I envy anyone living in Austin right now. Bob Bullock has the optimal presentation for this movie with 70mm IMAX Film. They've been doing it for years so their projectionists and AV technicians are top-notch guys who still use old-school technology.
Not sure where you got those numbers. They scanned Wizard of Oz at 8k for preservation but it is generally accepted 4K gets most of 35mm. The 12K number also seems arbitrary. I used to get bent out of shape over the loss of film IMAX until I realized due to film degradation and lens MTF loss (filming, transfer, projection) the resolution is less important than the sensor size area when filming. Nolan loves IMAX though.
It looked great but the story was marginal. Hoping that isn't the case with Interstellar because I know Nolan makes a great looking movie.
Am hearing very trustworthy reports that you should go for the visuals, but don't expect much from the plot, the dialogue, or (sigh) the science. Despite having (supposedly) Kip Thorne as a consultant, astronomers are having a field day with the big goofs. That's too bad, because it didn't need to happen. Still going to try to see it on 70.
This movie was great. Trust 99ers. I saw on 70mm IMAX at the Bob Bullock. Sure there's some weird ass logic and science fiction towards the end, but the experience itself was great. It's Nolan, so you'll likely talk about like Inception, except this has more closure.
From the reviews I've been reading they sound like two very different movies. Gravity was primarily about the action with very little character development and no philosophical implications beyond just surviving the situation. Interstellar sounds like character and philosophy are really what the movie is about it and the action is secondary.
Saw this last night. First, I just have to mention, I saw this at the Cypress Cinemark XD theater, and their projector was out of calibration - there was a red fringe to the right of every bright light, and the whole thing was dim and out of focus. I tried not to let that diminish my experience with the movie, but it was very distracting. That said.. It's definitely a 'grown-up's movie'. By that I mean, this is not Star Wars, this is not Guardians of the Galaxy, this is not Gravity. This is a movie which would have been at home in the 70's alongside 2001 and Silent Running. Generally I liked the movie. I recommend it. But I do have a few problems with it. Spoiler Problem #1 The entire premise I'm sorry, I just cannot accept the notion that the Earth is essentially 'running out of oxygen'. The Earth is about 80% water, and the oceans are filled with plankton, which create oxygen. Unless this 'blight' (McGuffin extraordinaire) was doing more than randomly destroying wheat and okra, such as destroying all plankton, and all trees and grasses, etc, then I just don't buy the whole premise upon which the movie is founded. Having said that.. 'suspension of disbelief' and all that.. it's fiction after all, so, ok, whatever, that's the fictional world they created for the movie. Problem #2 Technical issues with the film itself By this I mean, I have the same problem with this one that I had with parts of Inception - I literally couldn't understand what the actors were saying, too much of the time. I get it's 'realistic' for people to occasionally mumble, but there was too dang much of that, and I suspect there were important plot elements which were mumbled too much to be intelligible. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. My hearing is fine, as far as I know. Problem #3 The world being overcome by.. dust? Dirt? So there is this mysterious disease 'blight'.. AND unstoppable rampaging dust storms? Is this an implication that the world was 'drying out'? Everything was certainly green enough, and nobody mentioned the REASON for the rampaging dust storms.. just that they were happening. Is Hawaii being blasted by rampaging dust storms? Canada? The Amazon? Britain? Again, I get it. It's fiction, and all of that is basically just a series of excuses to create a 'need' to find another habitable planet, instead of merely a 'desire' to find one. This creates the dramatic tension, etc etc etc. Problem #4 The 'science' Ok, I'm not an astro-physicist. So maybe my nit-picks are the result of my own ignorance, I don't know. However. 'Time-shift' from going down to the surface of a planet? Really? I understand the concept of intense gravitational concentration 'slowing time' .. Vernor Vinge wrote some extremely deep and interesting novels about it - 'Marooned in Real-Time', books like that - which I enjoyed, so I can understand what they were trying to do. Maybe it was just dumbed-down too much, but the effect they were describing was the sort of thing which would span thousands, if not millions, of light-years.. not something which would happen just from going down to the surface of a planet, which happens to be orbiting a huge black hole. Again, I get it, it's there to create dramatic tension, and to make us feel the desperate loss of years with every decision and mistake. Problem #5 Why did Matt Damon's robot blow up? Seriously. Why did it blow up? Also, Cooper's robot was smart enough to disable the auto-docking procedure, but NOT smart enough to disable the ship from being piloted by anyone other than Cooper? Ugh. Silly. And.. the tidal-wave planet.. what, it was a foot-deep, except when the waves were like a thousand feet high? I'm guessing that is supposed to be caused by gravity somehow.. but, ok, they went down to the planet BECAUSE they had received a continuous stream of 'thumbs-up' data from the sensor equipment on the ship which had landed there ten years ago. But how? Hathaway said that because of the 'time shift', the previous ship had probably only been destroyed about ten minutes prior. But if that was the case, and time itself was passing astronomically slower in that spot, then the sensor would NOT have been transmitting a steady stream of data. So, to me that was a fail. And then they fly back up to the waiting ship, where the black guy was just standing there calmly saying 'You were gone 23 years'. There's no way there were enough resources on that ship to support that guy living there alone in solitary confinement for 23 years. Plus, more than likely he would have gone completely insane, or just flown the ship off somewhere else long ago. OR.. if the crashed ship had been transmitting steadily for the last 13 years or so, then their little landing craft would have also assuredly been transmitting steadily as well. ehh it just doesn't work. The guy was just too calm and sane. At least Matt Damon was clearly insane from the moment we laid eyes on him. Problem #6 The Black Hole Ok, maybe I just don't understand black holes. My understanding is that the mass of a black hole is so super-dense that it has collapsed upon itself, causing such impossibly intense gravitational pull that even light particles themselves cannot escape the strength of the gravity. (On a side note, do Neutrinos still pass through black holes?) To me, this means that once a black hole sucks matter past that point where even light cannot escape, then matter ceases to have form and is crushed instantly to its sub-atomic particles.. It's not a 'place you can go'.. you can't skim just inside the event horizon, you can't 'transmit out of it'.. you can't look inside.. anything which goes there, anything at all, is instantly obliterated. At least that's the way I have always understood it. So the idea of flying into one.. well, it brought back shades of Disney's 'The Black Hole'.. which posited that the black hole was actually itself a wormhole. Maybe so, but this movie seems to have wanted us to believe that it was just a place you could go. Maybe the '5th-dimensional beings' were able to manipulate and control even the galactically-destructive power of a black hole.. if so.. yayy. And on the subject of the black hole.. Michael Caine needed to look inside a black hole to 'get the remaining data he needed' to control gravity enough to launch the massive space station thingy? Really? How would he even know that? Again, I just chalk this up to dramatic fiction. And lastly.. the trippy interlude with the physical manifestation of time as a thing you could touch.. really cool actually.. but .. morse code embedded into the second hand of a watch? Really? I guess it was lucky she happened to notice that, eh? Now these are mostly nit-picks, because as I said, I enjoyed the movie, and I do recommend it. And I don't know that the things I am nit-picking at could have been changed anyway. I'll probably watch it at least one more time, and maybe I will catch more of the dialogue I missed the first time. Go see it, if you like science fiction. If nothing else, there are some impressive things to see, some genuinely good things on screen, the actors are all top notch, and heck, it's not a comic book movie or another sequel.
Spoiler Spoiler Nero, if memory serves, are you the "movie-review" guy on here? Were you the one (this is going waaaay back) who trashed "The Two Towers"? You or someone wrote a review that had me thinking, Man, this dude must be a lot of fun to watch movies with ( ) ("We shouldn't even be here, Mr. Frodo." "DAMN right!") Sigh. I'll see this movie and judge for myself, although after glancing at your spoilers, I'm stunned you would actually recommend it. Your remarks scream either "this movie stinks" or "I'm hypercritical". Which made me remember the "Two Towers" review (might have been someone else, though).
you have to watch it in IMAX, it's hard to describe the impact of the visuals. There are lots of things in the movie that make you think, but that's part of the fun.
if you need help understanding the movie after seeing it, go here: http://screenrant.com/interstellar-ending-spoilers-time-travel/
Which is the bestest theater in Houston to watch it? Inside loop/galleria preferably. I typically go Edwards Greenway Grand Palace Stadium 24 no idea what they are using.
