4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
Matthew McConaughey plays Joseph Cooper, a former NASA test pilot, turned corn farmer as the world faces global famine. He and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) have a special bond, with her interest in space and science. “Interstellar” premiered November 7, 2014. It received five Academy Award nominations and won Best Visual Effects, with 50 percent of the film captured on the large format IMAX camera.
(Click an image to scroll the larger versions)
“INTERSTELLAR: 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray; 2014; PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong profanity; Digital copy via Apple TV (4K), Fandango Home (4K)
Best extra: “The Future is Now: A Look Back”
The 10th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD Collector’s Edition.
4K screenshots courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Click the image for an Amazon purchase.
THE BOX OFFICE numbers for Christopher Nolan’s 10th-anniversary limited re-release of his sci-fi “Interstellar” were out of this world.
It averaged nearly $27,000 during its first weekend on 165 IMAX screens. Those screen numbers were double that of the next best film, Disney’s animated sequel “Moana 2,” which totaled $12,380 per screen across the U.S. and Canada.
In North America, every seat sold out for the 10, seven-story IMAX theaters showing Nolan’s preferred 70mm film screenings. The rest of the “Interstellar” showings were in IMAX’s slightly smaller digital format, which I took in nearly two weeks ago, at a Regal Theater in Northern California. Every seat was taken except for the first row, and the experience was emotional and exhilarating.
To coincide with the original weeklong theatrical re-release – and extended another week to December 18 – Paramount Pictures and Nolan produced an “Interstellar: 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Collector’s Edition” housed in a mini-coffee table-like book. The enclosed 4K and Blu-ray are the same Paramount discs from 2017. But, the bonus Blu-ray disc housing all of the extras includes the perceptive new featurette “The Future is Now: A Look Back. It also includes the excellent 14-part “Inside Interstellar,” with two roundtable discussions. There are five costume patches, five mini-theatrical reproductions, and a never-before-seen storyboard sequence from Nolan’s archive in the box set.
Coop and his family
(1) John Lithgow plays Coop’s father-in-law Donald, who sweeps the dust off the front porch. (2) Timothée Chalamet plays Coop’s 15-year old son Tom. (3) Coop and Murph take control of a drone with their laptop. (4) Dust storms continue to plague everyday life at the family farm. (5) Coop gives 10-year-old Murph one of his watches and tells her, “When we get back, we’re gonna compare. By the time I get back, we might even be the same age, you and me.” (6) As Coop drives away, Murph yells, “Dad.”
STORYLINE
MANKIND is on the edge of losing the planet; Earth has turned into an apocalyptic dust bowl. The military has disbanded, and the government space program scrapped.
This is the world’s last generation.
An underground NASA program led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) might be able to save us. A secret mission to find a home in deep space has been privately commissioned and they’ve enlisted ex-NASA pilot Cooper, played with emotional verve by Matthew McConaughey, to lead it. Now a reluctant farmer, Cooper is a single father with a teenage son already pegged by the system to follow in his footsteps working the soil. It’s Murph (Mackenzie Foy), his young, head-in-the-clouds daughter, who has visions beyond the cornfields. She keeps insisting a ghost in her bedroom is leaving mysterious messages. The father-daughter relationship is the heart of the film, driving us to care about what happens.
Coop accepts the mission to pilot the Endurance, a large ring-shaped craft similar to Kubrick’s space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The crew also includes Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway). They must travel through a wormhole, a shortcut near Saturn, in hopes of reaching manned probes sent to colonize future homes.
Coop and crew face many obstacles including Einstein’s daunting “gravitational time dilation” property that time on Earth moves faster than life on a spacecraft. An hour on a distant planet equals seven years on Earth. (Sci-fi fans have been dealing with time dilation since “Star Trek,” which played fast-and-loose with the concept. “Interstellar” earns kudos for tackling Einstein’s findings head-on.) Murph is heartbroken when her dad tells her they might be the same age when he returns. Jessica Chastain delivers a potent performance as the adult Murph, still bitter over her father’s absence.
Endurance heads toward a Wormhole
and a possible future home on an Ocean planet
(1&2) The Endurance crew takes off from a secret NASA facility, which includes Dr. Amelia Brand, (Anne Hathaway), responsible for planet colonization. (3-7) Coop, Dr. Brand, and Doyle (Wes Bentley) land on the Ocean planet, which has massive tidal waves caused by Gargantua's gravitational pull.
EXTRAS
The new 23-minute featurette “The Future is Now: A Look Back” starts with a short clip from 2014. Nolan says he’s always been interested in space travel and exploration, which he calls, “the ultimate frontier.” Then director Denis Villeneuve, who’s spent the last decade making four first-rate sci-fi films (“Arrival,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Dune: Part One, and Part Two”) considers the real test of a great film is “not the critics, is not film festivals, is not the accolades, and not even the box office,” he says. “The real test for a movie is time. And, “Interstellar” definitely passed that test.”
Joining the conversation is Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who says, Nolan's films tackle “big themes, big ideas, and big distances within the Hollywood system… But they are the opposite of cookie-cutter movies. They are personal. They are thoughtful. They come right from him.”
Nolan’s wife Emma Thomas, who produced all of his projects considers “Interstellar” a “nakedly emotional film. It’s so personal, and I think people didn’t really know what to do with it when it came out.” Now, 10 years later, “we’re able to look at ‘Interstellar’ on its own merits.”
Nolan still wrestles with the idea that ‘Interstellar’ was made ahead of its time. “I think we were swimming upstream a little bit,” he says.
Villeneuve makes the case that the majority of the so-called science fiction films are “in fact, fantasy movies.” He continues, “Few, were made by artists that had the necessary discipline to explore, to do their research, and to surround themselves with real scientists in order to bring a story that’s based on actual science.”
Nolan and his brother Jonathan, the other half of the writing team relied on real science as the foundation of their space adventure, recruiting Astrophysicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, as their executive producer. Thorne is an expert in the field of gravitational waves and the warping of space-time, Nolan says during one of the documentaries.
The carryover “Inside Interstellar” is a comprehensive look into the production showcasing the plotting the journey; filming in the Canadian Rockies for the Cooper farm; creating a dust storm and then cleaning it up; developing the TARS robots; Hans Zimmer’s haunting score that uses a large-scale church organ; space suits based on NASA gear; Endurance’s design and artificial gravity; filming in Iceland, the home for two distant planets; designing the mini-spaceships, using miniatures just like in “Star Wars” and “2001”; simulating zero-gravity; creating a realistic wormhole; designing the Tesseract – a three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional hypercube that’s been unfolded, and final thoughts from the Nolan brothers.
23 years later
(1&2) After a delayed departure from the Ocean planet, time on Earth moves much faster and Murph and Tom are now adults. Jessica Chastain delivers a potent performance as the older Murph and Casey Affleck as Tom, who’s taken over the family farm. (3) Prof. Romilly (David Ryasi) also aged, overseeing the Endurance during the mission to the Ocean planet. (4) Dr. Brand is overtaken with emotion.
VIDEO
Nolan’s love affair with the immersive larger-than-life IMAX (18K resolution) screen format started in the summer of 2006 after he captured nighttime IMAX test footage around Hollywood. During his stylish action thriller “The Dark Knight” (2008), he filmed key action sequences with the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) as Bruce Wayne and Heath Ledger as a haunting and disturbing Joker. It only totaled 15 percent, since the massive camera (215 pounds) was too noisy to record the actor’s lines.
Four years later, Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister upped the IMAX ante to 72 minutes of footage for “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).
With his sci-fi opus “Interstellar,” Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Dunkirk,” “Oppenheimer”) pushed the IMAX experience to the 50 percent mark.
For the home 4K Ultra HD presentation, IMAX scenes are slightly cropped on the top and bottom to 1.78:1 from its original IMAX 1.43:1, and the dialogue scenes captured with anamorphic Panavision lens with 35mm stock 2.39:1, so the aspect ratio changes from moment to moment. The 35mm resolution disparity is more apparent and lacks the extraordinary clarity found on the IMAX frames.
The 4K master for “Interstellar” was sourced from Nolan’s master interpositive, instead of its varying-sized original camera negatives. The HDR grading is in the standard HDR10 – sorry no Dolby Vision. Colors are well saturated and on the warm side on Earth and much cooler on the icy planet. The IMAX film grain is tight and larger for the 35mm scenes. The black levels are dark in the blackness of space, without losing detail, while the highlights are controlled. Overall, the results are staggering – especially the IMAX scenes.
AUDIO
Nolan doesn’t provide Atmos soundtracks for his films. Even so, the six-channel DTS-HD Master soundtrack has a powerful punch. Hans Zimmer’s haunting score, in which he used a large-scale church organ, echoes throughout your home theater. Theatrically, the sound levels were extreme, which Nolan prefers. At home, you can mimic that level if so desired or take it down a notch or two and keep everyone happy – especially your neighbors.
Another standing ovation is in order, for Nolan’s 10th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD presentation.
― Bill Kelley III, High-def Watch producer
Comments