Big Hero 6 & Interstellar: A Double Feature Review Part 1

This week I check out Christopher Nolan's latest film, the science fiction epic Interstellar, and I check out Disney's latest animated adventure Big Hero 6. 

Interstellar

D: Christopher Nolan

W: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

S: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn

The extremely popular director Christopher Nolan has decided that for his next motion picture to go out into the final frontier, SPACE. In the not to distance future (next Sunday, A.D.) the Earth has basically entered another dust bowl era as the environment makes it harder for people to harvest food and to live on in general. With the danger of extinction staring them in the face, a group of explorers go out beyond our solar system to find a new place for mankind to call home. Will they find it? Will they be able to return home and save the human race?

Now my history with Nolan has been a complicated one. While many find the man bold, innovative, and totally awesome, I have found just okay. Now that's not to say I think he's a "bad" director because he isn't. From a technical aspect he is great. He has a great visual style, he can direct an excellent action scene, and there are great themes of lies, deception, and responsibilities in his films. Of course one can't forget the some of excellent performances he can get in his films, the cliched example being Heath Ledger's creepy performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight. But my problems with him come with his execution of the movie. I feel like his dialogue, while funny and good from time to time, can be forced and almost unnatural. The plotting sometimes can have more holes than Bonnie & Clyde's death car. Then there are times when serious moments come off as rather silly, again the cliched example being Christian Bale's grizzly bear voice in Dark Knight films.

But what about this film? How does Interstellar hold up in my book? Well, from all of his stuff I've seen of his (the stuff he's directed I mean) this is his weakest, at the same level as Dark Knight Rises in my book. 

One of the big problems for me, outside of the extreme length, was that this movie was trying to be a hard science fiction film but then falls into what is called "science fantasy".

Now, this isn't a problem, many films/books/tv shows are technically science fantasy. Star Wars, Doctor Who, the books of Jules Verne, a good chunk of comic books stuff. But with Interstellar it's obvious that Nolan and company wanted to make this a completely serious sci-fi film, along the lines of  2001: A Space Odyssey (a film which Nolan got a lot of influence from),  War of the Worlds, Gravity, and even the Planet of the Apes films. Either one is fine but if you're going to do one make sure you stick to your guns. 

To get a better idea of these concepts check of Nash Bozard of Radio Dead Air's article which tackles the same subject: The Kid’s Table of Sci-Fi

This film starts out fine, it seems like something like this could happen, but as the film progress it then starts to going lop sided. Non-Spoiler Example: When the ship takes off from Earth when see what it take to just get a ship into orbit, something that's not too far off from how it's done in real life. But then every other time the ship takes off it becomes the Millennium Falcon and just blasts off. Now that's not the worst of it, without revealing too much it then starts to go into 'power of love' level type of stuff. You know the kind of stuff that made say to myself, "Really?!" Also they have, and I'm not kidding, a talking robot who has a humor chip installed. So yes, the have a sassy robot sidekick. Sadly he does not say, "bite my shiny metal ass." So it makes it hard to take this as serious or "adult".

 So, okay, the film wants to be more emotional based instead of science based, okay there's nothing wrong with that. I mean that's the whole concept of The Force in Star Wars, so why not? The problem is that the emotions come off as forced, to me at least. A good chunk of the emotional scenes come from the main character, the ship's pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), and his family. For the most part it's fine if not a little cliched, but then later on when Cooper is in space and after an small exploration of a planet a lot of time has passed as indicated through video messages from his now older son, Tom (Casey Affleck), and one of the crew members (David Gyasi) telling them it has been 23 years. As soon as the messages start playing we see Cooper bawling his eyes out. I have no doubt that a mission like this and getting a message from your now older child would be upsetting, especially since he hasn't been there to see him get married and have a child. But it's just so sudden to the point it comes off like "THIS IS EMOTIONAL! THIS IS A VERY EMOTIONAL MOMENT!" For me Cooper should have seen the messages without being told how much time has passed then slowly he loses control of his emotions. Then come moments that just get bogged down in Nolan's overly expository dialogue such as the ending but I don't want to spoil too much. 

Then comes some storytelling aspects. One of the biggest problems for me is that Nolan tries to put a lot of his usual themes of lies in it when it doesn't make sense. SPOILER WARNING. At one point the teams land on a planet where an explorer from a previous expedition is found, Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) betrays our heroes who have decided to return home instead of continuing the mission. It doesn't work for me because his plot line doesn't add to much the film. Then there's another one involving Michael Caine's character that to me doesn't make any sense. I'll hold off on the reveal for that one.

Now I've been doing a lot of criticizing, but there are still some good stuff in the film. First, some of the performances. Nolan always has an amazing cast in his films.  Not only does he get a lot of popular actors of today he also gets actors who sadly haven't been as mainstream popular as they should be in my book. One performance I enjoyed came from the awesome and underrated John Lithgow as Murph's grandfather. But the best is a three way tie between Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn who all respectively play Murph at different parts of her life. 

As I stated earlier Nolan knows how to film a movie. The cinematography and imagery in the film is dazzling and worth a view just on its own. 

So in the end did I personally enjoy it? Not really, I thought this could have been a lot better. But I'm sure if you're a big time fan of Nolan's work then you'll dig the hell out of this film. I'm sure I'm not going to be able to persuade you. 

Since this review went a little longer than I thought I'll make a separate post for my Big Hero 6 review. 

Feel free to share your thoughts in comments, share the review, and like the blog on Facebook.

Also, if you disagree with me please give me more than "you're just a hater" or "you just didn't get it" or just straight up insults. I've seen that comment come up one too many times in negative reviews of Nolan films.