Revisiting Interstellar As Oppenheimer Approaches (Amazon Prime)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watch this tonight, there's always something good to watch. Let's get started today. On the show, I am revisiting Interstellar. As Oppenheimer approaches. There's a moment early an Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey sees an Indian drone in the sky and he's excited about it and he wants to pursue it, but his truck has a flat tire, and Timothy Shalom plays his son, tells him, hey man, there's a flat tire. You can't and they but he doesn't care. He drives the truck anyway after it and they almost drive off a cliff. And I was thinking about that, and I thought, this moment, this sequence is like a microcosm of the incredible strength of Christopher Nolan's a filmmaker and the arguable weaknesses. And I always felt like this was his most flawed film.

1:19 I always felt like his ambition is so great, and I love his ambition, and the movie is beautifully made, it constructed, and then you watch it and you kind of second guess yourself and you're like, wait a second, like you think that I have I is this a plot hole? And then you're like, well, it's it's so smartly put together. Maybe there's just something I'm not understanding. And in a lot of his movies, I felt that way, where I'm like, this kind of seems like a plot hole, and then I think, no, there must just be something I'm not understanding. And my memory of Interstellar is that I saw it in the theater and I felt that really strongly. At the time, I had been studying stuff about black holes. I was writing something about black holes, so I knew, you know, a decent amount of stuff about it, and I felt like this movie just ignored just the basic idea of how those things work. And I really had a very honestly, like a pretty negative reaction to it, and I kind of you walked out of the theater. I never watched again. Obviously, I am in the minority. The movie made three quarters of a billion dollars was critically well received, although if you go to Rod Tomatoes and then you just go to just the top critics, it's a bit more mixed. Most of the criticism is about the last act.

2:21 But I'm very excited for Oppenheimer. I'm reading a book about three guys that are involved in making a decision to use the atomic bomb, and so I was like, you know, I feel like I should go back and give Interstellar another look. Maybe the passage of time. You know, we do the all star episodes on the show. Maybe I just kind of judged it unfairly, and so I did, and it was interesting. There were some things that I actually did not understand, but there were also some things that I think are still kind of plot holes. So let's get into it. This is revisiting Interstellar. So this movie has a single sequence that I think is better than many entire films, which is the sequence on the planet. And obviously we're going to be in spoilers here. I'm assuming if you're listening, if you're listening to this, you've seen an Interstellar. The sequence on the planet with the mountain sized wave and the robot turns into like an asterisk and rolls to get in Hathaway and they get up in the wave and then they got to escape. And it's just a great idea. If you're looking for a home planet, you're going to be looking for a planet that has water. Great, we found a planet with water, except the whole planet is these giant killer waves. That's a great idea of you know, it's a great example of taking your characters out of the frying pan and their friar.

3:31 I think it is up there with any sequence, any single sequence in any Nolan movie. That's great. And then the planet that Matt Damon is on is also incredible. There's a moment when they're flying and they hit a frozen clouds, so cleverly done, because it looks like they're just flying they're seen a cloud and then they hit it and it's solid and it breaks your brain for a second. It is a great idea, and the Damon twist is incredible, So so much good stuff, right, But then I think one reasons that I had issues with it is that it's so deadly serious at times in ways that also kind of feel silly. But it's hard to even it's sort of intangible, right, So, for example, At one point, we're in the future. You know, obviously the story takes place in the future. The only sustainable crop is corn. And there's a dinner scene that is extremely serious and the wife of Casey Affleck she tells their kid, finish your fritter. But she says it like a deadly serious, like heavy drama away, like finish it fritter. And it's one of those intangibles that intellectually it makes sense, It logically makes sense, but it just feels silly else to explain it. Sort of the same thing. Jessica Chastain asks Michael Caine an extremely important question. He's just admitted that he lied to her and betrayed her in this horrible way, and she's she asks him this very important question that's like found to who she is as a person, and he just

5:01 quotes a poem and dies. Now, to be fair to the film, probably might the scene that bothered me the most of the whole movie is when Anne Hathaway has the thing where she basically talks about and I had remembered it as like love is the only dimension that transcends whatever, and I remember seeing the theater, like, what are you talking about now? I when on the rewatch I was able to listen more carefully. What she actually says is love is the only thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. So what threw me off there was the word dimension. In the theater. It's a two hour and forty nine minute movie. It's so easy to miss, like exactly what she's saying. I took it as she's saying that, like, love is a dimension, which I'm like, love is an abstract idea, what are you talking about? But she's saying that love is something that still applies across physical space in the passage of time, which is of course true. If she literally just took the word dimension, that totally would have worked for me. But I misunderstood on the first watch because just trying to catch it and now scrutinizing it more carefully, obviously it makes sense. It's clearly illustrated in the relationship with Chastain and McConaughey, which does transcend space and time, even before they get into this stuff in the third act. And I relate obviously much more into the central relationship now that I have a daughter and you know, there's a moment where I think it's the first planet they go to, and then they go back up and like twenty years have passed and they have twenty years of video messages and McConaughey is watching

6:33 those twenty years of video messages, and that all hit me much harder now, right, You're much more aware of time is so much more precious in your mind when you have children and you see them growing and you know to miss that time. I actually understand what that means now. So I would say my biggest criticism of the film now is like null and void, I was wrong. My second biggest criticism of the film is that they just casually invent this concept of a gentle singularity. So this is something that I again, when I saw the movie, I was like, this seems made up, and then I googled it when I watched this yesterday, and it is made up. It's not a real thing. They just made it up.

7:15 So if you research black holes, the idea of the black hole is that the nature of it if you if you as in a spaceship or in this movie, Matthew McConaughey ejects into space, or to even get close to a black hole. You would for sure die, no matter what, you would die. It's that's it. It's not more complicated than that. And you know, they it's a problem because as storytellers, it's so tantalizing, like, oh man, what happens when you go in a black hole? The answer is you die, that's the answer. And so they just made this thing up to deal with that problem, the idea of the gentle singularity. And I think the reason bothered me so much, and this is this is how marketing affects your perception movie. They had made such a big deal about, oh my god, it is so scientifically accurate in the marketing leading up to the release of the film. So I think that's why maybe it rubbed me the wrong way. It's a perfectly reasonable like you have to make some stuff up in service of the story. And it's also you know, you can make the argument of like, hey, who really knows none of us have been in a black hole, so you know, I was much more lenient on it this watch. The other thing is that the movie is pretty long, so I feel like in the theater, if a couple things rub you the wrong way, you can kind of check out on it at home.

8:30 I was able to take a break, go in for the last forty five minutes with a clear head, and I really did enjoy it much more on this viewing. That being said, the part that I have a tough time with at the end, at the very very end. So Matthew McConaughey, the whole movie is about him and his daughter being separated and then making their way back to each other. And she's on her deathbed and it's like, hey, I haven't seen you my entire life, and she's like, you know, you shouldn't watch your child die. Like, I'm good, you can piece out go find Anne halfaway and he's like, all right, sweet, let me go find it and halfway and it felt a little bit like kind of a betrayal of the themes of the entire movie. So again I just kind of rubbed me and bit the wrong way. But overall, I would say my initial reaction on this very much was like the arrogance of youth, right Like, sitting there thinking like as a twenty six year old or whatever, I was being like, oh, yeah, this movie sucks.

9:26 The movie rocks. It's a really good movie. You know. My issues with it. Notwithstanding, I think my issues with it in the grand picture of what the movie accomplishes are relatively minor. And this movie is really good, breaking news. Interstellar is good. Oh it really, it really is. I was I was way too hard on it. But in the tradition of these all star episodes on the show, definitely the passage of time affects your viewing. I am so curious to know if there's any of you out there listening to this who had an equally mixed reaction Interstellar, either when you first saw it maybe you still do or is it just gangbusters for you all the way through and you just absolutely loved it the first time, still love it? Has it played different for you as the years have passed.

10:11 Yeah, I just would love to know your thoughts on Interstellar. You can always reach me at Benamore Dan on Twitter, watch This Tonight on Instagram, watch This Night podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group. That is the show for today Until next time. Bye,