It was shrewd of the makers of Interstellar to spot the market for a version of 2001: A Space Odyssey tailored for dumber people. Im making fun of Interstellar, but I know from my conversations with people who find 2001 boring or confusing that there really is a need for a version of that movie that has the cool space travel stuff, only with added scenes of characters explaining the science to one another for the benefit of the audience, speechifying about the themes of the film for anybody who might be confused about them, and explicating about how love is the answer to all the questions about whats going on that might still remain for people. The relatively realistic- or realistic based on the best assumptions available to us- portrayals of things like wormholes and black holes is very entertaining to see on a big Imax screen. Unfortunately (SPOILERS) that cool stuff totals around 10 minutes of screen time. The rest of the movie is labored drama with broad characters trying to hammer home messages about human nature in the style of the scene in Dark Knight with the two boats having detonators for each others bombs. And it is cool to see a movie make an effort to portray those things correctly, but all the talk about how cerebral this film is is kind of depressing since all the science you need to follow it would be more than explained in a short Wikipedia article about the theory of relativity. If you still didnt understand that when the gravity goes up time slows down, then the characters will explain it to you. Still fuzzy after they explain it to you once? Dont worry, theyll explain it nine or ten more times. While the outside of the black hole is very cool, once they get inside- in a perfect metaphor for how the cool stuff of the film is spread superficially over the preponderance of lame stuff- all Christopher Nolan can come up with for his portrayal of humanity achieving transcendence is a very very trite little Screen Writing 101 payoff to a first act mystery that is satisfying in the way its supposed to be satisfying in an action movie when a character says a joke another character said earlier, capped with our second or third speech about how love is the answer to all that stuff that you were wondering about. Speaking of love, I know Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out that he was impressed that there were female scientists in the movie... Well, out of the two that have any real screen time, one spends 30 years of her life crying over her Daddy issues because shes so mad that he left her- even though he had the pretty decent excuse that he was trying to save the human race- and the other almost derails the whole mission because she wants to ignore the data they have and go to the planet where her man crashed rather than the planet which is more likely to provide a home for our species. The first time McConaughey sees her, he comments about her being pretty for a scientist, and when she tries sending them to the wrong planet, he has to calmly explain to her that she cant be trusted to analyze the data that they have, because her lady parts are distorting her judgement. The two female scientists also never have a scene together, and the movie would completely fail the Bechdel test.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:05:15 +0000