Living up to a humungous expectation is a gnawing thought that good film directors are forced to contend with these days. It must be professionally satisfying for the director to see his movies being often revered as piece of art as opposed to three hours of popcorn chewing time. But this must be an awfully difficult piece of baggage to shed. And this is probably what Christopher Nolan, one of the most celebrated film makers of our generation, suffers from indeed. We have begun to associate his films with his customary pledge, turn and the prestige that we must partly take the blame for imposing towering expectations on him.
I found Interstellar to be an extremely good documentary on certain high school concepts that I was confused about – relativity for example. The twin paradox of one brother aging on earth whilst the other being fresh as an apple was quite convincingly demonstrated. But as a movie, Interstellar quite didn’t make the cut for me. Nolan probably spent so much time and effort trying to get the physics of the film right that he probably didn’t pay much attention to its core – the screenplay. The film moves at a laborious pace in the first half hour, so much so that you just want to shove the leading man into a rocket and thrust him into outer space. Things don’t move any faster later either, but of course, I don’t expect a half hearted space exploration to yield results soon. But what is disturbing is the lack of urgency in the proceedings. Consider this, our leading lady and man are literally to be stranded in space, with their spacecraft out of fuel and their only hope is of latching onto the spinning Endurance. What if they don’t make it? What if they have to be stranded in space for eternity? How thrilling is that prospect? Just thinking about this possibility raises goosebumps. Yet, the execution of this is as bland as ever. There is no sense of excitement. It’s almost as if we know that they will eventually latch on, only because if not, the movie ends there and that we know cannot happen. Remember that last scene in the dark knight, where we know the two ships are rigged? We know that they won’t die but isn’t the build up to that, nail biting? That’s what is missing here.
What is essentially a simple one line story of men in search of habitable land is needlessly complicated with over the top physics. But I guess that had to be the USP of the movie. We have seen far too many movies which deal with similar topics that a unique dimension (literally) had to be brought in. But after a little over two hours, that sudden burst of concepts towards the end which is meant to tie everything together, really didn’t work for me. Too little too late perhaps.
I was reminded of a similar movie a few years ago which covered the same premise but far more convincingly. The movie in question is of course , Wall-E. This movie was surely a little different in that the people back then, in the future (oxymoronic! yes 🙂 ) were trying to get back to Earth whereas Interstellar talked about moving away from it. But the underlying concept of searching for a habitable land remains the same. What Wall-E could achieve is the emotional connect with the characters. In spite of knowing that Wall-E and Eva were mere robots incapable of finer human emotions (though they did demonstrate that), I was left rooting for them. There was this genuine tear-in-the-eye moment at the end, when the human population returned to the Earth and took that first step onto the soil. But here, I find that moment missing. When Cooper wakes up from his deep slumber, we are shown the present world through his eyes. Everything seems green and prosperous, yet it failed to evoke a similar emotion in me. I’m supposed to be excited by the prospect of Cooper continuing his mission to now find Amelia, but given the lack of chemistry between them, I really don’t care for them anymore.
As I write this review, I know that I will be pounced upon by a certain segment of fans for failing to look beyond the nitty-gritty of the film and appreciate the effort of the director for packaging complicated physics in a mainstream movie. But honestly, if I need to learn about them, why can’t I watch a documentary on relativity on the Discovery Channel? Why must I endure three hours of unappealing drama only because the director dared to be “different”? To an average viewer like me, the one thing I expect from my movie, is to not be boring. And I’m afraid, Interstellar is very much boring! There, I said it!!
The Manga Pachadi 