Well, we decided to review these movies together since we went to see both of them within one week and also as they both are mainly dramas we thought they were comparable, to some respect at least. We focused mainly on character development in the comparison part.
Gone Girl
To get it off our chests: the female characters were great. Very unconventional for a Hollywood film. Truly intriguing in a way we haven't seen in some time on modern cinema screen. Interestingly the source material and screenplay is by a woman (which is freaking awesome since there aren't that many females involved in that level of film making), but you wouldn't know since both male and female characters are wonderfully complex and neither sex is left undeveloped. And the fact that "the public" might think that being a woman has anything to do with being capable of creating complicated and realistic male characters need to read their Jane Austens, George Eliots or Agatha Christies.
The building of characters was executed brilliantly: all of them were more than just the sum of their actions, like we all are. A great example of this is the wife: how she isn't just a femme fatale or a sociopath, but something beyond that. Or how the husband behaves like a complete middle-aged prick but then he isn't that at all in fact. Also, that building up of characters was woven expertly to the story when more was always revealed about the characters and the viewer's expectations changed as well. One way of knowing whether a movie has good characters is trying to describe them to someone who has not seen the film without mentioning their appearance, occupation or actions.
Relationships between people were gripping and quite believable. We liked the fact that the film took it's time to explain the characters' motives, while also leaving things to the viewer to discover. Thanks for perpetuating the myth of women lying about rape, by the way. We get that it's meant to make her look more sociopathic, but seriously, there would have been other ways to establish that.
General overview and opinion: Visuals were good, particularly we enjoyed the camerawork and editing. The cinematography reminded us of classic, golden age Hollywood Hitchcock, like Vertigo. Even though the music wasn't melodically memorable, it fit the story and was efficient in building tension and mystery. The story was very coherent: you could easily retell it and not miss any of the important bits, but the idea is also very simple and in itself interesting. All in all, a very entertaining, thought-provoking and just an insanely good cinematic experience (and we didn't even think of the run time).
Interstellar
Word of warning: we have not had good Nolan experiences in the past....so we did go in with some prejudices. We like to fancy that we're pretty good at setting them aside though. Although the movie is quite long it only has one main character, not that it's a bad thing, eg. The Deer Hunter. The reason why we found it to be a problem here is because he's just not that developed or interesting; we could not describe him outside of his profession or actions. The same issue extends to the supporting characters as well, apart from a few scenes with Michael Caine or Matt Damon, who we could assign to have more personality because their motives are more prominent than their actions. Some motives are given to the others as well, but they leave a more fleeting impression.
We thought that the the crucial relationship would be that of the father and daughter, but then in the end it wasn't? Because then they had another focus as well (that of Dr Brand), but they forgot that there needs to be a relationship...It was a repeat mistake from Nolan as this happened with the last Batman film as well. They never truly conversed about anything of significance for a lasting human relationship. Those conversations they did have didn't reveal anything important about characters or interpersonal relations. The conversations seemed to only serve the purpose of continuing and furthering along the story. In complete opposition to Gone Girl, the way that the characters reacted to other people's behaviour and actions or to diverse situations made no sense. For instance, how on earth would a father leave his dying daughter to live with a woman with whom he has no such relationship. Instead, Nolan should have just picked a relationship to focus on so that the story wouldn't have been so incoherent and all over the place. It would've been far better to focus on one theme and then following through thoroughly.
Lastly, we just have to say that Nolan's female characters....kind of suck. We detest the fact that women are always portrayed through men and that women seem to be some kind of a "standard" for goodness or that they are the "reward" for the man.
General overview and opinions: The visuals were stunning as one would expect, the editing disturbed us a bit as it wasn't smooth and didn't really fit the content. The music exceeded our expectations a little, but that wasn't very hard considering that we were expecting Hans Zimmer's "best of". In relation to the length, it felt like 2 hrs 50 minutes. That has a lot to do with the incoherence of the story and bland characters. The idea of the story was a freaking brilliant one, which makes us pretty sad because it would've been SO good had it been truly explored. We would've been way more interested had it been philosophical debate and moral dilemma about saving the human species.
