Interstellar review

               Much has already been written about Christopher Nolan’s space-time exploration epic “Interstellar.” Every aspect of the film, including its confusing scientific premise and its controversial ending has been debated and scrutinized ad nauseam.   Never mind the fact that this is science fiction, in which the movie’s complex premise and narrative follow-through are supposed be taken only as a creative thought experiment, inviting audiences to dig deeper into the metaphorical layers of the film — at least that’s usually the implied contract we enter in with when it comes to genre fare of this type.
                   What the endless articles and analysis of the supposed plot-holes and “bad-science” says to me is that the movie’s story (not the same thing as plot) apparently isn’t engaging enough to keep people from withholding their suspension of disbelief. Sci-fi deconstructs real paranoias and takes fictional premises to their logical extremes to discuss natural concerns, but this only works if we care about the world created or the character’s involved enough to ignore that everything going on is essentially ridiculous. This, unfortunately, is where “Interstellar” falls short.
                 Like most of Nolan’s movies — especially his original auteur work — this film is filled to brim with ideas. We’re fifty years into the future and the world is struck by another dust-bowl, killing most crops except corn, which, after global climate conditions have worsened to the point of devaluing science, technology and space exploration, puts the priority on basic societal agriculture. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is an astrophysicist turned corn-farmer who, after discovering a strange message within a gravitational anomaly in his daughter’s bedroom, gets recruited into a secretly-funded NASA exploration, set to enter a wormhole near Saturn that could lead us to a planetary system environmentally specific enough to sustain human life.The downside being that he and his crew of five would enter into a space-time differential caused by relativity, where decades pass like hours and their families would age out of their lives.
               As with most films in this sci-fi tradition, once they get to their destination, things aren’t quite as they thought they would be and plans aren’t as cleanly executed as they’d initially hoped.
Within this setup, Nolan addresses the critics who had previously complained about his emotional remoteness by weaving into the plot a supposedly tender father/daughter story about sacrifice and abandonment.   Towards the middle of the movie, Anne Hathaway, who plays another astronaut, reveals an ulterior motive that contradicts the crew’s prime directive, in which she declares that love is a quantifiable scientific measurement. She’s wrong, and so is this movie.
                 Despite Nolan's best efforts, every attempt at emotional reality and observation is squashed by the movie’s intensely calculated puzzle-box construction, which, like “Inception,” leaves every character (as   tearful as they may be through this three-hour ordeal) more like a pawn in Nolan’s technical chess game than a fully realized, three-dimensional human being. Performances like McConaughey as the film’s conflicted protagonist, Hathaway as the film’s needless counter-argument, and Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s embittered adult daughter who’s waiting impatiently on earth for his return, are realized to the best of their abilities and somewhere underneath the weight of this overloaded script and the oppressively fractured cross-cut editing, they might have even made a real impact.  All of this, along with an increasingly labored third act that piles plot on top of plot and then reverses everything in on itself (the signature Chris Nolan “ta-dah”), left me completely frozen out of the picture.
                Cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema shoots the film in a gritty realism that remarkably contrasts with the overwhelming space vistas. Make no mistake about it; a lot of this film is breathtaking and technically accomplished, and Nolan’s ambition as a screenwriter and director is totally in reverence to the art-form of cinema. And thank god that he’s given the money and studio go-ahead to fully explore his passions, but unfortunately, with this, and much of his latter commercial work, his filmic ambitions have created a stumbling block that often defies audiences to interact with his stories on a human level.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2014

Transcendence review

                Wally Pfister, the talented cinematographer behind modern classics such as “The Dark Knight”, “Inception” and “Moneyball” brings us his directorial debut in “Transcendence”, a sci-fi drama starring Johnny Depp as a mad scientist who becomes a highly sentient computer with ambiguous goals towards the human race.  Tonally and visually, considering his recent work with director Christopher Nolan, the movie is presented in a way we might expect; cold, stark, and sterile, mirroring the dehumanizing technologies that the plot warns the audience against.

                Though Pfister hands over the photography work to Jess Hill his fingerprints are all over the film, but unfortunately when it comes to storytelling, pacing, and drama this curiously drab blockbuster lacks the same sense of meticulous identity.  Many scenes drag their feet when the movie is begging for acceleration and the themes of loneliness, the gradual loss of individuality, and progress by any means are somehow bluntly beat into the ground without ever really committing to any of them.

                Depp stars as Will Caster, a Ted-Talking computer genius who’s figured out the process of creating fully formed artificial intelligence. His wife Evelyn, played by Rebecca Hall, is working in union to create medical nano-bots.  When her husband is fatally injured by a gunshot from a technophobic revolutionary, Evelyn does what she can to keep him alive and uploads his consciousness into the mainframe of his super-computer. There, he’s not only able to access all of his memories and knowledge but he's able to think exponentially faster and more efficiently, using Evelyn’s nano-technologies to heal the sick and injured and to build fields of solar panels, expanding his ever-growing digital network. 

                This cyberpunk Frankenstein plot should have provided a simple but useful framework for the actors and the screenplay to really go in a myriad of different, and hopefully interesting directions. Unfortunately, Phister never really gives us a clear sense of the key players in the narrative when it comes to why we should care about anything that’s going on. Depp and Hall’s tragic romance is underwhelming and almost nondescript, leaving all the pulp-genre elements of the film feeling derivatively old-hat.  We're never as sad as we should be about the Evelyn’s straining marriage to her computer husband as he becomes less human and we're never as worried as we are supposed to be about Will’s descent into cold calculation over compassion due to Depp’s flat-line performance through each point of his character’s arc. 

                Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman step over from Nolan’s stable of repertory actors and are given almost nothing to do here as concerned investigators. Them, along with Kate Mara as the leader of the human rebellion against Castor’s digital army, are strangely disconnected from the more interesting—though ultimately flailing--emotional story. Paul Bettany, as a former colleague of Depp’s character, who is then recruited by the militaristic insurgence, probably gives the best performance in the entire film, picking up the slack dropped by everyone else. Rebecca Hall is clearly trying her hardest but has absolutely nothing to work with or against, rendering her best scenes into an ineffectual, one-women juggling act.

                Despite the fact that “Transcendence” has the right budget, the right actors, and a promising director--given the pedigree of films he’s worked on as crew--the final result is a depressing slog, not worth your time or consideration.  It’s competently framed and lit but the screenplay lacks any kind of specificity or vitality, and the simple joys of the movie’s sci-fi conceits are almost instantly drowned in its bland austerity.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2014