f13.net

Teaser Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyc6RJEEe0U&feature=youtu.be)

http://www.interstellar-movie.com/
http://www.interstellarmovie.com/


Essentially Chris Nolan's take on Kip Thorne's (who helped with the film) musings (if you dont know who he is, you should be gettin to readin).  It'll be very "Contact"-like which was based on Sagan, only this time more far-reaching (obviously, if you've read any Thorne).  Even the producer is a brainiac, who actually edited some of Thorne's seminal works.

I saw the trailer at the Hobbit and I really liked it, though it was short.  They are clearly going for a deeper, more artistic presentation with this movie so I doubt it'll be fantastical sci-fi.  Likely will be an exploration on the human-condition via the subtext of interstellar space exploration.  High-powered cast too btw; Matt McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Cain...

Filming is in Alberta.  

I hope it's good.  I'm in the mood for a modern, thoughtful sci-fi movie.  You know, something like Prometheus.   :hello_kitty: 

edit:
<added just released teaser trailer to OP>

When did "teaser trailer" become synonymous with "2 minutes of telling you absofuckinglutely nothing about what the movie is actually about"?  I watched that on the big screen at my theatre, and came away knowing pretty much nothing about this movie other then who is in it and what the name is.

What? It told you everything you needed to know:

Chris Nolan, Matthew McConaughey, Legendary Pictures.

A year before release, that's all you deserve to know  :grin:

Honestly, I thought the cornfield rocket with son-in-hand imagery was pretty powerful.  There was a lot going on there.  Surf needs it beat over his head I guess.

To be fair, all that was already known before the trailer. Little side note, when we got the trailer into my theater on Wednesday it was "locked" in the same way the movies are (we get digital keys that unlock them at a specific time and which eventually expire). It's pretty rare for trailers to be locked in such a manner. In fact the last one I can think of was the first trailer The Dark Knight Rises, so when I saw this it got my expectations up only to watch the trailer that night and think to myself that it didn't really show anything. I do acknowledge though that the trailer is obviously for the legion of people that maybe don't click on any news article that mentions upcoming Chris Nolan movies.

Very Malick.  Count me as those who had not heard of this but are now intrigued/looking forward to it.

I am cautiously looking forward to it. I am not someone who thinks Nolan can do no wrong. For every Dark Knight, we have a Dark Knight Rises and for every Inception, we have a The Prestige. My hope is that he is due for another good movie this time. But I'll reserve judgement until I learn a bit more.

Heh. All four of those are pretty good movies. 

Wait, are you trying to say that Inception is better than The Prestige?

Oh, I don't disagree that there was a lot of pretty powerful imagery in there, but none of it tells me anything about what the movie is actually about.  Is it about a guy who lives next to a rocket launch facility? Is it about space travel? Going back to the moon?

If the only thing you had to tell you about this movie was that trailer, exactly what would you have come away knowing?   All you get out of it is a message that "Mankind has lost it's soul of the explorer", with no real indication of anything else.

They are both good movies.  You guys can get into a pissing match on which is better but both are heads above most other hollywood shit.

I think Inception is a pile of meaningless shit.

I think it works better when you accept it's meant to be meaningless.  As for shit, no.  No, not really.

Not at all, in fact.

Lamaros has a personal vendetta against Inception, and the fact that everybody here except him seems to like it.   :awesome_for_real:

I thought Inception was a bland movie and didn't feel the need to comment on it for that reason (so Lamaros is not alone)  :why_so_serious:

This. I don't feel let down by watching any of those movies.

Inception is a good movie.

The Prestige is better.

I felt like it was worth the price of admission, but it didn't stand up to favorable recollection.  A decent flick, but not worth the gushing that goes on here.

Gushing? The best comment here was "pretty good" with the other half of the people shitting on it.


We're getting a bit off topic but what I meant when I said that they are all good movies is that Nolan is an "all in" director for me.  It doesn't matter what his next picture is, he's been consistently good and his movies have all been enjoyable so this one is guaranteed to be a day one movie.

For me Takashi Miike is the director whose movies I always look forward to but they are not all (or you could even say that most aren't) that good... just interesting (most of the time).

The Prestige was 90% of a good movie followed by 10% of a lousy movie.

The final 10-15 minutes or so are really awful, hitting the viewer over the head and removing any pretense of subtlety. It also introduces some really weighty stuff and does nothing with it, which is a big pet peeve of mine.

I really like reading interviews with the guy and his approach to film making, but in the end his movies don't do that much for me. But the guy is clearly skilled at making blockbusters that aren't as dumb as typical blockbusters.

The Dark Knight Rises was just awful. Now, it was far from Joel Schumacher awful but it was close to Spider Man 3 awful to be blunt.  Seriously, I own Batman Begins and the Dark Knight on Blu Ray and I didn't even bother to watch the Dark Knight Rises on cable. The Prestige was a well made movie with some interesting ideas that just sort of jumped the shark towards the end. Oh, and it was honestly, pretty damned slow moving. Both Inception and the Prestige had some cool ideas behind them, the difference is that Inception actually told a story that was interesting. The Prestige felt....bloated.

There's no accounting for taste.

The Prestige is up there.  Agree about the last 10%.

DKR=SpiderMan 3

What the fuck is wrong with you ?

That's not even the same fucking ballpark.

DKR's biggest crime was not being as good as DK.

Still not a bad film. Solid B.

Like everyone else on the planet, I was disappointed by it.

but Spiderman 3 ?

SPIDERMAN 3 ?  With Venom and disco dancing and shitty hobgoblin and Sandman not being on his own ?  And MJ looking like the strung out cocaine addict that she was ?

Fuck sake.

Yeah, I enjoyed DKR. It certainly was the weakest of the 3 films but that's like saying The Magnificent Ambersons wasn't as good as Citizen Kane. It's still a true statement, but they are both still good films. Comparing DKR to Spiderman 3? Not even in the same fucking universe.

Well, of course not. One is DC, and the other is Marvel!

 :why_so_serious:

I also liked The Prestige more than I should have.  That's probably a good sign.

I need to watch The Prestige again, it's been a few years. Love that movie.

Alfred is totally out of character for most of this movie. There is no way in hell Alfred would just leave Bruce like that.
Batman is rarely in the movie.
The fight choreography? Laughable.
Speaking of fights: Batman loses against Bane not because Bane is better but because Batman neglects to do anything Batman would do in that kind of fight. Stuff he is shown doing in the other two movies as well as other fights in this movie. He basically just sort of stumbles around like he is drunk and allows Bane to beat him up. No lead up, no explanation, just....Batman suddenly becoming a moron.
The magical knee brace? Really? He has no cartilage in his knee but this brace somehow makes him a bad ass.
Of course, he may become a bad ass, except when the plot says he doesn't but he also doesn't actually handle any of the problems in the movie. Talia? Killed by a car crash. Bane? Killed by Catwoman. The bomb? Flown away by the Batplane thingy on remote control.
Oh, and somebody really, really needed to remind Christopher Nolan of the adage "Show, don't Tell." This movie was all telll very little show.
Oh and every single plot point was heavily, heavily telegraphed. In fact, most of the time you're just flat out told about plot points well before they happen. See: The cafe scene at the end.
Catwoman? Handled very, very poorly. Don't even get me started on how they messed that character up.
Bane? There is a reason people make internet videos where they play games using his voice. It is so over the top and silly.
Let's talk some more about the horrible prison by the way. Where nobody bothers Bruce and he has a man to help heal him. Oh, and a nice, big TV.

The only part of the movie that was close to good was the brief appearance by Scarecrow when he was holding his trials. The cinematography and music were also good. The script though? Horrible. The direction? Decent but it felt like his heart wasn't in it. I think that was the biggest problem with the movie, Nolan had quite after the Dark Knight and had nothing in the tank for this movie.

Stay on target.

Psycho.

So... he might not be the world's greatest detective... But, what is interstellar about? Corn subsidies and how large they are is my guess....

After skimming the thread I guess this movie is about Batman in space?  :headscratch:

Stop misusing it. Stop using it at all. You are not a funny guy.

Previous posts have established your sense of taste so I will take that as a compliment.

Yes.  I won't disagree with that.

BUT SPIDERMAN 3 ????

In fairness, there's nothing to say about Interstellar really. We don't know anything except the very brief summary and who is in it.

Come on, its pretty obvious from the teaser that this is a movie about the military-industrial complex subjugating the lower end of the economic class in order to further it's agenda of gobal dominance into space.

It's about a sudden discovery of a rip in space-time (and how to use it), allowing Interstellar travel to take place in the first place; which re-awakens the spirit of exploration in mankind.  What the hell more do you guys need to know? 

The release date?

(http://i.imgur.com/UesIDMv.png)

Oh, so it's releasing the entirety of November? Interesting marketing concept! That's a really long movie!

Was just trying to be helpful, you pipe-smoking baby! How could I know you need to know the exact day of release for a film thats another year in the future. (Which will vary on where you live anyway, complicating the question).

(http://i.imgur.com/M5CXig0.png)

I'm SOLD on the movie. I was just making a joke in response to Ghambit saying,"What the hell more do you guys need to know?"

 Full trailer is out  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSWdZVtXT7E)

Here's to hoping there's not 2-hours of lead-in before they actually get to the wormhole.

The alien is his father.

Will the alien be played by Jodie Foster?

Lemme predict it right here:

Why do I fear that it will turn into

(http://commasutra2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/tookourjobs.jpg)

I was disappointed at the happy ending of the prestige too.

Man, grump grump grump. I like it.

That trailer looks pretty good so I'm cautiously optimistic. I know Nolan is robot Jesus to some people but for about half of his movies I find the trailer better than the actual movie.

Actually, had they found a 2-way wormhole, it's likely it would be a closed spacetime loop.  Therefore, the astronauts would be in stasis for the journey to the wormhole, through it, and likely travel once on the other side... glean whatever info. they could, go back into stasis for the ride home, and get back the moment they left.  To them they could've traveled for 100's if not 1000's of years though.  Anyways, they could then share their findings with the world (maybe some aliens taught them something or perhaps they found a viable new home planet).

So this trailer is hella better than the last one, but there's an Oblivion vibe to it.

And you know what? If it has a saccharin ending where he returns to his kids, even if they're older as that one scene implies, I'm fine with that. I've been a sucker for happy endings since even before I had kids of my own. Emos gotta emo, but they can do that shit in the independent scene. Give me my popcorn flicks goddamit!  :grin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2RLzvgJJ2c

I think you meant to post this (http://collider.com/interstellar-trailer-comic-con/).

Looks much better than the other trailers I've seen.

Yeah, that looks pretty cool. 

I get the feeling he won't be returning in his own time and the messages sent through space will be the future generations of his family as the long search continues.

That would certainly be a common trope of this sort of story. I'm content to wait and see this film. Some films really are not improved by trying to outthink them months before you see them.

Seems like it gave too much away?

I have a feeling they're gonna get to Planet X and find it uninhabitable.

I'm thinking there will be multiple planets. Also looks like in at least one case an alien artifact.

It would be nice if it opened up a discussion about the moral proposition that we have to survive, or ought to survive (trailer makes me think it might). I get a bit itchy when I read all the "we have to get off this planet--colonize Mars or make habitats or whatever" folks, who often overlap with certain flavors of libertarianism. If we can't figure out how to cope with being ON this planet, I'm not sure going to another one solves much of anything. Certainly going to a place with a much more marginal, precarious environment (like Mars) will take discipline and control that we've yet to demonstrate on Earth.

It's a backwards-looking ideal that remembers colonization.

Antarctica is a nicer place to live than Mars. The Sahara is a nicer place to live than Mars. Giant rafts in the middle of the sea are a nicer place to live than Mars. It's easier to grow food in any of those places than on Mars. Easier to ship food there if you can't grow it. Easier to move there. Easier to move away.

Back in the day the ships to the colonies found air, a water table, occasionally habitable temperatures, native plants and animals. Mars has none of these things.

Mars is also the second-most liveable planet we've got within twenty trillion miles. Humans have, in the past, traveled almost one ten millionth that far. It cost them a substantial chunk of the resources of what will be remembered as the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history.

Crowded, plagued by mass extinction, choked with pollution... future Earth is still a more pleasant, less expensive place to live than anywhere we are ever likely to travel. The more crowded and choked it gets, the less likely we'll be able to go looking.

If you want to terraform a planet, start with this one.

...

Looks like a good movie, tho. I'll go see it at the discount theater.

This is coming out soon, and this is still an excellent post. (But the bit about America is probably going to be wrong in time / is already wrong depending on semantics.)

Saw this tonight in IMAX 70mm. I loved the first 3/4 and then it went off the rails. Knocked it down from a 9/10 to an 8 or 7.5 for me. Fantastic visuals but you probably already knew that.

Space Odyssey/Moon/Contact/Huh?

Saw this as well this evening at IMAX screen.  Agree that it went off the rails towards the end, lost a grade for me.  Pretty hard science in it for a big budget Hollywood movie, though it's got some huge problems with high energy physics, gravity, coriolis effects, etc.  But these are quibbles when it comes to Hollywood, nice to see thrust in low gravity handled well, though a bit too fast for actual aluminum foil cans in space.  Great performances from a suprising star-studded cast.

Also excellent use of the score and sudden breaks/silences to accent the movie and build tension.

Lastly, it is very very pretty on a really big screen.  It'll lose a lot in the translation to TV's, even big-screen ones.

Bigger gripes after the spoiler tag:


I'd give it a B/B+, could've been an A but for some problems I have with it.  If you like sci-fi and/or good McConaughey performances, it's definitely worth catching.  This is a slower, methodical movie though, but not as slow as 2001 nor Moon for that matter. 2 cents given.

I just came back from seeing it and I don't agree with it falling off the rails. I think it took hard science as far as it could go within the context of a movie narrative, and then explored something different, something wholly necessary to give the film an ending that wasn't narratively ambiguous (Nolan's already done that) but full of potential. Kubrick did it 40 years ago and divided opinions everywhere, Nolan's doing it now and history will, as ever, repeat itself. I actually think the last part of the film is a more daring act than anything that comes before it as it can be dismissed as naked sentiment when it's actually attempting to be as spherical a narrative as some of the more jaw dropping spatial entities. It's as much a film about a little girl who doesn't want her dad to leave her as it is about finding somewhere else to survive. That and the fact that things might not be exactly as they seem on screen anyhow; Nolan seems to have returned to the story telling tricks of his finest film to date (The Prestige). His sleight of hand is gargantuan this time round.

[EDIT] also holy fuckballs, Hans Zimmer. I now know what two planet-sized cathedrals sound like when they mate.
[EDIT 2] I should probably throw a few more 'narrative's in there but it's late and fuck you.

The ending wasn't off the rails at all if you follow ultra-modern physics (especially closed-time loops, quantum gravity, and relativity) and quantum consciousness studies fairly closely; which, of course, is a very small subset of people (myself being one of them).  As said, it's just extremely hard sci-fi.  It was obvious even at almost 3hrs long that a lot of explanation got edited out, but the meaning still came across fine to me.  Honestly, it took balls to do that ending and I loved it.

Loved all the homages to movies like 2001, Planet of the Apes, Field of Dreams, and Star Wars.  Even the soundtrack at times was decidedly old-school.

I thought it was pretty good but flawed. The movie was reaching lovecraftian levels of cosmic horror at its best, but the ending was totally tacked on and had a massive tonal shift for no good reason. Also, while I loved the dustbowl stuff, I felt it made the movie rather insular when combined with the utter lack of the rest of the world.

The sound mix was a bit terrible. Spoken word was at a good level, but the otherwise excellent soundtrack was set way too loud. Immersion breaks when your ears start bleeding.

edit: and there we go, rumor has it that in the original script it was Chinese at the end everywhere. I should really just believe my own rule: a near future space movie is not believable unless it's about the Chinese.



 

Never change.   :awesome_for_real:

I saw this last night with my aunt and we both had the same thought -- the last half of the movie or so was like a bad Star Trek episode.  Overall enjoyable, but you need to just turn your brain off as far as the plot and/or science goes.  Disappointing after the very strong first half  (everything up until they got to the first planet, at which point plot/dramatic convenience immediately shoved sense out the airlock).

Just watched it, and enjoyed it all the way through.  Don't feel it had a weak ending/second half like some of you do.  While I wish they'd had stuck to hard physics the entire way, and it had some plot/pacing issues, the few things they took liberty with I didn't mind as it allowed them to move the plot along.

Which was basically:
Beyond that, I felt you had to turn your brain on for the second half, not off.  

Was it perfect? No.  Do I think if they had worked out some plot and pacing issues it would have been an amazing movie?  Yes.  Still excellent and I highly recommend.  At the very least, you should give it some credit to introducing the hard sci-fi theoretical physics bent to the blockbuster.  Saw it with some other people, who were amazed at all the crazy ideas about time and space it came up with.  Had to explain to them most of the ideas they were raving about are based on theoretical physics and have been in use in written sci-fi forever.   :awesome_for_real:

The ending should've kept the tone IMO (and been about the insignificance of mankind, because Cthulhu). The fates of specific characters don't really matter to me as long as they refrain from changing genres midstream.

The black hole was pretty awesome, they in fact built a working CGI model with actual physics.

Fuck sake, is there ever going to be a movie again where people don't tell me to switch my brain off ?

On this forum?  No.  Everything is beneath the erudite intellect of the denizins of f13.   :awesome_for_real:

No need to switch your brain off really, the movie is leaps and bounds above normal in that regard. Science wise a lot of the criticism comes from people who don't know what they don't know.

Just desensitize yourself to exposition, because there's a bunch of that.

Just dropped a link to an article about this in the space thread.

As a counter-example to this movie in terms of needing to debrain (or is it just brain?) yourself, I'd point to Gravity.  That had its own share of silly dramatic plot conveniences, but at no point during that movie did I actually physically feel the need to facepalm (which I did at a couple of points during Interstellar), and at no point did it sabotage its own basic premise for plot convenience.  

The thing Teleku mentioned in spoilers about the rockets... YUP.  That particular plot convenience makes the entire "plan A" plot irrelevant if you think about it for more than half a second.  That jumped right out at me as soon as it came on screen and that's why that was the point in the movie where I think the brain needs to be switched off.  After that I could just go on for pages about all the plot holes but it's not worth it -- I just accepted that it's Not That Kind Of Movie and kept shoveling the popcorn in my face.

Moon was also an example of a good science fiction movie where you don't need to shut your brain off completely.  It's not like there's an impossibly high standard here.

I think this might be more a case of the science you think you know over-riding the science theory you're being shown.

Just turn your brain off when you read the comments and it'll be fine.

What is the science behind why the Ranger's fantastically efficient hover-jets, which are able to get significant weight payloads into orbit without any of the muss and fuss of multi-stage rockets, don't work for getting off Earth?

What is the science behind their ability to receive gigabytes of data (at least) from Earth through the wormhole, but not to send useful messages back beyond "thumbs up/thumbs down"?  Why don't they send lots of those messages to encode binary data so they can actually communicate something?  

Is it because the space ghosts used gravity to give them brain damage?

God dammit, I've been trying to NOT actually go through all the stupid stuff so I could just enjoy the movie, and you're ruining it for me.

Now that you've got me thinking about it, here's another big hole that I didn't spot in the theater, but that really wrecks the premise of the movie.

Often what seems like a plot hole is just us not liking the plot.

Well yes, that was the entire reason.  It becomes completely obvious it was the only POSSIBLE reason to launch the mission once you think about it.  Apparently none of these great scientific geniuses who were surprised by the Shyamalan twist toward the end ever thought about it once in twenty years.   :awesome_for_real:

Why assume the nonsensical when there's room for interpretation that does make sense? It's a sure way to ruin a movie experience, because all movies fold if you do that.

I think the logic is simple:
 

I wonder what Neil deGrasse Tyson has to say? (http://www.hugecool.com/2014/11/interstellar-gets-unexpected-twitter.html)

So the greatest genius on Earth, the Chosen One of the Space Ghosts, did figure out the big plot point decades ahead of time, and she was just ACTING really surprised.  I guess assuming one of the most otherwise dramatic moments of the film actually had no weight whatsoever does make the movie more enjoyable.   :awesome_for_real:

Neil DeGrasse Tyson did do a good job pointing out the parts of the movie that were good.  I enjoyed all of those parts.  Like I said, the movie is just way more enjoyable if you just don't think about any of the OTHER parts, but then one of you fuckers had the gall to suggest I hadn't thought about them ENOUGH.  A good example -- yes, time dilation from being deep in a gravity well, cool, they got that specific moment right, but everything AROUND it doesn't add up.  Gravitational time dilation is a function of potential, and changing your potential requires energy (good thing they had that ship with the completely unexplained Newton-defying hover jets, I guess).  But they pop right out of that thing and back to normal-speed time like it ain't nuthin'.  The way it's represented, it has nothing to do with the black hole and everything to do with the planet -- as soon as they touch down on the surface time is two thousand times faster, but being in orbit around the planet (only infinitesimally further away from the black hole at best, and in fact closer to it at worst) everything is the same as Earth time.  Derp?

You've spent several posts doing that quite efficiently yourself. Don't you dare blame your cognitive shortcomings on me.

The film is fucking Chekov's Gun writ large. The narrative is spherical. The science is not only approved, the FX software created with current knowledge algorithms for the movie is providing new observable theory.

So sorry that's not enough for you.

Explain some of this stuff I've been asking about, then; I would love for this movie to make some sense.  Use short words, I'm a bit slow.  I would actually love for someone to break down the time dilation math for me; I've done a little googling and found people proving that it's possible to construct the level of time dilation shown in the movie without also ripping the orbiting planet apart (apparently it needs to be a spinning black hole for that to work), but I haven't seen them show the math for what the effects of time dilation are on an observer in orbit of that same planet.  From my understanding of it, it would be very similar because it's a function of distance from the black hole rather than contact with the planet's surface, but I'm interested in being shown wrong.

Re: the exceedingly clever Chekhov's Gun plot:

Threads like this make me content with having a stunted mind that doesn't get hung up on the trees at the expense of the forest.

Lots of people think that the ending of Independence Day where a Mac laptop was able to upload a virus to an alien spaceship that the programmer knew nothing about was a poor representation of how security vulnerabilities work.  What those cognitively limited people don't understand is that all computers speak the language of ones and zeroes, and also of love.

 :grin:

(btw ID4 spoilers)

You've already gunning so hard for your own narrative, I won't waste our time going any further.

The time dilation planet however, they fudge it a lot but I think it's got something to do with the ergosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergosphere) of a spinning, supermassive black hole. I'm not going to pretend I understand enough to make a critique, but I believe Kip Thorne has written a book explaining the science in the movie.

As I understand it that bit (the ergosphere bit) is the part that makes it possible to have a planet orbiting a black hole (at a close enough distance to experience severe time dilation effects relative to something at a much much greater distance from the black hole) without getting torn apart by the black hole or falling into it.  That's all fine.  But the time dilation and frame-dragging effects would reach beyond the planet's orbital path around the black hole and would follow a gradient; it would not be a function of the distance from the planet, and it certainly wouldn't kick in at 100% as soon as you touched down on the planet's surface and then be completely negated once you were in orbit around the planet (at essentially the same distance from the black hole).  You'd still be in that same region of spacetime that's being distorted by the black hole and see very little difference until you removed yourself to a much wider orbit around the black hole (which the main ship did not do, yet it continued to experience Earthlike time).

Again, I would sincerely love for one of our resident cosmologists to explain this so I can understand how I'm getting it wrong.  I'm certainly not an expert; I just know that the functions that describe these things tend to have curves rather than stairsteps.

Here's Bad Astronomer hitting the brakes on the science of Miller's Planet. Let it be a lesson, strong off hand opinions on complex things rarely work out the way you want them to. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interstellar_followup_movie_science_mistake_was_mine.html

edit: also note that "100% as soon as you hit the planet's surface" is your own editorializing, the movie had a big cut at that point, presumably to avoid showing anything too weird. You can't blame Nolan for shit you make up yourself.

fake edit: I'm totally ordering Kip Thorne's book, sounds pretty great and it's cheap as chips on Amazon.

edit again: the oval shape of the ergosphere would necessitate some pretty steep gradients in spacetime, don't you think?

Ya, I already read that one.   :awesome_for_real:  It addresses the basic problem of how you can have a theoretically habitable planet that's close enough to a black hole to experience time dilation of that magnitude; it doesn't address why that effect would dissipate completely once you were in orbit around the planet.  (And they did definitely establish that -- it's what provided all the dramatic impetus to lift off the planet's surface [using magical hoverjets, let's not forget the magical hoverjets] and get back into orbit.)  I was surprised to learn that even the basic idea makes sense, though, so credit to the filmmakers for getting that much scientifically accurate.

I can't remember what they said, but I think mr. True Detective's drawing had the orbiter staying outside the ergosphere, which would mean orbiting the black hole instead. Maybe it's possible to stay synched to the planet, maybe the scriptwriters just winged it.

According to the wiki article the surface of the ergosphere is where frame dragging is happening at the speed of light.  So if we were to assume that there is a nice crisp line there where inside spacetime is weird and outside it's not (wiki says that's not the case and that frame-dragging does extend beyond the surface, it just gradually slows down, but it doesn't give the equations so let's be generous to the movie and say it's not really that gradual), for something outside that nice crisp line to sync up with something inside of it, it'd need to be going at the speed of light or thereabouts.  Right?  So, pick your physically impossible poison.   :awesome_for_real:  

I'm going with "writers winged it."  I suspect the science guys told them that it was possible to have a planet where time passes really slowly relative to Earth, and they said "oo, that's cool," and then they wrote a scene around that, without paying too much attention to the fact that it's not the planet that makes that happen.

Sure, but at this point we're way beyond "lol bad science". The science was there so much that most of the besserwissers didn't even understand the concepts at play.

I definitely give this movie credit for getting enough right to make the stuff they fudged stand out so sharply.  If this were Doctor Who or something I wouldn't bat an eye at a planet where time goes slower when you're standing on it for no particular reason.  As is it's just very... uneven.  Going back to the thing with the rockets, I thought their initial liftoff and everything around that was really well done and did a great job conveying how fucking hard it is to get off a planet.  When that suddenly ceased to be a thing and they had Star Trek shuttlecrafts it was a very distinct "wait, wut?" moment.

Yeah, the space planes were a bit too advanced. It bothered me because they were enough to enact plan A. Just send TARS and CASE to the asteroids and build a space habitat.


 

I think Samwise has some excellent questions. It is obvious they spent a lot of time on the science which is why throwing in plot conveniences like shuttlecrafts and one way communication stand out so much more.  It drives me nuts when a fantastical movie can't live within it's predefined rules, it stands out even more when a movie based on actual science won't do it.

I also facepalmed during the love speech.

Having said that, I loved this movie. I was instantly hooked from the first moments. I loved that they referenced Cooper's accident, but no more details were giving and we didn't have to sit through much of a flashback scene outside of the first few moments.

I thought I've read in the past that it's actually not that difficult to get into space off a planet.  The hard part is attaining a lateral velocity so fast that you go into orbit around the planet instead of getting pulled back down again.  Not sure how that would relate in this particular case but just throwing that out there.

Edit: This (http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2ktz4v/why_does_it_take_a_rocket_to_go_into_space/) askscience reddit thread gets into it a little bit, but I'm sure there's a lot more detailed explanations out there if one cared enough to look. 

Yeah, that exactly.  It wouldn't have been as bothersome if the difficulty of getting into space wasn't the conflict that drove the entire plot.

On the topic of the asteroids, something about the ending that bugged me a little bit:

Yeah, it was a little unclear, but here are the things I picked up:


(edit) Half in the Bag just put up their review. (http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-interstellar/)  Mike's thoughts were similar to mine -- lots of great stuff in this movie but it would've been better if they'd either gone all in on hard science or all in on cosmic love woo woo.

You've already looked up some of the more difficult physics for an (extremely amateur) enthusiast of these things like myself to talk about without simply resorting to wiki or whatever book I can drag the hard and fast stuff out of. That's fine; i'm no teacher and I don't dare condescend more anyway (I just get grumpy when people purposefully invent portions of narrative to explain how they would have done it better). We've already gone into ergosphere curavture time dilation in recepit of a super-massive Black Hole's influence, and I think we've established that maybe the distances involved are either fudged enough to work narratively or just kosher enough to appease the science informing the scene; either way we're talking about vast gravitational forces that are still firmly residing in theory (and as I said earlier, the working models created for the film's vlsuals are now providing observable data realised in 3D/real-time and giving science even more info) and the actual distances involved are quite literally astronomical. And sure, you're looking at an almost infantessimal degree of influence at the very outer edge, but that curve steepens significantly, exponentially further in as we understand things. Miller's planet is in a stable orbit around Gargantua (stable mostly because of the phenomental rotation of the black hole) and is probably on a wavering time dilation that works as it spins itself, which would honestly make the planet a no-go-zone for regular human habitation anyway. There's also the margin of error in the narrative that crops up - they fail to take into account where Miller's world is during its orbit of Gargantua, and their time on planet and the subsequent dilation outwards is so badly fucked up.

Concerning the ability of the scout vessel to VTOL (yes, it's just a more advanced version of what we've been using for 30 years), we know that the trip to Miller's world cost them more than time, it cost them fuel. The expenditure from visiting Miller's planet (and escaping + engine spark/fuel burn) cause them to be incapable of visiting both the next 2 planets on their schedule. The regular, work-a-day Rocket take-off in the film is 100% accurate in that it displays the forces necessary to get a large object out of atmosphere - when they're leaving earth, they're bringing fuel, supplies, all sorts that will then be sequestered into the main hub of the explorer vessel. They're not spending fuel they'd be using on the missions to do so, that's a write-off the moment the rocket breaks up. Their trip to Miller's world is costly in so many ways that it's easy to forget fuel was one of them.

I'd adress other things you've mentioned in spoilers but a lot of that is going into the more storified points and then it's really just my interpretation/opinion vs yours.

I saw this yesterday and I agree with most what's been posted here.  It was really good right up until the last 30 mins but even so it didn't detract from my overall enjoyment.  I don't know if it was just the theatre I was in, but it was one of the loudest movies I've ever been to.  They probably could have saved millions if they hadn't cast so many well known actors in minor parts.  You don't need anyone else other than Matthew McConaughey to sell your movie to the public.  I could see keeping Michael Caine and MAYBE Jessica Chastain, but I didn't think there was any need to have Matt Damon, Ann Hathaway, John Lithgow, Topher Grace & Casey Affleck playing the parts they did since they all seemed like they would be easy to replace with a dependable no name actor.  Damon in particular seemed really out of place and Hathaway was, in the end, reduced from a smart and courageous scientist to a woman who gets emotional and wants to bang McConaughy.  Of course, if you only have one guy to be stranded with on a remote planet and responsible for repopulating the species, I'm sure most women wouldn't mind if it was him. :grin:  Hathaway?  Meh, I guess.  We could always create a race of half human, half horse. :awesome_for_real:

So didn't it seem more than a smidge weird to you while you were sitting in the theater that the scout vessel was able to land on a planet (one with stronger gravity than Earth, no less) and take off without any of that rocketry?  They had a throwaway line about it costing them some fuel, but the way rockets work it's not like you have this little tank of gas and you top it up and you can reach orbit before you need to refuel, you have those huge staged things because the amount of fuel you need is such that it makes up most of the payload you initially launch with.  They even referenced it later in that movie with the line about Newton (gotta leave something behind), while completely ignoring that their own ship was apparently exempt from that particular rule of space travel.  This isn't nitpicking after the fact, this was repeatedly slapping me in the face while I was watching the movie.

Whut ?   :uhrr:

I'm a big cry baby these days and was bawling by the end.  A beautiful movie, obsessing over the science is missing the point.

She has kind of a horse face.  Not a Sara Jessica Parker horse face, but she still has one.

Hathaway's beautiful. Full stop.

She's got a non-traditional look, sure.

I saw this movie -- and I thought overall the movie wasn't great. Props to them for realistic renderings of space phenomenons, but I've never seen a plot hole *actually* represented as a black hole before. Inception is a superior film. I even sort of liked Prestige more.

Now, that aside, Cooper's emotional moments were what sold the film. Emotional interplay inside strange circumstances is one of Nolan's strong points.The logistics and execution of Miller's planet. It does a good job with sound and music.

TARS / CASE are great. It was weird to hear their voices so clearly, when half the movie I had trouble understanding what the main characters were saying.

Was there any connection to the jump cuts that skipped significant portions of time and relativity? I felt like we were also leaping through time, especially between Cooper signing up for the mission and when the mission launches.


Edit: Brain's always fried on a Friday. That's why I call it Fried-day.

Possibly that was a spoiler rather than a quote ?   :why_so_serious:

(http://bitcast-a-sm.bitgravity.com/slashfilm/wp/wp-content/images/Cinemark-Interstellar-550x737.jpg)

I had mentioned the difficulty hearing dialog, right? Welp. That's one theater's take, but it supposedly hasn't come up in official discussion or commentary.

I just saw it and honestly that was my only major problem with the movie: the 'background' music was way, way too loud relative to the dialog.  Otherwise I really enjoyed the movie.

To address some points brought up in this thread:

Rockets were used to bring the crew to lift the crew off of Earth to conserve fuel on the ship.  Fuel was the major constraint during the entire mission, as the crew talked about on more than one occasion.  The 'magic hovercrafts' could have taken off from Earth by themselves, but why waste fuel they'll need during the mission by doing that?  As for the landers themselves, we can already build spaceplanes today (albeit less efficient ones) so I have no problem with there being better spaceplanes 50+ years in the future.

The one way communication thing could have just been a broadcast issue.  A station on Earth could generate a much, much stronger signal than the ships on the other side of the wormhole could.  Especially those small Lazarus ships.

The time dilation around Miller's World was specifically explained.  There's an entire scene were Cooper says they're going to put the Endurance in orbit around Gargantua outside the ergosphere instead of putting it into orbit around the planet so it could avoid the time dilation effect.

Those were the major problems some people had, no?

Saw this and really liked it, TARS and CASE were awesome. Also the first movie I've seen in Malaysia where they just bleeped some swear words instead of jump cutting the scene. Gotta love censorship.

Saw it today on the 70mm IMax whatever.

This is a good movie.

Err, you missed our point a bit.  The point is that in a world where magical hover planes that can take off from earth and go into orbit exist, there is no need for them to 'solve the problem of gravity'.  They could easily start taking boat loads of people and equipment up to space without issue.  The problem is that sending stuff to space is currently prohibitively expensive, and impossibly expensive when we are talking about moving a large population over for colonization purposes.  Which they correctly showed by it taking a massive rocket (which costs hundreds of millions of dollars) to get the 4 of them into space. 

We currently don't have any space planes that I'm aware of.  People have been trying for decades now to make the concept work, but we currently haven't defeated the laws of physics yet.  The moment somebody manages to build an airplane with an engine capable of letting it take off from a run way (or you know, just sort of hover up and go  :awesome_for_real:), fly around outer space, then return, with the only expense being the cost of fuel (provided the fuel isn't liquid platinum or something), would be a massive civilization changing epoch.  Like, man discovers the fire/wheel/agriculture/The Atom levels.

So for them to just casually show it while spending the whole movie worried about solving the problems of gravity so they can escape was a bit   :uhrr:.

Still liked the movie, and as I said, I understand why they did it as a way to let them visit places and move the plot along without bogging it down with even more technical issues to surmount (though I personally would have liked that, but I'm not the general public).

NERRRRRRRDDDD  by which I mean, I agree.   :awesome_for_real:

Or they could've just established up front that they have Star Trek impulse engine technology and found something else to move the plot along and that'd be okay too (although I'd have really loved a movie that stuck to excitingly plausible near-future technology).  The mixing and matching is what really threw me.

Spaceplanes:
X-15 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-15)
Space Shuttle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle)
Buran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29)
SpaceShipOne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne)
X-37 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-37)

They are all rocket powered of course, but why can't the landers in the movie also be rocket powered?  They would just need a more efficient fuel.  It seems likely such a fuel would not be plentiful, which is why they used an old rocket to launch from earth and why they don't use those landers to move the entire population of Earth off-planet 4 at a time.  I'm also somewhat bewildered why VTOL landers are so outlandish when VTOL has been a thing for 50 years or so. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Jump_Jet)

The closest thing to 'Star Trek' technology for any of that would be the super efficient rocket fuel for the landers, which I'm willing to forgive since the movie is set at least 50 years in the future.  And just because the fuel is super efficient doesn't automatically make it plentiful.  All the other tech they use is entirely reasonable.

Fake edit:  actually, probably the most sci fi element of technology in the movie is the hibernation chamber but no one seems to have any complaints about that.

In the context of getting something into orbit, "rocket powered" doesn't mean it's got a rocket built into it, it means it rides up on a one-use rocket.  Because gravity is a bitch.

There are "spaceplanes" that don't need to ride on rockets to get into "space", but they aren't making it to orbit (or outside of it), they're just cruising around in very thin air.

I think, anyway.

That's the big challenge of travel between planets -- once you're there, how do you get back?  Getting one ship off Earth is hard enough, sending along all the heavy equipment you need to get it off ANOTHER planet (which weighs many more times than the payload) is just about impossible.

None of those can fly into space.  The Space Shuttle, Buran, and X- 37 are all attached to a much larger and much much more expensive space craft that carries them into orbit.  Once placed into orbit by the other vehicle, they can fly around and then land back on earth.  The x-15 and Spaceship one can't even leave the atmosphere, and can only get that close when launched from another bigger and more expensive vehicle (though not nearly as cost prohibitive as rockets).  They are not true space planes in the context of this argument.  IE, a craft that can land and then take off back into space all on its own.

Producing a craft that has the capabilities of what the ship in that movie could do is no small feat at all.

For the hover thing I'm not really knocking it for that (just poking fun at it), since its very minor compared to all the other technical hurdles.  But VTOL adds an exponential amount of complication to an aircraft (look at the development of the F-35 and the cost/difficulties of the VTOL and none VTOL variants).  Its just the sort of funny that on top of all the physic breaking magic they managed to jam into that small craft, they also managed to also cram a VTOL system on top of all it, heh.  With the movie being so hard sci-fi focused, the magical hover space ship does seem a bit glaring.

The Space Shuttle, Buran and X-37 are attached to large, disposable engines to lift them into orbit.  In the 50+ years of Interstellar's future, those large disposable engines were shrunk down to smaller, non-disposable internal engines.  I really don't see how that any more unreasonable or physics-breaking than a fully automated coffin sized hibernation chamber or cramming the computing power of city-block sized 1965 computer into today's smartphone.

One answer to your question is the fact that while the computers we used to launch space missions in the 60s have gotten many orders of magnitude more efficient, and while we've made huge strides in solar panels and robotics and all that stuff, we're still using basically the same rocket technology.   :awesome_for_real:

The characters in the movie even do a lot of exposition on why escaping the gravity of a planet is difficult and why we use rockets.  "Gotta leave something behind."  The difficulty of reaching escape velocity is the motivation behind the entire "solving gravity" subplot.  If they'd previously established via dialogue that they had no way to survive long space flights and made that an integral part of the plot, and they then suddenly whipped out the cryo-pods, those would have been similarly jarring.  It'd be like, wait, did someone who hadn't read the rest of the script write this scene and just drop it in there?

Turning off the brain makes it all better though.  It is a fairly decent Star Trek movie if you approach it from that angle.

So there can never be a breakthrough in efficiency in the future?  I mean, since the 60s we now have working ion drives.  Maybe in 50 more years they figured out a way to increase the thrust on those enough to reach escape velocity?  I mean, we aren't talking about some kind of entirely new propulsion devices here.  We're just talking about a more efficient version of something we already have.

The wiki article on ion thrusters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster) gives a pretty good breakdown on all the reasons they aren't at all practical for that purpose.  You'd have better luck using a bunch of helium balloons.

It's speculative fiction, they could have invented any technology we can imagine, including warp drive and quantum teleportation and whatever, but then you're making a Star Trek movie instead of something grounded in current science.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(I feel the need to keep on including a disclaimer that it's perfectly fine as a Star Trek type movie because after the first post where I don't include that, the goalposts will shift from defending the movie as scientifically accurate to defending it as an entertaining sci-fi popcorn movie.  It's a perfectly fine popcorn movie and I will not give you fuckers an inch to suggest I said otherwise.  I'm on to you.)

The major thing to understand is that it's a time travel movie first, a space exploration movie second. I think there's more reason to complain about the weak thinking about what the material culture of a dying Earth looks like and the use of future-NASA level rocket-propulsion tech for traversing Gargantua's environs than there is to complain about the third act. The third act (from where Mann fucks up the ship onward) makes more sense than the earlier stuff, actually, given the premises of the whole thing. People who think it's all about the power of love, etc., are mistaking what the characters say for what the narrative says. The narrative says that what the characters say is only their romantic interpretation of something that's actually pretty coherent. In no way is the third act of this film like 2001's hallucinogenic freakout. It's almost too clear, really.

It's actually about looooove first, then those other 2 second and third.

I feel like the movie's been out long enough and the thread's been going long enough that we can have spoilers in here now.  Are we okay with spoilers?  I'll hide them for now just in case.


I thought the general idea had potential, but it doesn't seem to fit together in a particularly clever way that makes you go "aha" at the end like most good time travel movies do.

Woo! Spoilerchat!

Your second loop would be a much more interesting plot than what they showed, but if that is what they intended (which I don't buy even though I like your version), LOL at what Cooper does at the end.   :awesome_for_real:

Apparently Kip Thorne's book on the science of Interstellar, which mostly focuses on time dilation at a black hole like Gargantua, actually hints at or mentions what I described as part of the overall intention of the film, that the wormhole aliens are very much meant to be .

Just a few comments about the second loop.

I was sort of thinking that

The space shuttle orbiter is (or was, I guess is the proper tense now  :heartbreak: ) essentially just a big glider.  The big engine requires that giant fuel tank to do much of anything; once the fuel tank's jettisoned it's done.  It has the other smaller thrusters on it, but they aren't meant for any kind of heavy use, they just help it maneuver around in orbit and reinsert to atmosphere in the right place.  At that point it basically plummets down like a brick with wings on it for all the maneuverability it has, even an airliner could fly rings around it.  Comparing it to the landers in Interstellar is like putting a Model T up against KITT.

Point being, the orbiter is designed only to handle the trip down into our gravity well; the trip up to orbit is wholly accomplished through the solid rocket boosters and an engine that only has enough fuel for one use, because that one use of fuel involves more volume than the entire orbiter.  It's really not a plane in any functional sense of the word, nor is it a complete vehicle on its own.

This movie was very frustrating. And as far as SF goes I think the Alien sequel you all hate was less stupid and more interesting.

Also the dust drifts were on the incorrect side of the car in the first storm shown. Pretty fucking annoying to have to dampen down the pedant so early on.

The thing that annoyed me the most was the deux ex machina was flagged so very early on, and nothing much else happened otherwise in the hours getting to it. Also that is just wanky question begging and doesn't really do anything interesting with its science. I haventnreally liked a Nolan film since The Prestige.

Also Hathaway can't act very good.

You didn't think it was interesting to learn that black holes are made out of Love, the strongest nuclear force?

Neil Degrasse Tyson said all the science in this film was accurate; that's good enough for me.

So in the future we will make special machines for ourselves to overcome the paradox of time travel? What a novel concept, which I have never thought of or seen in any other creative work before.

It is great when the science is mostly accurate, but unfortunately the plot didn't do anything with it.

I never can figure out how you guys manage to keep some of your more expansive complaints from pretty much giving everything in certain genres a fail.

Science fiction by definition is up against a basic problem: imagining conditions which have yet to come into being, including science and technology. Unless you're one of those self-satisfied gits that future humanity will enjoy poking fun at in a century or so, you probably need to think that the future is going to be dramatically different than the present. Sometimes that means worse, and usually folks can settle for that on the plausibility front well enough, because we think we understand what it's like to live in a pre-industrial shithole. (We think wrong, sort of, but this is about what people today take to be plausible on the face of it.) But we have three centuries behind us of people demonstrably being wrong again and again and again and again about what's plausible about a future where science, technology and society aren't the same as today in a non-apocalyptic way.

This is not to say Interstellar is a paragon of thinking speculatively about the future. It's not really meaning to--it's a time travel story that really belongs on an episode of the Twilight Zone with not so much weeping and so on. But the way some folks here trot out "science" and "technology" and "plausibility" more or less is like putting a fence around science fiction as a genre and saying, "You shall not do anything but that which we already have and know, just with a tweak or two here and there." At which point it's hard to say, "Why even science fiction?" There are stories about the world we live in which are just fine to tell that don't require a lick of speculation--not an alien or a laser gun or a space plane or anything of the sort.

I get that it's important to say, "don't just make it up". I suppose I want to hear how people apply that in such a way that isn't just a cover story for, "That just didn't sit right with me for some reason." That's a fine enough sentiment: it doesn't need to put on lipstick and pretend to be something more than it is.

The Love in this movie is not simply the love you're thinking of.  This version is more about quantum conscious nonlocality than anything else...  directed by obvious laws of attraction and closed-time-loop thought iterations.

No, I'm not even joking nor handwaving.  This is why Tyson and Thorne say what they do about the movie.

That's the point Khaldun, for me this movie did less interesting things, science or otherwise, than the recent alien sequel. I found the characters pretty dull (I didn't care about anyone other than Cooper and the dude who aged alone on the shit waiting for them) and there was little novelty in the story. A question begging "future us told us how to save ourselves so we could become future us to save ourselves" story is not new, and this didn't do anything interesting with it. The science was inconsistent, but this was only a big problem as it made (as Sam repeatedly said) the major plot incoherent. This made a lot of the characterization incoherent. Which also made me care less about this, which made the emotional hooks fall flat, which left me with not much else in the movie to enjoy other than my love of all things space exploration. Which was pretty thin on the ground as a wormhole did the heavy lifting.

I like and will read and watch nearly all SF, but this didn't have those things in it which I enjoy the most. Not a lot of novelty, not many interesting characters, no clever tricks and ideas. It had some beautiful images and some evocative comments about what makes us desire to explore, but not much else grabbed me. Which isn't to say I dislike the whole, but I got more pleasure from Edge of tomorrow, Oblivion and Gravity than this.

Anyhow, I'm a critical guy. Doesn't necessarily mean I enjoy life less, but I'm not going to stop expecting everything while the world shows that it can deliver it in moments.

Prometheus asked interesting questions because they never intended to give any answers.

It sounds to me like you are holding this movie to a higher standard than the three others you mention.  Is it because it purports to be based on hard science?

You weren't moved by Cooper catching up on 23 years of video emails?

Interstellar is not a great film, but I think you're painting with a pretty broad brush with some of your comments.

Or it's just my opinion and I enjoy different things to you? Sometimes no answer is worse than a really boring one.

I enjoyed this little, just not a lot. I certainly didn't hate it like I did Inception.

On the time travel paradox front I thought they were making the point subtly that there was no real paradox, the causality issue doesn't come into it because we see everything working perfectly well from the perspective of the main character. The paradox only comes in when we a assume there's an objective perspective of time. However the movie repeatedly reminds us that time and space are relative, the passage of time works differently when two perspectives are mashed together but reach observer sees things happening normally. The same thing is happening with the main character travelling through time, there no break down in casualty for him and the fact we think there should be is an incorrect application of an objective and universal concept of spacetime.

Of course there is a paradox. And "love + gravity + future humans book pushing machine" is one of the less interesting ways of exploring it.

Also, it was more interesting in 12 monkeys. And that still wasn't a great film.

Gods know I'm not interested in re-igniting any of the arguments this movie has caused in this thread so far, so I'm just going to say I've been rinsing the shit out of the soundtrack all Christmas. Seriously, Zimmer's best work to date. There's a reason Nolan had it so high in the mix - the overwhelming wall of sound as emotion and massiveness as space works so well, and it also just happens to feel incredibly wintery/Christmassy.

Jesus fucking Christ, I do not understand how some of you enjoy any goddamn thing anywhere EVER. Fuck's sake.

This was a beautiful movie. It was probably the most intelligent fucking science fiction (or any other genre) movie to come out of Hollywood in a least a fucking decade. It was "harder" sci-fi than anyone has a right to expect in these days of endless sequels and vapidity. Now, I realize that Hollywood has set the bar for intelligence SPECTACULARLY low, but that still shouldn't diminish how smart this movie actually was. The absolute WORST part of the movie was Brandt's speech about love and even that had more thought behind it than the entirety of Hollywood's productions for the last year.

I'm not spoilering anything. I avoided this thread for the month since the movie came out knowing I didn't want to be spoiled so if you're reading this and haven't seen the movie yet, go see the damn thing.

I can buy that the Ranger was lifted from Earth orbit by rockets because 1) it needed to conserve its own fuel, and 2) it needed to carry a shitton of fuel, food and scientific equipment up to the Explorer ship that wasn't already up there, making the use of its own orbital capabilities use up too much of that precious fuel that was in the Ranger. They didn't have the resources to build more than 1 Ranger and that Ranger had to go to 3 planets. Why waste its fuel getting off of ours when you can just rocket the thing up there, something you don't have the luxury to do when you are off Earth? It doesn't have to have magic gravity drives or some shit.

The 5th dimensional beings are quite obviously super-evolved humans from the future. It doesn't matter whether they were from Edmond's planet as a result of Plan B or not. Plan B was just as unimportant to the plot or the 5th dimensional beings as Plan A was before the gravity equation was solved. It only mattered that humans left Earth and survived in whatever capacity they did whether it be from the colony on Edmund's world or from gravity well space colonies. All that mattered was human survival, not the method of it. I thought the 5th dimensional time room was superbly constructed from both a visual moviemaking perspective as well as a science-y perspective. It was clever. The movie showed that one could not TRAVEL physically backwards in time - but that the 5th dimensional beings could interact with time at any moment through the application of gravity. They couldn't speak to 3-dimensional beings directly (so couldn't leave them explicit messages in language that the 5th dimensional beings may not even have the capacity for anymore) so they needed a bridge, a translator. That's what Cooper was - his emotional attachment to his daughter through that room is what allowed the translation. That's also why they didn't deposit Cooper backwards on his own timeline - they couldn't. They could however shift him forward along the timeline and through space so that he survived in his future.

This movie was as clever as Inception. Inception was a cyberpunk heist movie that used a completely illogical plot device to tell a story and get the audience thinking as well as add layers of complexity. The complexity wasn't NECESSARY to the story being told, nor did the plot device have to make any damn sense because it wasn't about the dream machine. This is the same type of movie. It's a fairly simple story about the "power of love" specifically a father's love and how that illogical emotion transcends time and space. But if you just try to tell THAT story - well, we've fucking seen that story before. That's why Anne Hathaway's speech about love feels so goddamn smaltzy, because we've seen that sentiment being the basis for many many many really bad movies. Take that simple story and wrap a complex narrative around it with some insanely good visuals and soundtrack and what do you have? A fucking masterpiece, or at the very least, an innovative movie that deserves praise.

Comparing it to Prometheus is idiotic. Prometheus was pretentious drivel that asked a question it didn't give a fuck about answering, nor did it even remain remotely consistent within its own narrative. Interstellar asked the question and answered it but in a way that makes you think about not only the question, but also other questions about how it got to where it's going. Things like "why didn't they just use the Ranger to get off Earth?" It's biggest flaws were that unless you are a complete idiot, you could see a lot of twists a mile away. The ghost being Cooper, Cooper going in the black hole, Matt Damon being batshit insane, Beardy guy getting cacked on the first world, the gravity ship being complete bullshit - all those things were pretty well telegraphed. And yet I still loved it.

Again, I don't know how some of you motherfuckers enjoy anything.

No it wasn't, it was a stupid movie.

Hey look, we both have opinions and they're not the same!

Edit: but my opinion is right. I will sort you out with the details when I am back at work.

The problem is Haem defends his opinion with insightful commentary and you are just yelling "Fire!" in a movie theater.  I look forward to your defense of your opinion.

In fairness, I don't.

 :why_so_serious:

At least you provide entertainment with your grump.

Scottishness is its own genre of entertainment.  :why_so_serious:

I could feel the channeling of 2001 throughout the film - I think that's what sold me on it.

Which reminds me that my kids need to see 2001.

Thought this was mediocre both as drama and science fiction. Tries hard to be profound but isn't. Worth a rent for visuals tho.

EDIT: although it gets bonus points for not being technophobic

Just have them read the book so they don't walk away with an extreme hatred/distrust towards Sci-fi movies.   :awesome_for_real:

The ending to that pissed me off for yeeeeeears.  Then I read the book and got even more angry, because it makes perfect sense and is actually kind of cool.

Well, I just watched this and I'm glad I didn't read any spoilers. It had its faults, but overall was a great experience. When it first hit the 5th dimension stuff, I got a little worried, but I think they pulled it off well enough (it was better than the final act of better than Contact anyways). The only thing that really hurt my experience was having to keep adjusting the volume so I could hear what the hell people were saying.

Lamaros, your defence of Promethius is ... no, I'll just not say anything mean.





Oh look, an alien snake, I'll go pet it!!!

My sister just told me she saw it and she thought it was total drek. So there you go...

Saw this the other day. I think it says something about the Nolans that the most likeable and funniest characters were the robots.

I didn't mind it, but I do wonder why so many hard science films end up being about love.

It's a curious thing. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ)

There's a YouTube clip where they directly say they wanted the robots to be the most human-like. The robots were a highlight of the movie for me.  Loved the design.

Just found out via AVClub that TARS was mostly a practical effect puppeteered by Mr. Noodle, so that's pretty cool.

Also, Honest Trailer is always great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZMzf-SDWP8

Hey I just watched this movie yesterday. I liked it and thought it explicitly confirmed the second loop stuff

Sorry, haven't read the rest of the thread so apologies if this has all been said before.

Thought this was hugely disappointing. The first 1/4 of the film was very good, the depiction of a dying Earth was believable and troubling. After that there was nothing that hasn't already been done, and done better, in 2001: A Space Odyessy.

Directors (editors, producers, studios, whoever) who are convinced that their audience are dumb shits who need to have everything neatly explained are a waste of oxygen IMO. Try crediting your viewers with a drop of intelligence for once.

Also, OK, so you've got a woman in a decent role, a scientist, and you've even deigned to give her a few lines here and there. So why, at the crucial part of her story arc, reduce her to just a love-struck puppy dog who's opinion is then automatically discounted purely because of that? Pathetic.

4/10 and that's entirely for the first quarter of the film.

But the special effects were based on SCIENCE!!!!   :drill:

Considering that much of the criticism of the movie was that people didn't understand it, never underestimate the stupidity of the movie-going audience.

Really? Wow, it's as if a constant stream of stupid films and TV has turned everyone's brains to mush.  :oh_i_see:

I mean... really? They word for word explained everything that happened. It was like an ELI5 for literal 5 year olds ffs.

You do realize most audiences do not understand how magnets work, right?

Wait... how do they work?  :grin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvmvxAcT_Yc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvmvxAcT_Yc)

Haha  :awesome_for_real:

This thread has now entertained me more than the film.

Oh WELL done sir.  (still chuckling)

I agree with you, except the first quarter is also stupid. What's the answer to too much dust and disease. Give up and get another planet... that doesn't even have food to be diseased. Plus all the other stuff that earth still has that makes it the best place in the universe for human beings to live.

Yeah, it wanted to be "2001" so very badly.

At least it was pretty.

I enjoyed it. I'll give credit to Nolan for attempting something more than 'shooting aliens in space'. Soundtrack was awesome.

Finally got around to watching this, posting this without having read any of this thread.

So, COINCIDENTALLY, I totally legally downloaded a pile of movies. One of them was Cube²: Hypercube. Having just watched that yesterday, and now watching Interstellar, I'm actually bummed out by the theoretical timeline of success leading to future humans building a hypercube/tesseract to allow him to send the messages required back in time to the pre-evolved humans in order to save those humans in order to become the evolved humans to

yeah

Great movie, hypercube is worse than time travel, but great movie in terms of watchability.

Edit: Biggest waste of Matt Damon in movie history.

Edit 2: Ok, now I've read a few pages of the thread:

• Yes, this movie had to be explained to a lot of if not most people. Fuck ya'll for thinking f13 (or even the lot of you) is some kind of bastion of intelligence that's representative of your average human. Most people can't naviagate an automated phone system.
• This movie was flawed to hell and back, but it also wasn't the droning narcissistic adventures of a Kubrick character. Though, admittedly, they treaded dangerously close to that in the last 20 minutes. Fortunately, Sunshine is still vivid enough in my mind as a complete fuckup that I can excuse the ending of this one in light of how bad that one was.
• This movie probably doesn't crack my top 100, but it's not really a cinematic crime. It's a fairly mundane, but brilliantly shot and more-than-decently acted story about time and space on a human level. It's been done, but not really - at least not like this.

Hypercube was probably the weakest of the Cube series, just because it leaned too heavily on the "Technology like Magic" and lost the focus on the human psychology and struggle. Not a bad movie in itself, but....

I think Interstellar may be that rare case of a recent movie that didn't have enough exposition. All that is necessary to resolve the paradox (a wormhole is opened by beings that can only exist because the wormhole was opened) is any other possible means for those 5D beings to have evolved, and some terrible tragedy that they wish to avert by opening the wormhole.

And conveniently, almost coincident with the paradoxical wormhole, we have another Mcguffin, the Blight. So....imagine a timeline where neither the Blight nor the Wormhole exist, and humanity evolves into 5D beings in a natural, non-paradox manner. Imagine the problem of trying to kill a 5D being that exists outside of causality and time, with one narrow exception.

--Dave

Cube 2 was terrible compared to the first one, and just as a movie in general, I just thought it was merely coincidence that I watched what may be two of the only movies that involve this particular science bullshit in a 24 hour period.

For the millionth time, there is no paradox in this movie; but the reasons why are only apparent for not even a few minutes.  That, to me, was this movie's biggest flaw... as it eventually plays into the emotion required to make the movie have a happy ending.  Basically, the point of the movie is sort of lost until the average Joe trolls the net for an explanation...  wherein most explanations don't even come.

How bad would the earth have to get that the basic premise of interstellar would make any sense at all (let's not get in to the actual plot details - one woman no failsafe to rebirth a species crap)? A lot lot lot worse than the movie depicts...

Why did I read this thread again, golly this movie shits me. Give me big and dumb, or just dumb, over psuedo-romantic-intellectual any day.