Is there more to "Interstellar"?

By the time I saw Christopher Nolan's latest wet dream, "Interstellar", I already went through a good number of excellent foreign-language films at the recently-concluded QCinema International Film Festival (Nov. 5-11) and Cinema One Originals (Nov. 10-18). Somehow, I was expecting Nolan's sci-fi yarn to be the icing on the cake - though that may be an over-statement. I wasn't really that impressed with Nolan as a filmmaker. Perhaps, his works that I really liked were the "smaller", pre-Batman ones, like "Following" and "Memento", both of which make ingenious use of a film's time structure in telling a story. When he was given the opportunity to make films in Hollywood, I wasn't entirely sold to his outputs there. The "Batman" trilogy and "Inception" were visually meticulous and thematically ambitious, no doubt, but one just couldn't shake off the nagging feeling that they were merely Hollywood blockbusters and that Nolan as an auteur wasn't simply there, or perhaps wasn't entirely there. 

And now, "Interstellar", of which I already began seeing a teaser as early as November last year and which was purported to be a "labor of love" for Nolan. It can't be denied: this post-Batman film of his, just like the others, is visually and thematically grand. It has all those painstakingly-constructed visuals, whether on Earth or beyond, that will put sci-fi lovers in awe and it touches on such heady concepts as time-space continuum, gravity, relativity, wormhole, blackhole, life beyond the planet and even the metaphysical implications of love that will give the thinking viewer something to check out. You can definitely see in each and every frame how much skill and effort Nolan, together with his cast and crew, has given to be able to mount this ambitious film. You just have to give it to the man. Yet, after sitting through "Interstellar" for close to three hours, no matter how much I'd like to do it otherwise, I still feel like there's nothing much gained. I mean, is that it? 

Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris", with their much more spellbinding and compelling visuals and much more deep philosophical concerns, gave me such a high that I couldn't shake off for how many days after - even until now. Shane Carruth's "Primer", which is way, way much shorter (at little over an hour) but whose scientific terms are much more brain-wracking in their incomprehensibility and abstractness, left me at a loss for words afterwards. Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity", with its groundbreaking depiction of the perils of space exploration, had done so much to keep me bruised and battered. I wish I could say the same for Nolan's "Interstellar" (and how much I'd really want to do that): but there was just no such high, no such grappling with one's intellectual capacity and no such visceral punch after seeing the film. It was an awesome visual fare, but it didn't really do much to transport me to a whole new level of cinematic experience. Some say that "Interstellar" is filled with images and scenes that will "stay in your mind" long after the end credits have rolled. I don't think so. Damien Chazelle's electrifying "Whiplash" has the more rightful claim to that. Even on entertainment value alone, I'd go anytime instead with Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy", not to mention its more flamboyant visuals. 

Perhaps, Nolan and his screenwriter-brother Jonathan Nolan aren't really intent on digging deeper into the scientific/philosophical questions that they postulated that could've made "Interstellar" a truly memorable sci-fi fare. I couldn't help thinking that they just started exploring the questions but midway through they left them hanging there, not because they want us viewers to have something to think further about but because they just couldn't care to move forward. Thus, when that supposedly climactic moment is reached towards the end that finally explains the "ghost in the shelf", it looks unremarkable that I couldn't care less about it. What was supposed to be a moment of eureka just impressed me as a flat note. But I have to give credit to Hoyte van Hoytema's work as a cinematographer in the film (his past works include "Let the Right One In", "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Her"), as he gives "Interstellar" this old science-fiction movie look that's ironically refreshing to look at. 

Even the actors' performances in the film aren't something special. I like better the offbeat turns of Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe" and "Dallas Buyers Club", Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married" and Jessica Chastain in "Zero Dark Thirty". Here in "Interstellar", their performances, along with tens of others, just border on the predictable, even crossing over into the border of melodrama. I'm more enthralled by Donatas Banionis' haunted stare in "Solaris" than by McConaughey's teary-eyed longing in the film. 

Thus said, is Nolan simply overrated? For the record, he's not a bad director, definitely not. And I know he's still capable of making some really good films in the future. But perhaps, his merits as a filmmaker are being assessed more than what should be properly accorded to him. Nevertheless, "Interstellar" is to be commended for its sheer scope and ambition. But as a classic-in-the-making? Let me think about that. 

(Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar": Oh, I think that's planet Saturn.)