Not sure this is the proper way to review a movie, but it’s what felt more natural, as a first approximation.
What i liked :
- i really liked the movie. I like more after watching it a second time. But i really liked the movie, i found it very very beautiful visually, very ambitious and audacious in what it tried to do, despite failing to achieve the place it had hoped for in the history of cinematic science fiction. More on that later.
- the first hour and half of the movie is simply fantastic, despite its shortcomings. Its a great science fiction movie. and better yet, a great science movie. I LOVE the theme of we need to do science discovery for the sake of discovery. “that we should be looking at the skies not at our feet in the dirt”. Carl Sagan would’ve been proud. Waht a great message.
- i really like the mcconaghy character in this first half of the movie. the relationship with his daughter. the wonderful scientific education he gives her in every aspect. ESPECIALLY because she’s his daughter and not his son. I could just keep going on about this relationship in the movie. I wish it was explored more. Just wonderful stuff.
i especially loved the sequence when he’s leaving, and we have taht music building up to the overlap of his leaving, his takeoff and her running after him. - Cliche as it may sound i love how all his space shots are soundless. even with the massive music blaring. Great hommage to 2001 in the whole space sequences in the first half, with the classic docking, spinning artifical gravity etc. its great that he showed it i think. the various points of view also that he adopts in this whole part upto and leadign to saturn are just great.
- I love how he doesnt try and explain the blight, and just states it exists without more detail. In fact i love how he doesnt in any way try and explain waht has happened to humainty other than …no food…barely any governments…most people dead
- I think my two favourite moments of the film are two of the most HUMAN moments of the film, and both are a result of physicsy phenomena. The first is when Romelly is kind of freaking out about being seperate from the infinite vastness of the void of space by the aluminium walls, and cooper gives him the headset with earth sounds, and we cut to the miniscule spaceship floating by a beautiful saturn.
I was on the verge of tears both times as it reminded me again of Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot passage. - The other favourite moment, obviously, is coming back from the first planet, and having zoomed ahead 23 years. The scene of Romelly anouncing “its been 23 years”, and the way that hits you as you try and comprehend waht it means, and then followed by watchign the past 23 years of the lives of his children. Just, so powerful. and beautiful. very artfully done.
- The wormhole sequence is fantastic. even if it did have to pass by the obligatory folding paper to connect two parts of the sheet routine for Nth time in cinema history.
- the botched docking sequence by the matt damon character. Very beautifully done (even if totally unnecessary – to be discussed in next part)
in fact there’s a part of that sequence i just foudn mesmerizing. The ship has alligned with the station, but because the protocol can’t be activated…the hooks keep tryign to lock on but they can’t. That put together with the hipnotizing music, for some reason, i found fantastically beautiful. like some kind of a crazy 80’s music video thing! i dont know why. but i really really like that. - i’m NOT a hans zimmer fan, at all, but i really liked this score! it gave the movie …space. it almost created a huge voluminous physical space for what was beign seen on the screen, becuase of its organcentric strucutre it felt like evcerythign was playing out in some sort of a vast cosmic cathedral.
- I really liked the tesseract sequence. I thought they did a fantastic job of tryign to visualize something that’s almost impossible to visualize. and to their credit they did not even try and explain why it’s a tesseract…or waht it is….or how he’s now got free reign to move around in the time dimension as well as the space one….Good job on that nolan (even though i think that alienated a lot of the non-physixy crowd).
and…great visualization of the worldline of th watch! i really really like that too.
What I didn’t like:
- that sinking feeling in my stomach the instant the Anne Hathaway uttered the word LOVE in the second part of the movie. At that moment, somethign just died inside of me. Here we had one of the most fantastic science fiction movies since 2001, and then suddenly with that one sequence, everything….gone! Gone! I really had a physical reaction of revulsion as that scene played out.
- Like most Nolan movies, the characters are more archetypes than actual characters, and worse yet, they are mostly there to serve some sort of a literary/cinematic purpose, so it is VERY hard to sympathise with them or have any sort of an emotional investment in them. The exception being – of course – cooper and his daughter. And quite possibly Romelly. (not to mention the robots). Either of the doctor brands, couldnt care less about them. Grown up Murph, meh. Cooper’s son…now there’s some depth, but not explored enough. nor necessary to do so. Matt Damon…….dont get me started!
- THE WHOLE MATT DAMON SEQUENCE. What the fuck man? you could’ve cut that whloe 45 minutes out and you’d have lost NOTHING! And really? doctor Mann? seriously Nolan? talk about subtle like an erection in spandex. NOTHIGN in that sequence makes sense to me. from dr. mann, to everybody believing his dumbass story, to the fucking frozen clouds, to …..arrrrgghhh. i’m getting angry just thinking about that sequence.
- Doyle dying on the water planet makes NO FREAKING SENSE. for the entire sequence he’s standing next to the fucking door, and then he dies becuase he doesnt get in? say what now? why? he did NOTHIGN to help get the others in by standing outside, and then he dies. huh?? If you say so Nolan.
- I cant help but feel let down by the whole final escaping from the blackhole’s event horizon sequence. There are a lot of things which just dotn match all the beatuiful stuff from before. First of all this is supposed to be a GARGANTUAN blackhole…yet when they’re skimming the accretion disc..the thing looks oddly off scale compared to the size of the ship….and then…
the whole “newton’s 3rd law” thing where you have to leave somethign behind …blah blah blah…doesn’t make sense…so Cooper’s module gets released when he has no more propulsion…but his module is the last source of propulsion for Brand’s ship…so why is it that when cooper disengages his ship…it is the only one to fall back …but not the rest? Newton’s would’ve been really pissed at that i think. - Wouldnt they be totally fried from the radiation emanating from the stuff falling into the black hole at crazy speeds?
- Why the frack after having fought for half the film to stay with his daughter, EVEN IN A FRACKING BLACKHOLE NEXT TO A SINGULARITY, does cooper upon seeing his old daughter for …oh i dont know….all of two minutes…decide he’s going to now leave her and go and search for Anne Hathaway? huh? Yea that makes sense.
- and wouldnt Hathaway be like superold by now?
- and why does he have to STEAL A SHIP??? he’s a hero to humanity …i’m sure if he asks they can afford to just GIVE HIM ONE!
- He doesnt even go and try to find the grave of his son……Casey Affleck always gets the shaft.
- So you’re in a tesseract now…and can go anywhere in time, so you’re gonna stick around in that bookshelf? hmm…whatever…
- STAY? what? you’re telling your old self to stay? why? how does that make any sense?
- and now we get to another one of the really irritating physics stuff…..you’re going to send ‘quantum’ information about the singularity …BY MORSE FREAKING CODE??? huh?? that annoyed me to no end. Even sending it binary would’ve made more sense…ESPECIALLY IF ITS A COMPUTER/ROBOT doing the translating and transmitting. (and how the hell is he communication with TARS? but that’s ok, i’ll chalk all that inside the blackhole at the singularity stuff to artistic license, and it doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t mess with the internal logic of the movie).
- I dont get the whole these 5 dimensional being are us from the future. how can they be us from the future? if they can manipulate time and space why can they only save humanity by having cooper do this schtick? I think it’d have worked better if we didnt have to give an explanation like this….either nothing or something better.
- did i mention how much i thought the matt damon / dr. mann thing was unnecessary and aggravating?
- and finally…the whole Michael Caine…having ‘had the solution’ for twenty years..but lying…was lame. so we are to assume that he is the first person to realize that he could not reconcile QM and GR ? hmm…i guess in that case sending information about what happens at a singularity should be able to help find a solution….
What has become clear to me in discussing this movie with others, be it colleagues and/or students, is that we certainly don’t all apprehend movies in a similar way. With a movie like this (or Gravity for that matter), i was much less bother by its narrative shortcomings because of its scientific accuracy, and that’s not because i want to be a science snob, but rather because, these movies being as accurate as they were (compared to most typical Hollywood science drivel), they allowed me to experience something i think we’ve all thought and dreamed about and that is actually being in space, and being explorers, and experience the universe in all its crazy and unimaginably fantastic and inconceivable phenomena.
