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camwynFinished watching Interstellar.
Things did not get any better with this movie. At all. Matt Damon turned out not just to be lying about his scientific results but willing to get murderous over them. The black scientist got killed, which was only a surprise because he wasn't the first person to get killed. When Matthew McConaughey flew into the black hole and gained access to a whoooooole buncha points along the timeline in one specific physical spot in his daughter's life he used it to fulfil the events of a closed time loop and never once showed any inclination to attempt to change things before the weird events that set the plot in motion.
The movie ends with what is supposed to be a happy ending- yay, McConaughey's daughter used Dad's information to save the human race! yay, McConaughey is fished out of the inky black void of space around Saturn and reunited with his daughter before old age gets her! yay, McConaughey goes off to rescue Ann Hathaway from the high time distortion planet around the black hole in the other galaxy! yay, there is still baseball!
Thing is, as far as I can tell, every single person shown on the space station where they revive McConaughey is white. There's one guy who might be Hispanic, tops. Other space stations are mentioned but we have no status for them.
Thanks to Dad's data McConaughey's daughter solved the problem of gravity and used that information to get space stations off the Earth and save humanity. What she did not do was solve the problem of the blight, the nitrogen-happy plant pathogen that was killing Earth's crop plants and that was- according to NASA earlier in the movie- destroying the oxygen in the atmosphere. Without that information, and with the mention of space stations but no mention of Earth, we can only assume that the blight raged unchecked through the green plants of Earth's land masses. The blight won. All of humanity that couldn't get onto the space stations either starved to death or died of oxygen deprivation as the blight used it all up. All the animal life that might have been left lost access to its food sources, except for the weird things in the deep oceans that live on the 'snow' of other things falling to the bottom, and the things that live around black smokers and metabolize sulfur.
But every animal left on Earth was left to starve, and the ones that weren't left to starve were left to suffocate, because humanity couldn't be bothered to collaborate long enough to solve the problem of the blight. Remember, this is a movie in which heroically solo scientists are the only scientists. They have support staffs with no names and no spoken lines, and they don't collaborate with anyone beyond the occasional assistant. The only group effort mentioned, anywhere, is NASA itself. No one is ever said to be frantically trying to pull together every scientist left in India or Japan or Kenya or Brazil or Norway or anywhere else to figure out how to stop this plant pathogen; the only people shown studying it are at NASA, and the NASA scientists are mostly trying to figure out how to leave the planet, anyway.
Earth, and every living thing on it that is not deemed worthy of being packed into a space station and lifted off planet, is left to starve and choke to death in a biological disaster worse than the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. Earth dies.
But it's a happy ending because the white Americans who play baseball lived.
The only good things I can say about this movie are that the visual effects crew did a fantastic job and that I really liked Hans Zimmer's score. The more I think about the movie's message, that love will save a tiny handful of humanity and every other living thing can just die and it won't matter, the more disgusted I am with it.
When the disc finished I fired up Netflix Streaming and watched the first episode of Farscape, and felt much better.
Things did not get any better with this movie. At all. Matt Damon turned out not just to be lying about his scientific results but willing to get murderous over them. The black scientist got killed, which was only a surprise because he wasn't the first person to get killed. When Matthew McConaughey flew into the black hole and gained access to a whoooooole buncha points along the timeline in one specific physical spot in his daughter's life he used it to fulfil the events of a closed time loop and never once showed any inclination to attempt to change things before the weird events that set the plot in motion.
The movie ends with what is supposed to be a happy ending- yay, McConaughey's daughter used Dad's information to save the human race! yay, McConaughey is fished out of the inky black void of space around Saturn and reunited with his daughter before old age gets her! yay, McConaughey goes off to rescue Ann Hathaway from the high time distortion planet around the black hole in the other galaxy! yay, there is still baseball!
Thing is, as far as I can tell, every single person shown on the space station where they revive McConaughey is white. There's one guy who might be Hispanic, tops. Other space stations are mentioned but we have no status for them.
Thanks to Dad's data McConaughey's daughter solved the problem of gravity and used that information to get space stations off the Earth and save humanity. What she did not do was solve the problem of the blight, the nitrogen-happy plant pathogen that was killing Earth's crop plants and that was- according to NASA earlier in the movie- destroying the oxygen in the atmosphere. Without that information, and with the mention of space stations but no mention of Earth, we can only assume that the blight raged unchecked through the green plants of Earth's land masses. The blight won. All of humanity that couldn't get onto the space stations either starved to death or died of oxygen deprivation as the blight used it all up. All the animal life that might have been left lost access to its food sources, except for the weird things in the deep oceans that live on the 'snow' of other things falling to the bottom, and the things that live around black smokers and metabolize sulfur.
But every animal left on Earth was left to starve, and the ones that weren't left to starve were left to suffocate, because humanity couldn't be bothered to collaborate long enough to solve the problem of the blight. Remember, this is a movie in which heroically solo scientists are the only scientists. They have support staffs with no names and no spoken lines, and they don't collaborate with anyone beyond the occasional assistant. The only group effort mentioned, anywhere, is NASA itself. No one is ever said to be frantically trying to pull together every scientist left in India or Japan or Kenya or Brazil or Norway or anywhere else to figure out how to stop this plant pathogen; the only people shown studying it are at NASA, and the NASA scientists are mostly trying to figure out how to leave the planet, anyway.
Earth, and every living thing on it that is not deemed worthy of being packed into a space station and lifted off planet, is left to starve and choke to death in a biological disaster worse than the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. Earth dies.
But it's a happy ending because the white Americans who play baseball lived.
The only good things I can say about this movie are that the visual effects crew did a fantastic job and that I really liked Hans Zimmer's score. The more I think about the movie's message, that love will save a tiny handful of humanity and every other living thing can just die and it won't matter, the more disgusted I am with it.
When the disc finished I fired up Netflix Streaming and watched the first episode of Farscape, and felt much better.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 01:04 pm (UTC)Here's the only thing I can think of to save it: this is actually a prequel to Wall-E and he's going to save the day and fix everything the whites did. Maybe.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 01:14 pm (UTC)I had briefly, early on in the movie, entertained the idea that the problem was that the Sun had gone unstable and the blight was only a partial problem, since there were issues with computer-controlled devices that might have been attributed to electromagnetic interference. If that had been the case I could've seen it as a very distant prelude to The Night Land. Unfortunately it was not.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 07:07 pm (UTC)No comment on the stupid racist movie since I didn't actually see it and had no intention to do so even before your review.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-08 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-08 12:24 pm (UTC)Weirdly, it comes very, very close to passing Bechdel. There are three women with speaking parts in this movie, and at one point two of them talk, and the conversation is about one, Matthew McConaughey's daughter, getting access to the room she lived in as a child and how the other has kept the room just as she left it, albeit with some of her things in filing boxes. It's only about a minute, maybe two minutes, but it's more female character interaction than you get in a lot of other movies.
I think that constitutes damning with faint praise.
I do have to say that the soundtrack is gorgeous and does not sound like the vast majority of Hans Zimmer's other work. If you wanted a semi-ambient soundtrack that makes really good use of organ music, the Interstellar soundtrack is great. The visual effects crew deserves serious recognition for what they pulled off, too, so I can compliment that about the movie. And the aerial shots were sufficiently well done that I did not catch myself wondering what it would take to become the helicopter pilot responsible for getting the shots, which says a lot about the visuals.
Most of the visuals, anyway. For some reason Chris Nolan had this thing with what looked like GoPro camera footage. Something like 75% to 90% of the shots in which Matthew McConaughey or Matt Damon or one of the robots was at the controls of a flying vehicle were taken from a camera affixed to the wing of the vehicle, so half the field of vision was sky and half the field of vision was the fuselage. Which got kind of disorienting when the vehicles spun, because it was the sky spinning the whole time, and also made it hard to really picture what the damn vehicles looked like, because all you saw was that one angle.
But the other visual effects and the genuine aerial shots were good. And the soundtrack was good. The rest of it... no.