Interstellar 4K Blu-ray
By Chris Heinonen on
Audio Quality
Video Quality
Overall
Summary
“INTERSTELLAR” stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow and Michael Caine. With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars.
Movie Review
Set at an indeterminate date later this century, Interstellar shows up a world with family, crop failure, and dust storms. The prospects for long-term survival on earth at this point are low, with most people now focused on farming to try to survive instead of other pursuits. NASA has come up with two solutions to possibly save humanity, and those are the focus of the film.
Interstellar has great ambitions, and overall does a very good job of trying to meet them but isn’t quite the cerebral film that something like 2001 is, despite some similarities in look and feel throughout. For me, the end of the film ties up everything in too neat of a package, leaving you very little to actually think about once it is done. For all the challenging ideas the film presents while you watch it, they all wind up resolved too easily in the final act for my liking. It’s still a good film, but not the sort of thing that you need to watch again to try to understand all the thoughts and ideas it has put forward.
Technical Review
Christopher Nolan loves to shoot on film, and Interstellar is shot on a combination of 35mm and 70mm film. The transfer here to 4K Blu-ray is almost impeccable. Aside from a few areas of shimmering in fine details, the transfer is perfect. Details are fantastic, and colors are rich and true. There is good use of HDR, though not as much as their might be with a native digital image, but it is much better to be restrained than to have too much HDR. The image is often very dark but that seems to be the look of the film as opposed to having some shadow crush.
The soundtrack is still a standard 5.1 lossless and not Atmos or DTS:X. With the number of scenes that would really benefit from an object-based approach, this is a disappointment, but the soundtrack is fantastic as it is. Voices are easy to understand, and surrounds are used continually. It’s not a reference soundtrack because of the channel count, but it comes quite close.
Special Features:
- The Science of Interstellar
- Plotting an Interstellar Journey
- Life on Cooper’s Farm
- The Dust
- TARS and CASE
- The Cosmic Sounds of Interstellar
- The Space Suits
- The Endurance
- Shooting in Iceland: Miller’s Planet / Mann’s Planet
- The Ranger and the Lander
- Miniatures in Space
- The Simulation of Zero-G
- Celestial Landmarks
- Across All Dimensions and Time
- Final Thoughts
Review System: Sony A1E OLED, Sony UBP-X800 UltraHD Blu-ray Player, Oppo UDP-203 UltraHD Blu-ray Player, KEF Ci5160RL-THX Fronts, Ci3160RL-THX Center, 2x Ci200RR-THX Surrounds, 4x CI200RR-THX Atmos Speakers, Anthem MRX 1120 Receiver, Power Sound Audio XS30se Subwoofer.
Pros
Great looking image on 4K Blu-ray, true to the film nature and not abusing HDR, a good story that keeps you interested.
Cons
No object-based soundtrack, movie not quite as deep in ideas as it aims to be in the end.
Summary
Interstellar isn't up to the level of the Sci-Fi classics, but it is a well done film that aims high and for a while feels like it will get there. On 4K Blu-ray this film based transfer looks wonderful, but I do wish it has Atmos.
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