I just got done watching a featurette for Christopher Nolan‘s Intersteller (included at the bottom of this post) and at the very end there’s a bit of footage from the film featuring a full-sized look at the black hole as you see above. It’s a very cool visual effect, but it has the appearance of being a visual effect nonetheless. The question is how do you go from turning something that looks like a visual effect into something that “feels” real?
Earlier this year I think Gareth Edwards accomplished an attempt at realism within a film containing a massive CG creation as best as he could with the sky-diving sequence in Godzilla. As the puny humans fell alongside the massive radioactive beast the audience was given a greater insight into the size of Godzilla. It doesn’t mean we now believe Godzilla is real, but it allows us to accept him as a reality of the film we’re watching and not just a bunch of digital bits actors are pretending to run from.
In Interstellar, while Nolan offers us this impressive wide shot of what they come to refer to as Gargantua, this is merely the money shot, providing that “wow” factor. Where he and his team convince us of the sheer size of the wonder, as seen through human eyes, is in the following shot.
It’s definitely not as pretty, but it’s how Gargantua appears to Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) through the front windshield of the space craft he’s piloting. Nolan goes with a handheld camera for the shot, adding a sense of intimacy and giving the audience that “being there” sensation. It offers only a peek at the mystery this group of explorers is about to enter. It’s a shot that turns the “money shot” above into more than just a special effect and once we get to the moment the crew finally enter the black hole you have the singular moment in this film I would say makes a trip to seeing it in full, six-story, 70mm IMAX worth it.
If there’s any one reason I think Interstellar deserves serious applause for its visual effects work it’s the fact they most often didn’t feel like effects. I didn’t feel as if I was watching a bunch of CG scenes slapped together, which allowed for more of the story to shine through. Now whether or not that story truly captured your imagination or not is up for another debate, but visually I think this film is a marvel.
