Interstellar
Ilia Bykow
Imagine yourself trapped in a steel container hurtling at high speed through the three dimensions of space. Outside is a cold and ultra-dark void permeated only by an occasional display of bright, majestic, piercing and swirling blobs light and sparks. Inside the electric lights will intermittently go out, only to come back some seconds later without explanation. Everything around you rattles as scary jarring, grinding, beeping, whizzing warning noises blare out of both instruments and from the structure of the craft itself.
Now, you might be thinking that I’ve just described a typical daily commute on the New York city subway, but that’s not it at all. Instead, what I’ve actually just described for you is the visually stunning worm-hole scene from Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar.
Three parts of the movie stood out. The visuals, the music and the dialog. I would rate the visuals as being 90% spectacular, the music a solid 98% and the dialog a dismal 4%.
Visuals
The problem with the visuals was a single thing which appeared fairly early on in the film and therefore marred the rest of the experience. It was the closeup image of Saturn. In this film, we were supposedly traveling near that giant gas planet. That is to say, we were supposed to be made to feel as though we were actually there, but what it actually looked like was just a great still shot of the famous object, perhaps taken from some website about space. In fact, I bet you that it was. What gave it away was the fact that, despite the atmosphere of Saturn being its primary or, dare I say, only constituent, nothing seemed to move on the surface. Those are clouds for crying out loud! They’re supposed to move, at varying speed perhaps, but move none the less around the planet in some way. It’s like taking us on a “fly past” of Jupiter and showing us a Great Red Spot that’s standing still instead of twirling round and burling with great force that way it actually does in real life.
Music
The music was outstanding. It was the most epic thing - mixed in with just the right amount of poignancy - that I’ve seen in a while. I’m sure that there may have been some way to make it even better, but I don’t see what that would be like. In fact, I pretty much only gave it 98% because it was periodically pierced by the thing that brought this movie down - the dialog.
Dia-what?
If I could not speak or understand any English, then this would have been perhaps my favorite film of all. It may have beaten out Heat, or La Dolce Vita for that top spot. Alas, it was not to be. And to think that all they had to do was mute the dialog. Yes, even if they let the actors continue to move their lips, but just keep the voice out it would have made a world of difference. At least that way they would create a sense of mystery. Everyone would want to know what they were saying. Instead, they words left everyone with a bad, bad taste in our mouths. It harkens to an old adage about remaining silent and being considered dumb instead of speaking and removing all doubt. Interstellar made great effort to have that doubt removed.
Here are some examples of bad writing in the movie, albeit not all direct quotes. Afteral, it wasn’t the pronunciation of the words, or the sentence grammar that made this script so bad.
Follow your heart
There’s the scene where the crew is deciding which planet to visit next. All of a sudden a conflict of interest is revealed. Oh, you had a boyfriend on that other planet? Really? And, so now you want to risk everything to follow your heart? That’s great. That’s really great. Yeah, let’s all just forget how to think for a moment, and engage in this pointless exercise. In terms of the film as a production, let’s rehash this tired cliche of love winning the day, or is it really love? Oh how so very deep of them to make me question all of that. No wait. It’s not. It’s boring. Let’s move on.
And to think she had the nerve to then go and guilt him afterwards with, and I’m paraphrasing here, this fantastic piece of dialog:
“if you’re wrong, you’ll have to make more hard choices later,” (condensed for brevity).
Now to me that sounded a lot like, “if you’re wrong it’ll be all your fault and I’m going to shove it in your face.” Which begs the question of whether she knew something that the others didn’t? Had she maybe, somehow broken that fourth wall and looked into the script? Well, come to think of it, for a movie which has characters traveling through the fifth dimension, a fourth wall break may not be such a stretch.
Let me explain the science
There is the scene around the wormhole part where that one crew member suddenly decides to “explain” the science to the other. Yep, because the other guy has never heard of relativity, or worm-holes, black holes, or any of the other things that somebody, who is supposedly some kind of space engineer, would know. In that scene the crew member actually uses his fist as part of an example, and then outdoes himself by drawing the guy a picture of how wormholes actually work. Yes, you heard me correctly, one scientist draws another scientist a rudimentary picture and pokes a hole in it. See? It’s round? And what do round things look like in three dimensions? Spheres! Yay! You get a prize!
Seriously though, if they wanted to explain it to us, why not just have an intermission or something. Anything would be better than discrediting your own characters! You know we were there watching right? Are you sure you had look through that scene before you shot it right?
I could go on. I could give more examples of just how bad that dialog was, but I will spare you.
And if I heard you say, “but please, you did have faith that it would work,” I would reply, “dear god, give me a break.”
The End
In summary, the film is like the beautiful, and delicious vanilla ice-cream of music and visual imagery sprinkled with some dialog of rat poop meant to pass as chocolate. Because, no matter how much you try to delude yourself otherwise, a few good chews through that small and crunchy poop will convince you that the entire desert is ruined and should be consumed without the sprinkles from the start.
