MYST #4: Interstellar

Being a pretty big fan of Christopher Nolan and his past works, I must say I had decently high expectations for this movie. A cast of Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Kane, among others, sounded promising. But all I got out of this movie was disappointment and confusion.

The plot of the movie is long and complicated, and to avoid spoilers I'm going to shorten

it down.

The film takes place in the distant future, in which the Earth is quickly running out of natural resources and the leading profession is farmer. The main character, Cooper, (played by McConaughey), is one such farmer who used to be a star NASA pilot, before it was supposedly shut down by the government. After his daughter begins experiencing what she believes to be ghostly occurrences in her room, he decided to check it out to find that whatever was the source was sending him a message: the coordinates to a top secret NASA base (after all not shut down), where Anne Hathaway and Michael Cane's characters tell him their plans to save the human race. They have found 3 planets, reachable only through a wormhole, that may be able to sustain life and must be visited immediately to find out. Of course, they ask Cooper to lead the mission and so he leaves his family and leaves Earth to do so. The next 2 and a half hours of the film progress through his journey and his findings on these 3 planets.

While the plot is quite interesting, it has many elements which simply don't fit or make sense. I can live with an unrealistic plot though, it is a movie after all. But the other aspects of the movie are what let me down. 

I'll start with the most obvious problem: the sound editing. Everyone who has seen the movie can tell you this--it's not even a matter of opinion anymore. There were multiple scenes, some of them vital to the plotline, in which you couldn't at all hear what the characters were trying to say because of how loud the music or background noise was. I would look around the theater during these scenes and literally everyone was turning their heads asking eachother what was going on. For a movie of a budget of $165 million, I'd expect at least the decency of an audible dialogue. 

Next on my list was the acting, and directing concerning the acting. Matthew McConaughey was great as always, I'll give him that, although he didn't seem to make the character really stand

Matthew McConaughey (above) pictured
with the bright lights reflecting
off of his visor--very reminiscent, perhaps
an homage to, Kubrick's
use of this detail in
2001: A Space Odyssey
(below)

out from his usual roles--it just felt like Matthew McConaughey. Michael Kane was also superb in this role, as usual, and Matt Damon's random unadvertised role was also a pleasantly interesting surprise. But this movie will always be remembered in my mind as the movie that made me hate Anne Hathaway. Her acting was two dimensional and cliché, exactly what you'd expect from a sappy, dramatic female character. Then someone pointed out to me something very true about Hathaway's acting--every role she does is the same. She doesn't make the character unique, she just plays herself. Which is why Catwoman can feel so much like Fontaine from Les Mis. 

The character of Murph, Cooper's daughter, was played by two different actors because some amount of time passes throughout the movie. The old Murph was played by Jessica Chastain, and I must admit she won me over as an actress with this. The young actress who played Murph as a child, however, (Mackenzie Foy), was just awful. I couldn't handle watching her. Her acting was so plain and cliché, playing out just the strange little girl who's distressed over her father leaving--completely predictable and boring. These flaws in acting may also be partly the director's fault for organizing the actors this way. I don't think the script is to blame, as the dialogue was decent enough to be brought to life much better than it was. Honestly the most enjoyed performance here for me was Topher Grace's tiny ten-minute-screentime cameo. 

As for the directing, it felt like this movie was just trying so hard to be a big blockbuster hit that everyone felt super amazed and moved by, coming out conveniently in oscar season. It was overdramatic and threw in too many mind-blowing twists. It was simply overdone, too much of the Hollywood formula that so many of us are so sick of (although the crazy physics included were pretty interesting).

Overall, this movie was a big disappointment. I will give it one major applaud--the cinematography, done by Dutch Hoyte Von Hoytema, who did the beautiful cinematography of the 2014 film "Her" as well, was absolutely incredible. He really took advantage of the film taking place in space and created some amazing extreme long shots juxtaposing how very small the spaceship was, representative of humanity, in comparison to the rest of the vast universe. 

The score was also beautiful, done by one of my favorites Hans Zimmer. It was perfectly simple and moving, and worked very well with the movie. 

I'd give this movie a depressing 6/10