INTERSTELLAR LIVE - Review/Thoughts

So the evening began surprisingly with a red carpet, which after a bit I left and just went in lol, as I was gonna see everyone inside anyway. Turns out I missed Chastain but oh well.



So the evening began…with a really nice and short intro from Stephen Hawking himself, who introduced everyone on stage! Extended applause all around. Then the pre-show talk, which was really quite nice. Some things we’ve known before such as that ‘Day One’ story were brought up, and Kip had a couple of slides explaining the Tesseract and how the black hole came to be and how Nolan decided to eschew scientific accuracy for a couple of thing such as the Doppler shift…you’ll probably see that first bit online or somewhere (that April 7, I believe, special showing thing across the US?) soon, as it was filmed and all.

Now for the main bit, after the intro from Caine and Nolan and Zimmer…yup it began. It was damn good. Really really fantastic hearing it live as the film plays, and it doesn’t need describing, you can imagine the feeling…. But the real kickers came in the second half…the whole Coward/Imperfect Lock/No Time For Caution sequence was chilling and really awesome, but NOTHING, not even, what I feel is a bit overhyped tbh, NTFC (of course the film version with organs and all, and of course applause at the end)…came close to Detach. WOW. WOW. WOW. Jaw hit the floor immediately when the organ kicked in, the sheer power, well I guess the extreme bass isn’t just from post production huh. It hits you right there. And the Wagnerian organ/strings/wind combo at the end was just the icing wow. I was probably shaken and overwhelmed with joy/feels/epic and exhaustion at the end of that, which is something I have never quite felt ever during a live performance. And also another bit I loved was the slight variations in orchestrations in such in the bits you heard over and over…especially Day One/Who’s They. Everything was just beautifully performed, I got extreme chills at the end credits, where it was really nice seeing different parts of the audience applauding even people like Paul Franklin, David Gyasi and so on…and of course the big cheer (which I kicked off) when “A Christopher Nolan Film/INTERSTELLAR” came up.

Overall….probably an even better way to experience the movie than 70mm IMAX. Unless you can fit a 60-piece orchestra and a giant organ in a 70mm IMAX….but it wouldn’t match Albert Hall acoustics though TBH. And while I really hope they do a tour of this like Giacchino did with Star Trek/Into Darkness as you all HAVE to experience this…it will never be quite the same performed by most if not all of the same performers from the recording sessions, Zimmer himself, and of course the giant 9,999-pipe organ in question.

10/10 (as if this even needs a score, it transcends that ) Thank you Hans, Roger, Gavin, all the performers, RAH and Orchid for actually organising this (hope this gets them to do even more recent movies with excellent scores too) and of course Nolan!

