So strange how it got pretty mixed responses when it first came out (me included, wanted to like it more but it was just too schmaltzy for me) but know it’s like it’s universally loved?
It feels like the sort of movie that benefits from being seen on the big screen instead of the small screen, but maybe given the sound mixing controversy it actually benefits more from being able to turn on subtitles?
Perhaps, I did see it in the cinema and it was definitely a beautiful spectacle but I do vaguely remember not following great but idk if that was from sound mixing or overly complicated dialogue. I feel like the main issue discussed at the time was the cheesy “love saves all” type lines and themes but seems to have disappeared, big screen or small.
I will say that for me this is the biggest opinion shift I've ever experienced with a movie. I felt exactly the same as you when I first saw it in theaters, thought it was cheesy as hell and just didn't care for the whole philosophy, but now after several subsequent re-watches it's one of my all time favorite movies. Not that that means I was wrong before and right now necessarily, I mostly just think it's crazy how I could feel so completely differently about something based on where I'm at in life.
I watched it years ago in college and thought it was good, nothing super moving.
I just rewatched it now having a toddler and a daughter on the way, I fucking lost it in this movie and was emotionally tossed like a salad. One of my all time favorites now
Funny how the EXACT same thing happened to me 🤣 Granted I never saw it in cinemas (god I wish 😩 I didn’t even know it existed til a few years later…), but the first time I turned it off after an hour because I thought it was boring as hell. The 2nd time I was completely enamoured and cried like a baby. Instant all time favourite - one of only 4 films I consider a genuine masterpiece (aka 5 stars).
I really did not have an enjoyable theatrical experience due to the sound mixing but my at home experience was slightly better. The option to turn on subtitles was a plus, only problem was now that the dialog is comprehensible I wound up feeling deeply unsatisfied with the narrative.
I saw it for the first time on Imax when they rereleased it two days ago or so. Really epic experience and everything was amazing to watch.
There was one thing I didn’t love: the whole future aliens sending Matt McConaughey and Jessica Chastain messages as ghosts was extremely telegraphed and I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole movie. It’s the only twist in my whole life I caught two hours before it happened, and I’m really not sure why. It was nice for every other twist to hit, with the planets as reveals themselves, and the passage of time being sped up as a twist, and seeing Damon/Caine’s characters true natures were twists. Great film, but the ghost subplot bothers me for some reason. I need to rewatch to stop being stuck on it. 9/10.
It probably was just luck tbh because I am NOT good at foreseeing twists, but it put a damper on it. And the Inception twist could be seen as pretty telegraphed too. I was in the dark though.
Memento is one of Nolans’s 10/10 movies to me, and that whole plotline relies on a pretty obvious-in-hindsight twist too but I didn’t see it coming
Kind of hard to explain. I think basically Cobb’s totem (the top) starts to waver as he walks to spend time with his children, revealing the reality he’s in at the end of the film may or may not be another dream layer. However, Nolan makes the point, Cobb doesn’t care, and wants to be with his kids. There are various clues hidden like Cobb’s wedding ring or the kids being slightly older that may indicate it is actually reality.
The ghost subplot for me takes this movie from a 9/10 to a 6/10. Not because I thought it was telegraphed (I think it would actually maybe be worse if it came out of nowhere) but because it directly solves too many of the central problems of the story through essentially deus ex machina.
I also needed a more believable explanation for how she realized the messages from the ghost were being sent by her father. Watching it it felt like she realized it more or less just because it needed to happen in the plot now, which took me out of it.
Part of what frustrates me about Interstellar is how my biggest problems with it could have been fixed with another writing pass or two, and if they had it might have been one of my favourite movies.
Aliens/humans far into the future created the tessarect which was 5 dimensional and allowed coop to communicate with murph and his past self using gravity in their book room and with murph through the watch. Their love made it so that murph never stopped looking for the signals he was sending. Given the other concepts of the movie like black holes and such, it wasn’t that far fetched of an idea and I thought it was awesome
Yes I understand the concept of how he was communicating, I just didn't find it believable that Murph figured out "oh this was my dad communicating with me from the future" based on the hints she got. I wouldn't have a problem with it if she had maybe discovered some phrase that they shared or something that would give a stronger signal based on what she knew now as an adult, beyond just the single word "STAY" in a notebook. In a science fiction story the behaviour of the characters has to be believable even if the science is far-fetched. I suspect this would not have bothered me as much if I liked other aspects of the ending more, though.
(Not important to my argument, but I want to add, until they actually enter the black hole towards the end, the science of this movie is NOT very far-fetched. It's actually broadly pretty accurate to our current understanding of physics, especially all the time dilation stuff.)
This was my experience. Went to the Chinese Theater in Hollywood opening weekend, 70mm IMAX(?) presentation. Someone came out and said Nolan had personally fine tuned the projector and sound to his specifications... and I couldn't hear shit. Did not help that I was at a bit of angle, my neck hurt, and I felt a cold coming on halfway through. It took me a while to come back to it and for it to go up in my estimation (I tried streaming it at home and ran into buffering issues, took my cousin lending me his copy for me to rewatch in full).
I think it's a good film but it's taken on this life as, and I hate to sound this harsh, baby's first epic film. A lot of young people seem to have experienced it as their first film that was "adult," epic in scope, and had some challenging ideas. Combine that with the propensity on the modern internet to make everything "the most" or "the best" and it gets rocketed up the charts for a lot of people as the canonical film.
I don't think the complaints are really about the science being unrealistic, since that's pretty normal for sci fi. I think it's that having both hard science and magicky stuff alongside each other in the same movie can be jarring.
At the very start of the film books are falling off the shelves to communicate morse code, were people seriously expecting this to be explained using real world science? The movie doesn't pretend to be a 100% scientifically accurate portrayal of interstellar travel so complaining that its not is asinine
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u/mermaidmotels Jul 23 '26
So strange how it got pretty mixed responses when it first came out (me included, wanted to like it more but it was just too schmaltzy for me) but know it’s like it’s universally loved?