Haven't seen it. If it sucks, then it solidifies that Christopher Nolan is overrated, if it's good then I ended up watching a good movie.

win/win

seen it, did not like it very much. It felt like 5 star trek episodes clumsily stitched into one.

it has some great visuals: yes
it has some good ideas / moments: yes

overall : not memorable

i would rather watch john wick

whoa
free my mind

I watched John Wick. I recommend it.

i liked it very much tbh.
not everything is logical or makes sense really .. but the visuals and ideas (as butcher mentioned) are great i think.
if you like space, watch it!

The visuals in space and on planets were great but there just wasn't enough of them. It needed more of the space shots and less of the cabin shots.

Watched a review and they said the last 10 mins should have been cut and I couldn't agree more.

Soppy underdeveloped characters and shitty script were great too.

im with you on that point with the visuals. but. the movie/story wanted something else.

great sci-fi genre flick. it has all the ingredients/cliches you would expect from the genre, the story and characters are engaging, and the execution is masterful. it shows you stuff that no similar movie before it has shown to the same degree. it's not a super high-brow, deep movie and it has its weaknesses, but if you love sci-fi (real sci-fi, not some star wars bullshit), interstellar is a must-see.

star wars is far from bullshit.

its so far from bullshit the film is legendary and will be still watched till the end of human civilization. yeah, its THAT good

Star wars is a bit bull shit. I dont think that interstellar is "real sci fi" and SW is not but I dont think SW is the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be. Still pretty good though

Then again I like all 6 movies and die hard star wars fans seem to only like 3 of them so maybe I like it more than most SW enthusiasts

Error: The target user can't receive judgements

+++++++

To be honest that is mostly because of marketing than the movies' qualities, that if you know about how star wars came to be and have watched and read its sources, which are all way superior than star wars even though it ripped off everyone.

time to go to bed, Christopher

Agreed. A couple of my thoughts:

-Technically, it was a brave movie by Nolan. Some of the scenes -- the bookshelf scene near the end, in particular, but also the scenes dealing with relativistic speeds -- were very risky. If done poorly or wrong (either visually or through dialogue) it could have come off as absurd or incomprehensible. I thought it was neither and was, in fact, very well done.
-Story wise, it covers a large breadth of themes: Life/death, sacrifice and parenting, truth, knowledge, exploration, etc. There are gems scattered throughout. Though the major themes are sacrifice and parenting (imo), many of the other themes touched on were not overdone or hamfisted.
-Scifi wise, it hits all the right notes. It never goes into fantastical territories. All the physics, the plausible realism is there (except for the ice clouds, according to Kip Thorn). Moreover, one of the key ingredients for classic "hardcore" scifi is the profound reverence for the physical universe. The role that relativistic physics plays in the story is clearly done in reverence and a great example why scifi nerds love scifi.
-Visuals/Atmosphere is spot on here. The music -- dark, brooding organs -- is just about perfect. I can't quite describe the feeling of awe I had when they first pass through the wormhole and the music, combined with the visuals, did incredible justice to the profoundness of the scene. It was nearly perfect.

Anyhow, awesome film. I've been thinking about it everyday, all day since I walked out of the theater. I believe it's going to be considered a classic and possibly Nolan's magnum opus in the years to come.

this is no way Nolan's magnum opus. I think these 3 movies are the best ones from Nolan so far in that order.

The Prestige
The Dark Knight
Inception

I'd rank them:

Inception / Interstellar
...
Dark Knight
Random bad movie
...
...
Prestige

Nolan doesn't know what he wants to say at the end of movies, so he substitutes random things that are ambiguous, or just contradictory, in hope the audience will interpret it however they prefer.

Interstellar was cool, but I think it would have been a lot better if Speilberg's studio didn't move from Paramount to Disney and lose rights to it.

there was nothing ambiguous about interstellar. He tried to tie up every loose end like a mathematician and therein lies the problem with the movie, it just tries too damn hard, you gotta leave something for interpretation.

Imagine inception ending like Leonardo DiCaprio going on for a 30 min lecture to prove that the layer you ended at was not a dream layer and a montage of previous scenes to prove his point instead of the top spinning on / falling scene, would not that totally ruin the movie ? that's what precisely interstellar felt like.

im apprehensive about going to see it - on the one hand, its probably very visually appealing, but on the other hand, it seems kind of stupid (astronaut farmer stupid - though i did enjoy that film) and with weak/boring/cliched characters.

I'd really like to see some less soppy shit and something a bit more brutal sometimes.

There's a very clear reason why it is a farmer that goes to space and it is well explained. After 10 minutes of the movie you'll understand why he aint exactly a farmer to begin with :)

yeye, i know hes the best pilot nasa ever had etc...

There aint many nasa pilots to begin with afaik. :)

depends what kind of pilot - lots of nasa pilots fly only their experimental aircraft that are more similar to regular jets - with a twist usually; for instance, nasa did alot of flight testing on vectored thrust in the 80's.

for the most part, NASA space ships fly in a very automated way, and with the shuttle, pretty much the only 'traditional' flying they would be was the final approach and landing - not easy by any means but not crazy hard either.

i will probably go see it eitherway for the VFX and perhaps some interesting ideas etc, but im also primed and ready for the cheese though :/

not many?
I can name a lot np.
Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Jamer Garner, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Yuri Gagarin, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Steve Buchemi, Bill Paxton, Tom Hanks and ofcourse Gary Lockwood and perhaps the greatest Michael Collins.
Need I go on?

:D

Theres more to it than that. They will explain the state earth is in and why people are now in certain roles. When you watch the film is not stupid that a farmer goes into space.

with all the hightech i'm still unsure why they would need people to observe farms. being a farmer looked like being an engineer with a house somewhere in the cornfields.

i liked it. but my favorite movie of the year so far has to be nightcrawler. shit was awesome =D

totally agreed. Nightcrawler blew me away.

http://coub.com/view/3z5xd

Saw it yesterday at IMAX and loved it. The visuals are amazing and you feel like you are on a great jouney while watching it. Don't wait for a download and go watch it in theater because this movie, much more than others will be elevated by the big screen. Didn't really like the ending tho. Kinda makes me wanna re-watch it to catch some things and clues that I've missed but on the other hand they pretty much show and spell it out for you. Could've been more subtle.

8/10

interstellar is fine

if u dont mind reading, this guy is a great science fiction author

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Eschbach

I wished they show more of the visuals.. that moment before and when they enter the wormhole, that big ass waves, when they slingshot around the Gargantua.. holy shit! All these things made me watched twice already :P

i worked on interestellar xD

you work at Double Negative? :o

worked, left now

have you put any hidden Cooller references in movies you've worked on?

Amazing. One of the best movies I've seen in years.

Loved it. Never seen so many people cry in the cinema.

Great story, great visuals, mind bending concepts. Reminded me a lot of revelation space at the end.

Never seen so many people cry in the cinema.

And then everyone is surprised there are shootings in cinemas.

Dont get it. I had a hard time relating to any of the characters in it. Thats why I did not find it great, it failed to invoke empathy nor did it confound me in a sense of awe like 2001: a space odyssey.

The best thing about the movie was the humor from the dual personality robot, honestly if that was not there this movie would have been literally unbearable.

I didnt relate to any of the characters in terms of leaving a child behind or anything like that, but I thought the space travel, the visuals, the acting and most importantly the concepts were all really good

Not my favourite sci fi film, but definitely a really good one. I would buy an extended directors cut if such a thing existed.

It reminded me of revelation space

yeah, it was great.

IMO it's the best movie this year easilyyyyyyy and the 9.0 rating on IMDB is not overrated.

What I loved was the pace so the movie did not get boring during the entire 3hours.
Also I liked that not everything went wrong (compared to armageddon) ;-)

I had different expectations, I wish it was more interstellary, whereas it turned out to be more of a moral story. But this is probably because I couldn't possibly conceive a story THIS GOOD.

The movie blew several of my fuses - space hype, commitment to accuracy, visuals, acting, editing, story settLing. It's one of those movies you will think of and talk about for a while. I expected nothing less from Chris Nolan and the megastar cast there is. Including Matthew M, who's a hot little potato right now.

The great possible deviation in movie reception I see is that it's geared heavily towards the people who understand value of family and love. Though I'm afraid the fanbase is probably from a completely different dimension of space nerds and gfx appreciators. They are likely to be disappointed completely.

Which leads us here, ESR forums, where , I'm not afraid to assume, most of the users are single , up to mid-20s, no wives, or children. No offense to anyone, but your live takes you through these events and your whole perspective on life will be changing. You will have several 3rd eyes open that you probably cannot even think of right now. If you did not love interstellar now, check in a few years when you are closer to the Cooper character, it will blow your fuckin mind how strong this storyline is.

I wish the characters and the plot were more believable though. The characters and their actions were much more Sci-Fi than the 5 dimensions and the scientific stuff. He sacrificed a great deal of logic in order to surprise and dazzle us. For me was an easy watching, enjoyable movie, but with illogical little details, that could had been easily avoided with a little more thought and work and that pissed me off.

Interstellar 10/10 was a masterpiece, next level in both visual/musical aspects and in the deeper philosophical message.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Impressive.

and the soundtrack!

ok ... so i just came back from watching nightcrawler based on some recommendations in this thread..... last weekend i watched interstellar

imo you cant even compare those two movies... i enjoyed interstellar waaaaay more... the visuals, the music and the plot is just on another level... ~3 hours and not one boring moment

nightcrawler on the other hand has some nice scenes, but overall it was pretty boring and also very predictable.... i watched the trailer and expected an interesting story line to develope from this homicide the guy films ... but nothing really happens... if you saw the trailer you saw the movie basically

Interstellar: 9/10

Nightcrawler: 6/10

The most impressive and sturdy sci-fi over the recent years. The Moon was also good, as well as district9 (or smth), but even they don't come anywhere near the epicness of this here interstellar.

A few minor issues:
the few holes in the plot (which aren't really important to the story flow);
the stupid hysterical girl suddenly digs einstein-level physics;
the hardcore sci-fi element gives in to 'love is our solution' emotional fuck-science-we're-doing-movie-also-for-girls bullshit
(and I was so glad at first that Nolan haven't fucked up the movie to the nasal mucus when they were choosing between Mann's and Edmund's planet - I mean, really - the 'professional' decision of Brand sounds like 'I don't wanna hear any reason and save people, I just want to see my fiancee', - but then here we go again...)

Still, all these issues are not even touching the overall massive epic of this Nolan's gem. Might I say - it will remain classic and the prime example of what a great sci-fi should look like in the years to come.

Don't expect anything similar in any nearest future, guys - you will chew all the same blank superhero-marvel-avp fantasy. Crowd eats it, so why try harder. Nice to know that Nolan is doing his job his own way.

There are a lot of such sci-fi that includes "love" as a powerful, if not central dimension to enter a greater level of conscience/dimension/whatever though.

On the top of my head I can think of Dan Simmons' Hyperion and the Ender cycle.

sure, mate. and it detracts huge chunks of excellence and epic awe from the 'sci' of the 'fi' in every movie of the genre.
sure love is a central part of our relationships with all the world phenomena, but when it comes to absolutely imperative professionalism and scientific approach (combined with such tasks as saving mankind or similar), every hard-boiled pro is able to do his part of the job strictly effective and rational.

That's how we roll here in science and able to fly rocketships up above. Every pro in this field knows exactly how to suppress emotional surges and make the shit do the job. I'm talking about men, ofc.

But movies are targeted at as wide audience as possible, and the largest viewerbase in cinemas is female. It all goes suit and fine when shown in melodramas like Titanic (a great epic flick too, btw), but when every (EVERY) director puts this emotional love/hate chewing gum for 80% of the runtime, and leaves 20% for actual story telling (or sci-fi element) - that shows more like inability or fear of doing the movie properly - guys fear that the flick will receive bad rep at 'wide audience' I've already mentioned))

Remember when people rated movies because of the plot and execution, instead of mostly due to CGI?

Anyway, what I think happens with Nolan is that in his movies he grabs your hand the whole time, which is something some people really like a lot (everyone is engaged) while others really dislike it. I prefer more complexity so OpieOP, tho understand the former is best for mainstream current cinema.

Also I personally was a bit too hyped by the trailer and comments, so ended up a bit disappointed.

They dont make good scifi movies since like forever. Just crap like Avatar. Apparently they even want to make a Bladerunner sequel! There should be a law against this.

Okay here is a list of sci fi movies post 2000 that are not that big budget, does not have epic story like interstellar but seemed to be more effective on me in terms of appreciation.

Donnie Darko
Moon
Children of Men
Looper
Source Code
The Mist
Mr. Nobody
Splice
Equilibrium
Snowpiercer

.

well I dont have the patience to refute each of your cases, but all these movies are great, and most of them are downright original.

As for "snowpiercer - why is this even on the list? how did you become a user admin?"

To oppress on you bitchez from my comfi engine.

"not that big budget"?

If by "not that big budget" you basically mean... not one of the most expensive movies ever made, then ok perhaps you have a point.
But really man... that list contains some pretty decent budgets if you ask me.

If your only comparison to major hollywood productions are other major hollywood productions then you're not really qualified to speak on this imho.

I only compared mostly mainstream vs mainstream for fair comparison, something that relies on having at least some level of visuals.

It is just plain stupid to compare primer to interstellar. A true indie sci fi movie relies on the cleverness of the idea and there's a small number that succeeds: (my criterion was budget less than 2 million)

for example

Primer
Timecrimes
Cube ( the first one only)
Monsters
Banshee Chapter
Triangle (more of a thriller)

Why are so many SF titles named after shapes?

Okay here is a list of sci fi movies post 2000 that are not that big budget, does not have epic story like interstellar but seemed to be more effective on me in terms of appreciation.

That's a very different way of comparing things than: I only compared mostly mainstream vs mainstream for fair comparison, something that relies on having at least some level of visuals.

The logic seems strange anyway.

Heck even the logic between 'appreciation and budget' is silly. Why would it matter for my personal rating for a movie, how much money was spent on making it?

I don't go "ye the blair witch project... god that movie was shit... but hey it was made with a handicam in a week. So for that low budget it was actually a really well done movie, let's watch it."
Nor do I go: "Ye the indiana jones series, kind of a hollywood mainstream movie. It's funny as hell and made almost to perfection, but hey what do you expect with such a budget? Let's not buy that.".

If that's your viewpoint then your appreciation of a movie is very one dimensional and you fail to analyze from a directors point of view. Most genius directors start with a low budget / indie / short film...but they make it worth watching by cleverly creating something believable out of a pretty tight budget...its this skill which separates great directors from merely good ones.

Think of a director as a problem solver of the highest caliber. He has a vision on how the final product would look / feel like and has finite amount of time and money and other resources. Usually the most efficient solvers are the best directors.

Efficiency in utilizing the money in terms of producing the sense of wonder in the viewers mind is definitely another dimension of appreciation that you either lack or live in denial...I don't know what.

You've got a strange view there imho.

To me it's like art.
You can like a piece of art without knowing anything about the artist.
But you can also analyse the art piece bit by bit and study the process through which it was made. Which can increase your knowledge and perhaps appreciation of the artist. (it can also lead to the opposite)
However this appreciation of the artist is detatched from the appreciation of the actual produced work.

For instance The Matrix was made by the same directors and cast and crew (mainly) that made 2 and 3.......... That doesn't mean that I now think that The Matrix is a bad movie.
Also the first one was made on a significantly lower budget than 2 and 3. (still a large budget though)
Does that mean that somehow in 4 years time the Wachowski Brothers lost all their skills in directing and or script writing?
Or that they get worse if they get more money?
These are questions that evaluate not the movie, but the people making the movie.
So as in art... You can still like a movie regardless of your view on the artist.

(also it's possible to hate a movie from a director you usually like. Meanwhile it's also the case that directors you like in general make other movies you also like.)


* Finding Forrester quote:
And when the critics started all this bullshit about...
...what it was I was really trying to say...
...well, I decided then...
...one book was enough.

You should really watch the movie and pay a lot of attention to appreciate the quote though ;)

i worked on Triangle xD

what movie are you working on next? chances are its going to be worth a watch !

Terminator

I'm so jelly of your life

wtf explain more

showoff

don't make me show you the bafta

show it to jamerio irl and i will pay you

I thought District 9 was great as well, although the third act suffers from a bit too much action.

equilibrium.... did you rewatch it since 2000? The movie is total shit now.

Eeeeeeh. Equilibrium? I mean, I like the movie, but its premise does not make any god-damn sense to be honest. The whole "erasing emotions" thing when people on-screen are obviously driven by them. The concept is neat but it was terribly executed. Action holds up tho, I appreciate it for that.

amazing movie

Was great, really glad I saw it.

I prefer to read books about lost civilizations than watch movies, unless its "The Matrix" ofc.

Worth watching for the visualizations of things we can only describe in mathematical abstracts alone. I'm very interested in things like black holes, space-time curvature, wormholes - the mysteries of the universe we barely started scratching the surface of. A big budget movie that puts these concepts to film in an accurate way was a long-time wet dream of mine, and I can't even say how glad I am to have seen it. It has its ups and downs but overall there's nothing I regret about the experience - which it really is more of than a movie, an experience.

this man has the right attitude

I was impressed with the movie.

Pros:
- Very well done on the science part, relativity, gravity etc
- An extremely complicated story told in a very efficient and understandable way
- Visuals are amazing
- Acting is great

Cons:
- Don't like the Grandfather figure much, doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with the father figure. Kinda weird chemistry.
- First half of the movie was too slow paced for me
- Why do they always have to throw in the token psychopath-in-space person who almost destroys everyone? SO cliche and SO unbelievable.
- The bloke who got left on the ship up in space while they went down to the water planet, who ended up aging 23 years didn't make much sense either. He seemed really old and mentally lethargic when they returned, why didn't he spend the entire time in cryo-sleep? Why did he say 'I almost gave up so many times etc' just frigging sleep it off man? lol
- Why did the son not give a shit that his family was dieing? so unbelievable and unrelatable even given the circumstances.
- Big criticism - I'm not a fan of Christopher Nolan's *really* intense drawn out dramatic scenes that rob you of all your internal patience and emotions until you're a shrivelled husk.
- I really think sci-fi is better done in a more grittier Ridley Scott style, like Alien or Blade Runner.

But overall - I think it's a great movie and recommend it.

>He seemed really old and mentally lethargic when they returned, why didn't he spend the entire time in cryo-sleep?

he said, he didnt know if they ever came back, slept some time but wanted to live his life and studied the black hole more. anyway, details.

- Why did the son not give a shit that his family was dieing? so unbelievable and unrelatable even given the circumstances.

he gave up and had no hope. to go away would be a risk. and in the end, all would die sooner or later. a traditional thing, most people never leave their hometown.

the movie has nice citates from sci-fi movies and sci-fi topics. all in all a good movie, influenced by the more realistic sci-fi touch. apollo 13, 2001, gravity. i give it an 8.

its not your usual mainstream movie which i like, but ofc it has a hollywood touch (drama scenes, zimmer music, america scenerio with the fields).

i saw it in 4k. i remarked color noise, and blur in some scenes (due to imax camera). visually i expected more for imax camera shooting, 4K, and nolans cgi.

on imdb some people dont understand the ending...

i disliked it and i think it's bc of mcconaughey.

zimmers music was also out of place all the time. he is kind of overrated in general.

plusses for making a classic sci-fi movie, tho

Even though I'm sure I misunderstood intricate parts of the story, I thought it was decent enough. Maybe 30 mins too long.
Was nice surprise to see matt damon at the end, I should have known something was up when I saw Casey Affleck. But I don't think he (Damon) was right for the role. I think he plays the hero a lot better than what he plays the Scumbag, The Departed was so good its easy to get carried by the others.

As long as I don't come out of the cinema wishing I had not spent money on the film, I consider it a worthwhile experience.

Some nice ideas and twists and visions in the film.

Would never watch it again though.

Too many explanations, too much story, too much happy end, too much going on that needed to be connected in the end (see LOST the TV show).

I loved Prestige for example, but now he made the same story about something unreachable and just explained it his way.

It started out alright, but then all those characters wasted too much pace. When the black hole got introduced, I hoped it could get interesting now, but again it was just all about the characters and the story again.

I read one sentence about the film beforehand. Something about connecting the robots from Interstellar to HAL, and it excited me. What a let down there as well, they just functioned as a comic relief and twice as a cheap way to advance the story.

"too much happy end"

was tempted to see it but after that... eeeeh.
Generally dislike things that have a silly happy end.

this is what I felt as well.

Started good, got gradually worse and ended abysmal.

The dialogs were borderline idiotic. "Lets go to that one planet, because love transcends space and time blah"

Most of the science stuff they talked a lot about was bullshit.

The end was really bad. Also, too long for no good reason.

They stopped making good scifi movies 20 years ago.

They stopped making good scifi movies 20 years ago.

Wow ok, if only interstellar had some gay sword fighting with laser beams that end in thin air for no fucking reason, I bet that would've made the science less bullshit and the movie much better.

eh meant to reply, see below.

you can edit who you replied to.

2001, Alien, Bladerunner were the last good ones. Moon is debateable.

You can't knock on interstellar for the science being bullshit or being too long and then use the odyssey as a counter example to that. The odyssey could've been half an hour long and both it and alien I don't remember having much to do with science. Bladerunner I have not seen.

And please elaborate on the science in interstellar being bullshit.

Its ok for a movie to be long, if its a masterpiece like Odyssey. And the science wasnt such a central part of the plot like in Interstellar. For example the whole time stuff is bullshit - landing on the planet vs. staying in orbit does not make time go by faster relatively either way.

I haven't seen the movie so I don't know if they did it correctly but yes that would have an influence. It has even been experimentally demonstrated... although not with living beings, of course. This is explained by the different time dilation in the two scenarios.
Look up the "Twin Paradox"... which isn't in fact a paradox since the two scenarios aren't equivalent.

See this for a specific example :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox#Specific_example

It doesn't matter if it's "in orbit" instead of "traveling towards a different star", what matters is mostly the inertial frame.

One of the executive producers, Kip Thorne, was one of the originators of the fundamental story of Interstellar (the basic idea and structure). He's also a fairly well known astrophysicist (working primarily on wormholes and blackholes).

According to Thorne, all the science in Interstellar is airtight except for the "ice clouds"on Martin's world.

Really. So getting sucked into a black hole and then manipulating gravity through a book shelf on earth and making a magic watch is a scientific fact i suppose.

Ok, that part as well. Then so is the TARS/CASE robots, the character (who don't really exist), this hypothetical future in which "blight" is killing off all plants... yeah, so I think the problem you might run into is that its science fiction and not a documentary.

Uh, yeah it does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

Time dilation explains why two working clocks will report different times after different accelerations. For example, ISS astronauts return from missions having aged slightly less than they would have been if they had remained on Earth, and GPS satellites work because they adjust for similar bending of spacetime to coordinate with systems on Earth.[1]

Only thats something completely different from what was shown in the movie.

Maybe pure sci-fi is dead.

Did you like Event Horizon, Sunshine, Prometheus?

I liked Sunshine up until they brought the monster in. Prometheus was appalling as an Alien prequel (liked thed 1st 10 minutes tho). I dont know why Scott did this. Event Horizon was a nice horror movie.

Even the first ten minutes were shit imo. The 3D was nice though.

Interstellar is the 2001 for this generation. Where 2001 popularized some of the interesting aspects of space travel and spaceships in a thoughtful and well made way, Interstellar is now popularizing the well studied and known effects of relativistic physics.

Also, there was a lot of "hand waving" at the end of 2001. I don't short Kubrick on the boldness of that ending (it was a groundbreaking moment for cinema of the time), but what Nolan did for the tesseract scene was equally (if not more) bold. That scene, if done any less than perfect, could have turned out to be incomprehensible. But yet it was pretty clear how everything connected.

I didn't find it particularly bold. Well-executed yes, but not bold.

I can't remember another movie where the climax includes time visualized in 3-dimensions or where relativistic physics plays a key role in the story. These are not common tropes and far outside the common zeitgeist. To make such a huge budget movie with these elements is indeed bold when studios these days do not want to fund $150+ million movies that are anything but guaranteed to resonate with a large demographic.

Planet of the Apes from like 50 years ago?

True about the relativistic stuff but that movie was also bold.

cried about 4 times

it was great, but what purpose did the last half an hour serve? it felt totally stupid and pointless

disgusting movie