First Reviews for Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR Roll In
Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated sci-fi film Interstellar was recently screened for members of the press, and the reviews are mostly positive. Many of the reviews praise the incredible looking visuals of the film and technical direction, but it seems like the emotional core of the story didn't hit with everyone. I try to stay away from reviews for movies like this until after I see it, but I couldn't help myself this time around. I had to read them! The movie is set to be released in theaters a week from tomorrow, and I already have my tickets to watch it in 70mm IMAX.
I included several excerpts from certain interviews below for you to read. You can click on the links to read the full interviews for each one. Look them over if you want and let us know if they sway your excitement for the movie in any way.
Scott Foundas at Variety:
To infinity and beyond goes “Interstellar,” an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done, the director’s ninth feature also proves more emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children (and vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside “The Wizard of Oz,” “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Gravity” in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered.
Tim Robey at The Telegraph:
Christopher Nolan is a merchant of awe, which is not to say he’s always selling it at the right price, or that customer satisfaction is guaranteed 100 per cent of the time. Even by his standards, Interstellar is a wild leap of faith: an epic of science fiction which puts equal stress on both words.
Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter:
Preoccupied with nothing less than the notion that humankind will one day need to migrate from Earth to some other planet we can call home, Interstellar so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. Feeling very much like Christopher Nolan’s personal response to his favorite film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, this grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.
Geoffrey McNab at Independent:
Interstellar is the astounding new $160 million sci-fi epic from Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Made under the supervision of leading theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, the film (bound to be a front runner in this year’s Oscar race) launches a twin pronged attack on our emotions and on our intellects. It combines abstruse ideas about gravity, matter and time with old fashioned, hyper-charged family melodrama.
Drew McWeeny at HitFix:
I was moved by “Interstellar,” and there are stretches where it is as good and as pure as anything Nolan’s made. You can feel just how important all of it is to him in every frame of the thing. I don’t love all of the film’s dramatic choices, though. It’s a film I look forward to revisiting, and considering just how much my own son loves space and space travel already, I’ll definitely be taking him to see it. The best the film can hope for is that it will remind young viewers that there is something else besides this planet, and there is so much of this universe that we don’t remotely understand, and if there’s any hope for us, it is by looking up. Nolan’s fervent belief in that message alone makes this something worth seeing, and if it can inspire a new generation of dreamers, then even better.
Edward Douglas at Coming Soon:
“Interstellar” is another one of Christopher Nolan’s more personal mind-f*ck movies which he’s done so well when not directing adventures of a certain cowled vigilante. While it may not be as immediate as “Inception” and it wears most of its most obvious influences on its sleeve, it’s still very much the type of intelligent spin on a specific genre we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker.
Scott Mendelson at Forbes:
Enough of Interstellar is thoughtful, engaging, and visually dynamic that it feels almost petty to acknowledge that the picture doesn’t quite hold together as a movie. Chris Nolan is one of the more talented directors working in the industry right now, and he has directed some of my favorite films of the last fifteen years. He is not singularly responsible for keeping the notion of the original big-budget Hollywood spectacular alive in an era of reboots and adaptations and the (relative) artistic failure of his latest opus shouldn’t mean anything other than the film doesn’t quite work for me as well as I had hoped. Interstellar is certainly a noble effort that wears its heart on its sleeve and arguably should still be seen on the biggest IMAX screen possible if you had the slightest interest in the project leading up to its release. But in terms of what Mr. Nolan is capable of and in terms of the film viewed in a relative vacuum, Interstellar is not quite a success. I can’t insult those involved by grading on an admiration-based curve.
Alonso Duralde at The Wrap:
The universe-spanning saga — starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain — is challenging, provocative, and gorgeous. Until it isn’t. To paraphrase Christopher Nolan‘s “The Dark Knight,” we don’t get the prestige filmmakers we need, we get the ones we deserve. And one of the ones we seemingly deserve is Nolan himself, a filmmaker with a keen visual sense but also one who undercuts the big, challenging ideas of his movies with unnecessarily tidy resolutions.
Dave Calhoun at Time Out London:
Christopher Nolan’s overwhelming, immersive and time-bending space epic ‘Interstellar’ makes Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Gravity’ feel like a palate cleanser for the big meal to come. Where ‘Gravity’ was brief, contained and left the further bounds of the universe to our imagination, ‘Interstellar’ is long, grand, strange and demanding – not least because it allows time to slip away from under our feet while running brain-aching ideas before our eyes. It’s a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality.
William Bibbiani at Crave Online:
Interstellar would be a stunning piece of cinema if you weren’t supposed to think about it, but Nolan’s film challenges his audience with too many relevant social concepts, doomsday scenarios and impossible moral choices to prevent them from turning off their brains. And since your brains are already working, you might as well question all the gaps in rudimentary storytelling that derail this otherwise ambitious and beautifully produced popcorn movie, which only falls flat because it seems to be vying for the role of “best movie ever made.” Interstellar forces you to be too smart to enjoy Interstellar. I don’t think very many movies have had that problem before.
Emma Dibdin at Digital Spy:
Interstellar is a spine-tingling blend of brains and heart, a high concept sci-fi opera that’s as unafraid of cerebral ideas as it is of heart-on-sleeve emotion, even if its ambitious reach occasionally exceeds its narrative grasp. It’s the first film of Nolan’s that could justifiably be called sentimental, but it earns every moment of unrestrained emotion with another of quiet fortitude.
Clayton Davis at Awards Circuit:
Christopher Nolan. A staple of blockbuster cinema for over a decade has crafted another technical marvel for the world to indulge. “Interstellar” has the Academy Award nominated screenwriter and director taking new liberties in his style and approach to character development while paying homage to classic filmmakers from decades past. “Interstellar” is a roaring achievement of technical proficiency, faithful to new ideas for our own existence and where we might find ourselves exploring.
Mike Ryan at Screen Crush:
‘Interstellar’ is a good movie that so desperately wants to be important. That sentence is going to read as churlish, but I do admire ‘Interstellar’ for at least attempting to be something that’s not dumb. There are already too many dumb things we are subjected to on a daily basis. And ‘Interstellar’ is ambitious, even though there are a lot of head-scratching scenes. Yet, there we still are, spinning out of control with the reality that Nolan has created – and it’s only when we stop spinning, when we look at it from afar, that we kind of realize how absurd it all was … even though it leaves us craving a little more.
Tim Grierson at ScreenDaily:
An emotional powerhouse when it isn’t hokey – and a stunning spectacle when it doesn’t get bogged down in plot logistics – Interstellar is the clearest example yet of filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s desire to wow us with ambitious big-budget projects that balance cutting-edge effects and bold dramatic crescendos.
James Rocchi at The Playlist:
After all the jaw-dropping cinematography and carefully-buffed CGI, in fact, “Interstellar” winds up fitting into a fairly narrow and deeply tired sub-genre alongside films like “Frequency,” “Contact,” and even “Field of Dreams”: Dad Issues from Dimension X. It’s impossible to not admire the technical achievements of “Interstellar,” but as Michael Bay and so much more modern moviegoing has proved, rapturous visuals can’t make up for a ruptured script. Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” spends hundreds of millions to take the audience on a journey to the farthest parts of the cosmos … so they can be told sentiments as close, and as cheap, as any of the offerings at your local Hallmark card retailer.
Eric Kohn at Indiewire:
That Nolan can do so much with such a grand canvas and studio money shows the extent to which he has managed to carve out a niche in the industry. Brainy and exciting at the same time, “Interstellar” invalidates the need for mindless Hollywood product. No matter its shortcomings, the movie achieves an impressive balancing act. It turns the mysteries of the universe into a cinematic playground, but for every profound or visually arresting moment, it also encourages you to to think.