**Warning: spoilers below.**
I left Interstellar feeling disappointed and suffering from a pounding headache. Three hours of intense concentration was enough to fry my brain a little. That's not to say that Interstellar is a bad movie. It's not; I liked it enough. The thing is, I was expecting to love it, to have my mind blown by the wonder that is Christopher Nolan. But for me Interstellar was lacking the brilliance of Inception. For me, something just wasn't quite right.
Of course there was greatness to Interstellar - McConaughey was on form, the other-planet settings were spectacular, the space visuals were phenomenal, the emotional pull of a father-daughter love was heart-wrenching. But the film was let down by cringe-worthy exposition dialogue and Hathaway's corny 'love-is-the-answer' monologue, Hans Zimmer's blaring music drowned out whole patches of dialogue, and then the third act stumbled into ludicrous black-hole action that was hard to follow and in doing so created a time paradox that didn't make sense.
I wanted to fall in love with Interstellar, but I couldn't quite get there. The first two acts captivated me with all the space travel and I definitely enjoyed Nolan's meditation on the human condition and our ability to fight for the survival of our race at all costs. But the bizarreness of the third act hurt my head and undid all the good that went before it. I was left so confused that I came straight home afterwards and read a lot of helpful explanations online until, finally, I was able to get my head around the science stuff that frustrated me during the screening.
Of course there was greatness to Interstellar - McConaughey was on form, the other-planet settings were spectacular, the space visuals were phenomenal, the emotional pull of a father-daughter love was heart-wrenching. But the film was let down by cringe-worthy exposition dialogue and Hathaway's corny 'love-is-the-answer' monologue, Hans Zimmer's blaring music drowned out whole patches of dialogue, and then the third act stumbled into ludicrous black-hole action that was hard to follow and in doing so created a time paradox that didn't make sense.
I wanted to fall in love with Interstellar, but I couldn't quite get there. The first two acts captivated me with all the space travel and I definitely enjoyed Nolan's meditation on the human condition and our ability to fight for the survival of our race at all costs. But the bizarreness of the third act hurt my head and undid all the good that went before it. I was left so confused that I came straight home afterwards and read a lot of helpful explanations online until, finally, I was able to get my head around the science stuff that frustrated me during the screening.
Interstellar is the kind of movie you need to see more than once so I'm hoping on a second (and third) viewing I'll find the elusive brilliance in the final act that I couldn't grab hold of this first time. Nolan's masterpiece came up short for me, but I know other people who absolutely adored the film. I guess I'm just not enough of a science-fiction geek to fully 'get' the intricacies of Interstellar first time around. So back I'll go to the cinema to sit through another three hours of mind-bending Nolan magic.
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