Interstellar Review Round-Up

There’s still two weeks before Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar, hits theaters, but the reviews have already begun rolling in. So far, the reviews are mixed, suggesting that the film isn’t without it’s merits, but that it’s certainly not the masterpiece that Nolan imagined it would be.

Alonso Duralde at The Wrap uses one of Nolan’s most recognizable lines to suggest that the writer director might be his own worst enemy.

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.

Writing for Time Out London, Dave Calhoun was much more enamored with the film, giving it one of the most positive reviews so far.

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.

Over at Badass Digest, Devin Feraci suggest that Nolan simply can’t live up to his influences:

“They should have sent a poet.”

That line from Contact is probably the best summation of Interstellar, a well-made, well-meaning movie that somehow manages to undersell the grandeur of interstellar travel. It’s a movie designed for people who watched the bedroom sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey and wished there was more exposition about who built the room, how, why and what thread count was on that bed; Christopher Nolan, who aspires to Kubrick’s precision, cannot match his messy metaphysics. There’s an equation for every emotion in Interstellar, including love.

Writing for Forbes, Scott Mendelson say the film has great ideas, but fails to follow through.

Christopher Nolan’s ambitious outer-space adventure is more admirable for its intentions than for its overall execution.

Variety’s Scott Foundas felt like the film was an enjoyable spectacle with brains to back it up.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed.

Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter says the film is good, but falls short of greatness.

Interstellar optimistically and humanistically proposes that, even if the light is slowly dying in one place, a reasonable facsimile might be found as a substitute. But there’s no rage here, just a healthy belief in mid-20th century-style Yankee gumption and a can-do attitude. Whether that’s enough anymore is another question.

Interstellar opens in theaters November 7.