dumb scientist' scene in prometheus and should be equally famous and ridiculed. you know what sounds like a great place for humans to live is right next to a black hole where time is distorted. if that was their bar for planets worth checking out then humanity really is doomed. hey guys we've got three 'maybes' to check out, two of them are NOT time-bending gravity planets and one of them IS. if we go to the normal planets first, we won't have fuel to visit the gravity planet and also return home. troubling. if we go to the gravity planet first, we're risking the possibility that even the slightest delay, for example if the scientist we're there to pick up has a limp, means by the time we get to the other planets the scientists we're there to meet and everybody on earth will already be dead. well this is a no-brainer!

seriously they spend about five minutes talking about this unbelievably high-stakes decision with the fate of all humanity in the balance. what were they supposed to do if they got through the wormhole and ALL the planets had sent positive messages? what's the point of docking up with the space-station super-ship if it still doesn't have enough fuel to visit more than a couple of these dumb planets? it's just all so ridiculously contrived: they have to go to the time-bending planet first or all the aging drama stuff that is supposed to come at this point in the movie doesn't work, and the later decisions the characters make don't have the same stakes. it is also really confusing why they would even try to land on the gravity planet: can't they see from space that it's covered entirely with water? they can see earth and saturn and the wormhole out their spaceship window, but not this? no one brought a telescope? binoculars even? their spaceship doesn't have even the information-gathering capabilities of your average late-20th-century probe?

but setting that aside the prize for stupidity has to go to marooned matt damon, who has decades to think of an evil plan and comes up with "let me try to look as much as possible like a suspicious marooned crazy guy with an evil plan, like we have seen in countless other movies before." why keep the disabled robot around, instead of tossing it off a cliff? why even bother trying to betray and murder everybody instead of trying to get them to actually take you up into space? and isn't it risky to booby trap the robot? suppose the astronauts were like "oh we're so glad you're alive and your planet is great, let's take you and your robot up to the space station with us and we can try to send word back to earth?"

this is also where the the this-must-follow-this-must-follow-this plot carpentry becomes a millstone around the movie's neck: the team has just gotten word that they must get the black hole data or Plan A is futile, and they have come up with a scheme to try and get the data. is it really essential to, right this minute, go on a long hike into a dangerous landscape with matt damon? after what happened on the water planet? is it remotely plausible that the mcconaughey character as portrayed so far in the film would choose to proceed in this fashion with no debate? anyway they don't seem to be carrying any equipment with them - what is the motive for this very sketchy hike again? if the idea is that matt damon wants to give them a peek at the planet's surface below, i for one would be like "cool show me your camera roll!"

the other hilarious thing is the ending, where after three hours of obsessing over the father-daughter relationship, their reunion is brushed over in about thirty seconds of screen time. nolan reveals his real sense of human emotion by instead making sure we carefully track the fates and redemptions of each of the three identical robots.

*raises doc c onto his shoulders, carries him aloft through an adoring crowd as tickertape descends and fireworks spell out the letters 'O T M' across the sky*

also very convenient how it occurs to no one that a long-standing "positive" message from a time-dilated gravity planet is meaningless. like not even at the level of someone going "so wait, if time there passes so differently, how long has Doctor Whatever actually been there?" this is the key to their whole decision to go to the planet - possibly the most important decision in the history of the human race. "well there's not a lot of data but they've been sending positive messages for a long time!" to be fair, these are the same astronauts who didn't bother looking at a map and making sure everybody was briefed on the presence of a black hole until they actually got out there. well, i guess that's plausible - it's not like the main character is characterized by scientific curiosity and an explorer's passion for learning about the unknown, oh wait.

*raises doc c onto his shoulders, carries him aloft through an adoring crowd as tickertape descends and fireworks spell out the letters 'O T M' across the sky*

― licking the yellow Toad next to the teleporter (bizarro gazzara), Monday, August 21, 2017 10:33 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

co-sign

I like Nolan, and there are neat things in this movie, but of all his movies I've seen Interstellar is the one I'm least in a hurry to revisit.

So very OTM it ain't even funny. One of the stupidest flicks of recent years but, hey, Nolan's a genius (bro).

nolan shoots real good and has never been able to tell a story

enjoyed reading over this thread. tears streamed down my eyes as I read all the zings and disses that I'd missed out on in the passing years.

down my eyes? down my face obv

nolan shoots real good and has never been able to tell a story

― Larry Elleison (rogermexico.), 21. august 2017 19:32 (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which is why he is the best mainstream movie maker.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/994/418/48b.jpg

I must have posted this before itt but this film has one of my all-time favourite dumb bad movie dialogue exchanges, where a scientist is explaining the concept of wormholes to another scientist

Actual scientist: Now, think about it. What's a circle in three dimensions?

Other actual scientist: 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
...a sphere!

Saw this recently. Didn't follow the plot at all, it's far too long (especially the Damon scenes) but I enjoyed it very much for the music, some of the visuals, family and love stuff.

Not a big fan of Nolan but I find the hate for him completely ridiculous. Hate the overraters not the overrated, I'm sure that's in the Bible somewhere.

someone handed the Nolans a list of cool science ideas and they just had a family drama where they drop the concepts in one at a time, with the characters kind of mumbling halfhearted justifications to justify each being incorporated in the plot

I must have posted this before itt but this film has one of my all-time favourite dumb bad movie dialogue exchanges, where a scientist is explaining the concept of wormholes to another scientist

Actual scientist: Now, think about it. What's a circle in three dimensions?

Other actual scientist: 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
...a sphere!

Nolan's tendency to have a character in every scene be a stand-in for the audience reeeeally doesn't work well when everyone in the scene is supposed to be smart

http://blackhistorynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2258401040_4aa50f9ff7-199x300.jpg

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

a bruce willis movie, mayhap?

Harry Potter 3?

"the sixth sense"?

thinking specifically of some kinda time travel bit, i think. it was me all along oh god nooooooooo

12 Monkeys

Looper

lol wait what if all Bruce Willis movies are actually this movie but better

12 Monkeys is almost certainly what i'm thinking of - thank you.

Was hoping you meant Angel Heart.

Meanwhile I want to know what very promising, nearly-human-ready planets the other twelve sucker astronauts ended up on, or how bad the data had to count as a "no" for these guys when time-bending gravity planets covered in tidal waves get a thumbs up. Are the other planets made out of snakes? Quicksand? Vampires? "Look... Coop. I know. A planet where if you land there your hands and feet turn inside out and air turns to acid inside your lungs isn't anybody's first choice. But this could be our last shot at Plan A, and that's a little more important than any of us getting home to our loved ones, such as Murph."

least of the movie's problems

also i love how Hunger Games guy is in the movie exactly long enough to be the asshole who puts his foot down about going to the gravity planet, and then as soon as they get there he dies. he serves no other function in the film; there's a lot of drama wrung out of him docking two spaceships together, but later it turns out this isn't so hard, because mcconaughey does it under much more extreme conditions and seems confident that should he fail, it's something the robots can do just fine. maybe they should have had the robots do other stuff too, like go check out the fucking death planets. the only person who makes any argument for why they're gathering the most basic first information through staffed missions, rather than sending the rectangle robots or even space probes on fly-bys, is the crazy marooned guy. seems pretty clear nobody at NASA knows wtf they're doing but i guess that at least is consistent with the rightist worldview nolan has laid on the table elsewhere.

someone handed the Nolans a list of cool science ideas and they just had a family drama where they drop the concepts in one at a time, with the characters kind of mumbling halfhearted justifications to justify each being incorporated in the plot

yeah, i love that the press around the time this came out leaned so heavily on kip thorne being involved as a consultant in the science of the movie - which is cool, the guy played a key role in the incredible first detection of gravitational waves and anything that gets more scientists in the media is a good thing imo - but what nolan would have benefited from more is someone telling him 'uh chris this is not how humans work, just fyi'

this feels like his stephen king-style 'too big to fail' moment, i think - making billions for warners with the batman movies gave him carte blanche to write whatever he liked and no-one involved in the production had the clout to edit him

You remind me of a podcast I listened to sometimes, where one of the hosts was physicist Brian Cox, and the other host regularly laughed at him for being the scientific advisor on Sunshine, 'a film about rebooting the Sun with a big bomb'.

(For the record, I actually liked Sunshine--for all its flaws, it was VERY good on the simultaneous beauty and lethality of space--a hell of a lot more than Interstellar)

it had a lot of interesting setup and then turned into Event Horizon

but not as ott, to its loss

i'll happily take a comparison to robin ince! xp

sunshine will forever live in my memory as a cinema experience for creating a super-cool persistence-of-vision trick where a the image of a sudden blast of white light with a silhouette in the centre of the frame lingered on my retinas into the next shot

Is there not a Sunshine thread? no search on Zing

with typical ilx flair, we have What's the best way to discourage people from going to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine?

this came up at drinks tonight and i realized i am still pissed off about that stupid gravity planet

it sucked you in

and brought you down

it felt like it went on forever

this was nice

makes u think

well, we're plowing through movies during the pandemic, so....

maybe the best example of the nolan thing where if you tell me the macro executive summary idea of the movie i'd say yeah, sure, i'm all in. but then i hate almost every individual choice he makes along the way. this movie takes place in 2060something but everyone is driving well-maintained c. 2004 dodge trucks? the only crop is corn but someone is served a regular-ass sandwich at one point?

nolan's arrogance is basically that he thinks he knows how to make some things important while minimizing other things in a way that he thinks the audience will never notice. that's how you make a move that makes it seem like the dylan thomas poem is some sort of undiscovered masterpiece while presenting a future earth that doesn't make any sense at all if you think about it for 30 seconds.

the slab robots were cool. there were some good exterior space shots. the rest of it was nonsense.

My wife calls this film Matthew McConaughey in the Closet.

Nolan definitely coasts a lot on elliptical but not quite fully explored Big Ideas disguised by high concepts or time jumps or that sort of thing at the expense of coherence. At the time I did like this movie, but I haven't seen it since opening weekend. I did (completely coincidentally) watch the first 10 or so minutes of Inception with my daughter last night (it was a punchline in an episode of Community we'd just watched, and she said it was a punchline in The Office, too) and I can tell the po-faced hand waving (and furrowed-brow DiCaprio thinking so hard) is going to be a problem when I try to explain what's going on.

Murph!!!!!

I thought the overbearing music was used to give the dialogue an unearned emotional depth. I think if there was a cut of this movie with no music it would be even clearer how comically bad much of the dialogue really is.

McConaughey is more orange than Trump

orange man sad

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

I watched Interstellar last night and had the exact same reaction!
I also came up with Cypher but that's not quite the same. Maybe Timecrimes

Anyway I actually enjoyed this loads, despite the frustrating bits and dumb things. I think mainly because of the robots.
Is there any Nolan film that doesn't basically have the theme "Ahh, but you did it to yourself"?

"Ahh, but you did it to yourself"? is how you feel if you pay for a ticket to one of his movies

I watched this on a plane recently and honestly, what a weird mishmash of a film? I stg I groaned audibly at the ending where it turns out the secret of gravity is love (or some shit). Enjoyed Matt Damon being obviously evil, the whole thing is an occasionally interesting mess and visually stunning ofc but it did kill three hours

And yes. Everyone living on the upside down planet at the end is a load of shit

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

I watched Interstellar last night and had the exact same reaction!
I also came up with Cypher but that's not quite the same. Maybe Timecrimes

Triangle

This is exactly the plot of The Others tbh

Although why I'm putting spoiler tags in for a 20 year old film I don't know.

I watched Voices today and it has this as the plot twist at the end too except it's the wife who has been seeing the ghosts all the way through, and David Hemmings is adamant it's her mental state (having had EST and attempting suicide after the death of their son). Although it's him that realises they're dead first.

Very much a TV vibe in the way it's shot too.

plus, if it really was 7 years for every hour, the data would effectively only be a couple hours old at that point. you'd think they would know that and maybe not risk everything to save it

classic Fred B post:

Frederik B
Posted: 2 December 2014 at 22:32:16

I was surprised by how much I liked this, and it reminded me why I like The Prestige and The Dark Knight and The Following so much. I really like Nolan, and I wish all mainstream directors were like him.

lol wins

scientist: now think. what's a circle in three dimensions?
engineer: (thinks for a few seconds) ...a sphere!

i had to reread the plot on Wikipedia to sort this out, but: Hathaway and McConaughey suffered all the same time dilations. the first big one is when they both go to the stupid water planet, after which the daughter is adult Jessica Chastain. the second one happens I THINK because they slingshot around the black hole, which brings daughter up to death's door.

at this point McC heads into the black hole and Hathaway heads for her old flame's planet. he spends a while transmitting messages back in time to Chastain-Daughter, enabling her to start shipping humanity off Earth en masse. they spend decades building space stations before reaching the point in time where McC and Hathaway are. McC then teleports himself in space (not time) to be picked up by the space station folks, have an underwhelming chitchat with dying daughter, and then head out to meet Hathaway, who has just been setting up shop. i'm not sure why the space station people haven't sent any other missions through the wormhole and beaten her there, but that's the gist of it, I THINK.

I'm out of touch. Is Christopher Nolan "Nolan" or "Christopher Nolan" nowadays? During his heyday I lost touch with pop culture so I've always thought of him as Christopher Nolan, director of Memento and The Prestige. But then he was Nolan, genius director of The Dark Knight and Interstellar. And then he did Dunkirk and we weren't supposed to like him any more.

Looking back at his filmography I have the impression that he was Nolan from 2008-2015 or so, but Christopher Nolan outside that period. He wasn't dominant enough beforehand to be Nolan and now he's something of a fallen star. Like Peter Bogdanovich but with a shallower drop-off.

Is Nolan Nolan or not Nolan? Is there a consensus?

okay, yeah. i thought that the big time zoom between chastain-murph and deathbed-murph was because of big mac going through the black hole but you must be right.

dr c i loved reading your thoughts on the deranged, rushed logic of which planets they looked at first, the lack of any preparation or even curiosity about them before just careening recklessly into their surfaces. weird behaviour from people trained to save the human race.

xpost: idk

This film lost me at solar powered jet drones flying for decades or whatever it was.

there were so many lines like this:

GETTY
They just pack up and leave. What are they hoping to find?

MURPH
Survival.

I just had to google what topher grace’s name was in this, obviously I had no idea.

aww glad to have spread some joy through my annoyance. in hindsight the visuals of this movie really were something, but all the plot developments were like the traps in Home Alone, with Nolan as the kid: he's set them up so those burglars are just gonna have to be stupid enough to walk into all of them.

Only saw this movie once, in the theater. It was gorgeous but kinda ridiculous in a way that Nolan movies typically aren’t quite. Heck, I’ve seen Tenet more than this - somehow I have more fun with that movie.

Finally seen this. What a chore. Dr C otm if course.

Can anyone explain why the super advanced beings we become who can build wormholes and five dimensional tesseracts inside black holes, think the best way to save humanity is to set up this insane lengthy and perilous heath robinson contraption ending with matthew mconnaughey transmitting critical data in morse code to a wristwatch decades in the past? Why couldn't they transmit them directly themselves? Or come and tell us? Or give us a lift directly to a lovely new planet? Or fix ours?

the simple answer is because Nolan is a worthless talentless moron, A very British enterprise

Not gonna repost for what must be the 8th time itt but this film has my all time favourite dumb guy’s smart guy exchange in cinema

lol yes, enjoyed your multiple posts on that when reading the thread.

i'm not totally anti nolan - tenet and the prestige are fun. dunk is erm effective. insomnia probably ok, curious if memento would hold up. no interest in the batmen any more, opp is basic, inception is bad. following is the only one I haven't seen!

This is very good “second screen entertainment” - dumb and pretty enough to spare a glance while doing a crossword puzzle or filling out tax forms.

“Oh shit I owe $2500 fuck” “lol why does McConaughey look like he’s crying and taking a painful shit at the same time?”

i'm not totally anti nolan - tenet and the prestige are fun. dunk is erm effective. insomnia probably ok, curious if memento would hold up. no interest in the batmen any more, opp is basic, inception is bad. following is the only one I haven't seen!

― ledge, 31 October 2025 22:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a flawless run through imo, and imo inception does hold up and key to that is it really all does hinge on the technical aha but the performances etc rely on it perfectly

the best thing nolan has an involvement after that is yermans sketch about the elephant

ito gifted "directors" (imo their gifts probably best deployed as not being the director nor final decision maker on anything) who have found their way to total discretion in what they do, nolan and mcdonagh are an interesting study and contrast the problem is that in order to partake or to get anything from that id need to watch the films they have made since they got successful enough to ruin their own promise with their own limits

Started rewatching last night (we have an hour or so left, which we’ll get to tonight). I’ m responding to it a lot more positively this time, my second time with it - and I don’t know why. Maybe age and time.