Interstellar: An Overrated Film

Interstellar is a good film, even ambitious enough to push the peaks of the sci-fi genre. However, there is a detail in the film that bothered me excessively and felt artificial: Matthew McConaughey's reactions to his daughter's video tapes and his tears here felt extremely fake to me. While every natural movement his daughter displays toward the camera elevates the emotional tone of the film, Matthew's reactions unfortunately pulled this effect down.

When I look at the film as a whole, I see a classic Christopher Nolan signature: films that make their audience "feel smart." Inception was like this, and so was Memento. All of these are above-average productions; however, in Nolan's filmography I cannot see even a single work that I could call "great" or a "masterpiece."

The handling of the theme of love in the film was beautiful, perhaps it was the only beautiful thing in the film. Although the scene where his daughter, in her old age, calls out to her father seemed quite amateurish to me, the main theme being explored was quite impressive. Hans Zimmer's music, on the other hand, elevated the film to a point far above what it deserved. Even though I didn't like Matthew's acting, the most crucial part of the film was undoubtedly those video messages.

According to my research, Christopher Nolan is the director with the most films in IMDb's top 250; he has exactly eight films on the list, and his closest rival follows with seven films. However, I am extremely certain that a large portion of the world understands nothing about cinema, nor about quality. In a world where the highest-grossing film of all time at the box office is Avatar, the opposite could not have been expected anyway. This is a mass that flocks to watch Avatar while a masterpiece like The Godfather exists. The same mindset that pushed The Dark Knight to third place on IMDb, right after The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather, is the same mindset. Whereas Batman Begins was a much better film than The Dark Knight.

The only point where I appreciate Nolan is Following, his first serious work, a medium-length film he shot with his own means. Even that first film is far more valuable in terms of price/performance ratio than all of Nolan's subsequent big-budget films.