Interstellar: Visual Splendor Eclipsing Storytelling & The Assertion of Film Values Yasser Owino College

James Cameron's Avatar, with all its visual splendor, innovation, and ambition, it wasn't enough to make up for the 178 minutes of derivative, heavy-handed storytelling. Avatar isn't the first larger than life blockbuster with a mediocre narrative. For the record, Avatar isn't that visually astonishing either. It doubled down on gimmicks such as 3D. In a world of James Cameron and George Lucas (Star Wars), filmmaker Christopher Nolan is a warrior for stylistic purity. Whereas others seem convinced that cinema needs to move in revolutionary new directions to survive. Nolan sees that the possibilities of 2D haven't even come close to being exhausted, let alone fully realized. He's among the last to fight for everything audiences treasure about celluloid.

For this reason and others, it may be unfair to compare Interstellar to Avatar, but it's not unreasonable either. Both films are big, muscular operations that collapse onto weak skeletons. Both force themselves to use characters as vehicles for exposition then choose to use them as megaphones for awkward philosophical declaration, “Love isn't something we invented.....its observable, powerful... It has to mean something....”(Nolan, 2014). Of course Interstellar is noticeably...