Had a chance to watch Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster film: "Interstellar" during the opening day in Singapore threatres on 6th NOV last week.
And I have to say. Mind blown. I am just mind blown after watching it.
Spoilers Alert!
Firstly, it touches on love, kinship, relationships and these alone are already tearjerkers.
To show the bond between the family within a short span of time is not easy. I feel that the impact it has on audiences is much greater than "Inception". I left the cinema feeling stunned, loss of words, and felt pity for the main character!
How can anyone not be crying?
The main character Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey ) missed out on the prime years of his children's lives! It is heart wrenching to just think about it.
Secondly, space, universe, galaxy, time relativity. They are soooooo profound and a lot of research has to be done before you can wow the intelligent audience. Unlike the dream within a dream within a dream from Inception which can be totally fictitious (ok, a lot of thinking had to go into that), this had to be done properly in order not to receive backlash from nasa enthusiasts. Although I think it has quite a few loopholes that scientists probably would wanna bash them about but hey, it was already very well done.
This post is not gonna explain to you how the wormhole and the galaxy works, but there are numerous articles talking about it already. Here's one awesome explanation my friend sent to me:
Major spoilers here (I am gonna assume you all know the story already and I am skipping to the end):
The whole concept about Cooper falling into the "extra-dimensional "tesseract" where time appears as a spatial dimension and portals lead to Murphy's childhood bedroom at various times" is profound and I had to mull over it for a few days before I understood. (ok not really a few days, but you get the drift)
Thirdly, to make space travel real yet entertaining to audiences is so difficult to juggle. On one hand you want to be realistic and show that space is actually just a boring empty silent space but on the other hand, you don't want to bore the audience with too much real stuff, yet not make things as fake as Star Wars. (think flashing light sabres and over-the-top sounds effects) The wormhole alone is mind blowing already.
Don't understand the part about the equation and how the space shuttle at the end of the film came about? Time relativity was the key. I think
Wikipedia did a good job explaining most of the plot so you can just get the info from there. The powerful thing about Christopher Nolan's films is that they spark debate. And people would still talk about and discuss the films many weeks and months later on. Some lighthearted and seemingly "satire" post explains about the whole plot of the film
here.
But, best of all was that it had a clear ending.
There should be a trilogy. So that the film can develop the characters more, and educate the audience more about how the galaxy works and stuffs. But I figured that it would be too much for the normal audience to bear since these type of sci-fi movie ain't very popular. These type of films is just not suitable for trilogies. Just think of the other movie, "Gravity".
The movie sequence didn't quite cut it though. There were simply too much details to put into a 169min movie and it was simply going too slow at some point, but too fast at some other. There also weren't time for the other characters to develop. Technical jargons regarding the galaxy and time relativity were also huge topics that the audience needed time to digest. By the end of 169min, I was just mind blown yet mentally drained as well.
However, lucky the movie has great actors to prop it up. The child actor nailed it. Matthew was awesome as usual. At least there were redeeming factors to make up for the loss in the flow of the movie.
Overall heavy movie, but it was still enjoyable, evokes emotions, and gets quite exciting at times. The special effects and how the galaxy was portrayed were also beautiful. I would dare say it was one of the better movies this year.
What say you?
