Interstellar (Nov. 2014)

[Khaldun]

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 .

[Nevermore]

Just a few comments about the second loop.

[Khaldun]

I was sort of thinking that

[Kitsune]

The space shuttle orbiter is (or was, I guess is the proper tense now  ) 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.

[lamaros]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Samwise]

Also that is just wanky question begging and doesn't really do anything interesting with its science.

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Ghambit]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Tannhauser]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Mattemeo]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Khaldun]

[Tannhauser]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

In fairness, I don't.

 

[Lantyssa]

At least you provide entertainment with your grump.

[HaemishM]

Scottishness is its own genre of entertainment. 

[Setanta]

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

[shiznitz]

Which reminds me that my kids need to see 2001.

[tazelbain]

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

[Teleku]

Which reminds me that my kids need to see 2001.

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

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.

[Bunk]

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!!!

[Sir T]

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

[UnSub]

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.

[Nevermore]

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.

[Tannhauser]

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.

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.

[Abagadro]

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

[Raguel]

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 .

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

[apocrypha]

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.