Will Christopher Nolan's Interstellar be the heralded filmmaker's first ever flop, or will mainstream audiences respond to what is being called a very personal and ambitious film with big ideas? We'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out, but the first wave of reviews have come in, and they are not as overwhelmingly positive as his previous work. The sci-fi thriller currently has a 72% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a number which will surely change as more reviews come in before the November 7 release. The aggregate score so far represents his lowest RT score to date for his first eight films:
Following - 78% Fresh
Memento - 92% Fresh
Insomnia - 92% Fresh
Batman Begins - 85% Fresh
The Prestige - 78% Fresh
The Dark Knight - 94% Fresh
Inception - 86% Fresh
The Dark Knight Rises - 88% Fresh
Interstellar - 72%
Below we have compiled excerpts from some of the first 18 reviews that were published today, which display a diverse number of opinions on this sci-fi thriller.
"An exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done...More emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit."
"Preoccupied with the notion that humankind will one day need to migrate from Earth to some other planet we can call home, Interstellar bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions...It was inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing..."
"Interstellar may represent an apotheosis of sorts, as it illustrates the very best and the very worst of Nolan as a writer-director."
"Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you've never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you've seen all too many times before."
"Interstellar is long, grand, strange and demanding - not least because it allows time to slip away from under our feet while running brain-aching ideas before our eyes. It's a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality."
While a 72% early rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a number most filmmakers would be very pleased with, these early reviews hint that Interstellar may be Christopher Nolan's most divisive movie to date. We'll have to wait just a few short weeks to see if the mixed reaction will have an adverse effect on the box office receipts when Interstellar opens on November 7.
What do you think about these early reviews? Will they have any impact on you heading to the theaters to see Interstellar next month? Chime in with your thoughts below.