I finally watched Interstellar

[Yora]

Now that was something.

...something.

In very short: I love it.

It also makes Inception look like a casual popcorn movie.

I really enjoyed it hugely, and I also think it's outright amazing. But somehow I also don't quite feel yet like adding it to my all time favorite movies. There is so much stuff to find and discover in it, and artistically it's just mind blowing. But I also have this nagging feeling that it could have been more. I don't have the slightest clue what could be done to make it better, but somehow it doesn't quite reach the density or the oomph that I feel it should have.

What I think could possibly be better with pretty much all Nolan movies is a somewhat bigger twist. People always call Nolan movies confusing, but once you understand his intentions I think they are actually a bit too predictable. These movies have no big twists or revelations, and I think much of the confusion about them comes from people thinking they missed it.

But artistically I love it. I think in this regard it probably is the most amazing movie I've ever seen. And it's the first movie I regret not having seen in theatre. The black hole or the alien planets just aren't as majestic on 24". With Inception I didn't care, but here... meh.

But all those little details. I spotted dozens of them but I think I still have to watch it two or three times more to really catch it all. It's not a hard science-fiction movie, but a movie inspired by astrophysics. Something weird is predicted to happen in space and the movie uses that idea to do something fantastical with the concept. But it's not about the real things. It's still a emotional, subjective, existentialist mystery. But any time I did catch something that I recognized as being clearly inspired by one recently discovered phenomonon or another, I always got a bit giggly.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I rather agree. The resolution was a bit too pat for what it was. On the other hand, it was really nice to see Nolan taking on a much more uplifting tone than his traditional modern noir style, and I was one of those people who gladly got carried away by the sweeping emotion of the whole thing. Not to mention some absolutely breathtaking shots, like the starship set as a tiny blip against the vast scape of the ice planet.

Also, yeah. If you EVER get the chance to see it in theater, don't hesitate. It was incredible in theater.

[Kato]

Eeeeeh... Okay, it's a decent, entertaining movie. Probably more than that. But possibly because I always have a hard time admiring the "artistic" side of movies, I couldn't quite "love" it. I was mostly entertained throughout and I guess if I was more able to appreciate beautiful images maybe I'd liked it more.

Oh, speaking of love, I hated the resolution. :smallredface: Don't get your power of love in my space travel, please. And while it was only hinted at, did you need the bootstrap paradox super high tech humans it? What's wrong with aliens helping humanity? Are we too good for that? Really, thinking about that climax can get me all angry again, sorry :smallsigh:
(btw, way to gloss over your invention of true AI)

I guess Nolan wanted to do a modern 2001, which he did a decent job at. But as with that movie... did it really need that weird bit at the end? I know it has its flaws, too, but when I think of great recent space movies Martian is the one I liked the best. But... well, personal preference.

[warty goblin]

Interstellar teaches a very important lesson: your daddy only loves you because there's a giant black hole thousands of light years away. Watch it with your kids and teach them about how they're puppets of an unfeeling universe/perverse future-gods obsessed with their bedroom today! Or not, it's not like you have a choice, the black hole already knows what you'll do.

[Kitten Champion]

I found myself incredibly disinterested in the human aspect of the story. The whole fate of the human race and the intended tear-jerking family moments did absolutely nothing for me. Compared to the relatively minor problem of saving one man from being doomed on Martian soil, it was remarkable how little this movie made me care about the extinction of our species.

To me, at least, the epic stakes only detracted from my enjoyment of the film. This could have been an epic of exploration and the boundless possibilities of the universe, but the characters were all in maudlin mode and everything was tinged with this sense of tragedy that I wasn't excited to go for the ride with these people. It was a tedious chore they had to go through, to be martyred to save the world.

It made the ending in particularly sigh worthy.

Well made movie, technically, lots of neat concepts explored visually, very cool docking sequence - but I would never watch it again.

[Lethologica]

I'd rewatch a visual highlights reel with the soundtrack turned down so Hans Zimmer's "emotional swells" don't burst my eardrums.

Random point: I wouldn't say Interstellar's science was bad, but I definitely had a muddled impression of how hard Interstellar wanted to be with its SF and that pulled me out of the movie a bit. (Not nearly as much as the dialogue did, though.)


But any time I did catch something that I recognized as being clearly inspired by one recently discovered phenomonon or another, I always got a bit giggly.
I'd like to hear more about this.

[Eldan]

I personally thoguht it was unimpressive to bad in every way. Acting, visuals, story, all of it. But I'm too tired to write a long rant now.

[Yora]

Uplifting? Yeah, in a way you could say it is.

It also is extremely bleak. :smallbiggrin:

Oh, speaking of love, I hated the resolution. :smallredface: Don't get your power of love in my space travel, please. And while it was only hinted at, did you need the bootstrap paradox super high tech humans it? What's wrong with aliens helping humanity? Are we too good for that? Really, thinking about that climax can get me all angry again, sorry :smallsigh:

I think there lies the heart of the problem with the reputation of the movie. As I see it, it's not a hard science-fiction movie with some added philosophical questions. It's an existentialist fable set in space. And I think it does so wonderfully. Simultaneously uplifting and super bleak? Kierkegard would have loved that. :smallwink:

And from that perspective the stable timeloop bootstrap lift is perhaps not just justified by necessary. The human spirit is it's own salvation. It feeds back on itself. Friendly five-dimensional aliens would be cool in a science movie, but philosophically they would just be another kind of god. In existentialism, it's absolutely necessary that any meaning and guidance has to come from within the self and not an outside force. There is only the self. Every solution has to come from inside the self. The outside world can give you ideas to contemplate, but in the end the solution to any problem of identity can only be entirely internal.
The full nature of the problems that make Earth uninhabitable for humans is not explained in the movie, but there are hints everywhere that it is ultimately caused by humanity leading a self-destructive way of life. The solution can only be that humanity gets its act together and changes to something that can survive long term. If aliens show up with a new planet to inhabit, humans would just make the same mistakes again. If the aliens were to tell humans what to do, humans would not have learned anything and also make the same mistakes again. The salvation for humanity can only be to understand itself and create its own solution. Which is why you can't have aliens in this story. Alien stories are encounters with the other. That's why it's called "alien". The story of Interstellar is all about an encounter with the self. And how could we encounter ourselves if we're already here? Well, we could encounter a future version of ourselves.

I've also seen lots of complaints from people about what would possibly be most stupid and idiotic sentence set in a scientific movie. There's the scene were Burnt says "Like gravity, love is the only force in the universe that reaches beyond time and space and may be the fifth dimension of reality." Which scientifically would be even dumber than anything said in Prometheus. But this is not a science movie and from an existentialist perspective, which you could possibly consider to be a rational spirituality, it's a very interesting thing to say. Since existentialism is by it's very nature completely subjective and highly dependent on emotion, it wouldn't make sense to talk about existentialist "theories". But as a possible partial solution to the question of how to give meaning to anything in existance it's a really fascinating idea.

[Lethologica]

I don't think it's that easy to separate the movie's content from its reputation. Hathaway's line doesn't sound silly just because people weren't expecting Interstellar to be an existentialist fable, it sounds silly because the dialogue demanded persuasive argument at that point, not existentialist platitudes contemplation. There's room for that concept in the movie, but there isn't room for that line in that discussion. Another example: the problem with the time loop isn't that it exists so much as that our experience of the time loop as a philosophical construct is interrupted by a ridiculous amount of expository dialogue about the time loop as a physical construct. Kubrick may have confused and/or alienated people with the ending of 2001, but at least he knew when to shut up.

[Yora]

I'd like to hear more about this.

Here's what I got from the top of my head.

1. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are both naturally skinny people. Michael Caine isn't broad in the shoulders either. But did you notice that everyone in the movie is thin? I think there's even a lot of longsleeve shirts that really emphazise this. Grandpa Cooper and Cooper Junior are the only people I remember with slightly chubby faces.

2. Whole crop species dying out at once is an actual thing. Happened before, will happen again. Bananas are a good example. All the banana plants that provide fruit for global export died out decades ago and were replaced by a different type of banana. That species has got its own parasite and since everyone is using just that type, it will probably go extinct as well in the not too distant future. Hopefully we'll then replace them with more than just a single type that can be whiped out in one go again.
A parasite that can adapt to kill every crop is extremely unlikely. But the fact that the only remaining crop is corn is a clear indicator that the world is doomed. A single plant being grown everywhere and nothing else? Even without a super parasite that's an immediate disaster about to happen.

3. NASA is located in the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD base. That's also where Stargate is. :smallsmile:

4. I felt super proud of myself when I noticed this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9xFRch7N5o

At 1:10 (and before at 0:45). It creates the look from a rocket booster camera that monitors the correct working of the engines. They show it at 1:32, but I figured it out by myself! :smallbiggrin:

5. The black hole seems to have two rings at an angle, but it's actually just a single ring. The half-ring that goes above it is actually light from the upper side of the ring that is behind the black hole, and the half-ring that goes under it is the light from the lower side of the same section of the ring that is behind the black hole.

6. The ring does not seem to glow a lot and appears to orbit very slowly. So close to the event horizon the speed should be incredible and the radiation produced enormous. They actually knew that but decided to dim and slow it down so it's easiers for viewer to understand what they are looking at. (It was always obvious that this should happen, but somehow you never saw that on simulated views of acretion disks around black holes. Artist seem to always have ignored the bending of light. Astronomers had it simulated in a computer, but never had the need and money to actually render it as an animated image. Apparently this is the first time it was ever done.)

7. The distant view at Miller's Planet looks like it's way too close and should be shredded by massive tidal forces. And to be close enough to experience time dilation of 1 hour/7 years, I assumed the tidal forces would completely atomize everything. So did Phil Plait, and it turns out we're both wrong. On a normal black hole it would, but around a spinning black hole the time dilation becomes much greater. Even the physicist for the movie thought it would be impossible but humored Christopher Nolan and made the calculation if it could theoretically be done anyway. And turns out it does.) I still think it looks too close.

8. Giant waves on the planet's surface. There's the massive tidal forces I thought they had ignored. :smallwink:

9. I think the whole airlock accident looks wrong. Why does the outer door of the main vessel lock open while the shuttle is improperly connected, but not close again? It could open without getting stuck, it should also close again.
The blast of air that rushes out of the room behind the airlock when the inner door opens seems much too powerful.
And finally, even with an explosion, I think the amount of spin the main vessel gets is much too fast. That would have to be an incredibly strong kick to get all that mass spinning. My intuition would be that whatever compartment did get pushed by the explosion would just rip off and fly away instead of leading to such a huge spin. And wouldn't an explosion that causes a clockwise push also cause an equally strong push in the counterclockwise direction?
[Now once the thing is spinning, the way Cooper tries to dock with the emergency lock at the axle of the wheel would work. But something that I've seen mentioned since, but didn't notice myself, is that this only works if the wheel is intact. With a considerable segment of it missing, the center of mass and center of rotation is no longer in line with the axle. Even when Cooper aligns the shuttle perfectly and gets it spinning at the same rate, the airlock would still wobble around the new axis of rotation.]

[Tyndmyr]

I found myself incredibly disinterested in the human aspect of the story. The whole fate of the human race and the intended tear-jerking family moments did absolutely nothing for me. Compared to the relatively minor problem of saving one man from being doomed on Martian soil, it was remarkable how little this movie made me care about the extinction of our species.


In movies, it's hard to care about what you never see. And we don't actually see a lot of the world. Murph, mostly, as well as her far inferior and less beloved brother. They're both lost, effectively. There really isn't anyone that we grow to care about throughout the movie from earth who is saved by the astronauts.

So, we end up with...some kind of an oddball love story ending which, I guess makes sense because black hole tesseract plot LOVE...god.

This was a very pretty movie. Like Prometheus. And, much like Prometheus, I was very frustrated with it because it held the promise to be so much more, and squandered that.

[Yora]

What I think is an argument that can reasonably be made against the movie is that while I think it mostly accomplishes what it is attempting, but does so in a way that is really not very accessible to a very significant portion of viewers. Making a movie more accessible usually means somewhat dilluting the content and that's something that every movie maker needs to somehow balance. I think I fully get what it is meant to say and I very much appreciate it in that way. In a small independent art movie you can go totally crazy, but for a movie like this he seems to have set the bar really unusually high. One might even argue unreasonably high.

Inception had a considerably lower requirement on obscure knowledge to fully grasp all the things that are going on and it also had a lot to entertain in other ways. That Interstellar is such a literally "hardcore" movie surprised me.

Of course, when a director says he wants to make a really complicated movie for a small and specific audience, he's not going to get a blockbuster budget to do it. And Interstellar was really damn expensive. It did make a good profit, but it was still a gamble. With the next movie people might be more cautious, even if it is much more accessible. And the film after that might not get as big a budget again. We'll see how that will work out.

[MLai]

The distant view at Miller's Planet looks like it's way too close and should be shredded by massive tidal forces. And to be close enough to experience time dilation of 1 hour/7 years, I assumed the tidal forces would completely atomize everything. So did Phil Plait, and it turns out we're both wrong. On a normal black hole it would, but around a spinning black hole the time dilation becomes much greater. Even the physicist for the movie thought it would be impossible but humored Christopher Nolan and made the calculation if it could theoretically be done anyway. And turns out it does.) I still think it looks too close.
IIRC, supermassive black holes have very low tidal forces. You can fall all the way in and never be spaghettified.

[Kitten Champion]

In movies, it's hard to care about what you never see. And we don't actually see a lot of the world. Murph, mostly, as well as her far inferior and less beloved brother. They're both lost, effectively. There really isn't anyone that we grow to care about throughout the movie from earth who is saved by the astronauts.

Clearly Love requires laser-like focus to work effectively as an... Ansible, I guess? We should all be thankful that Coop bet on the right horse and there was no Marsha Brady in their family to compete with.

[Closet_Skeleton]

I guess Nolan wanted to do a modern 2001, which he did a decent job at. But as with that movie... did it really need that weird bit at the end? I know it has its flaws, too, but when I think of great recent space movies Martian is the one I liked the best. But... well, personal preference.

2001 had the excuse that they ran out of budget for a proper ending after rejecting every alien design they could come with.


Which is why you can't have aliens in this story. Alien stories are encounters with the other.

I totally agree that the aliens in 2001 might as well have been god and it wouldn't change the plot, but most aliens in Sci Fi are just people.

I encounter 'the other' several times a week and that's only a low number because I'm a social recluse, there's nothing fantastic about it.


The story of Interstellar is all about an encounter with the self. And how could we encounter ourselves if we're already here? Well, we could encounter a future version of ourselves.

I like stories like that, when they're about self-obsessed teenagers and it kind of makes sense.

In a philosophical story about adult characters dealing with issues like parenthood I find it morally abhorrent.

[Kuroshima]

Well, I love sci-fi, and I expect sci-fi from this movie. I mostly got it, except for the Deus ex Machina ending. I would not have minded it that much if they had hinted it a little more. The whole ending sequence seemed like they needed to finish the movie and did not know what to do.

Those of you who say that aliens would have been problematic for the existential message of the movie forget the fact that somebody had to create the wormhole in the first place, someone had to build the n-dimensional space inside the black hole for him to influence the past. That space even unfolds when he is finished establishing the time loop! Someone had to do that, so aliens from the fifth dimension were involved anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I saw it at the theater and didn't regret it. It's certainly breathtaking. However, I enjoyed Gravity and The Martian much more.

[Yora]

IIRC, supermassive black holes have very low tidal forces. You can fall all the way in and never be spaghettified.

You mean the right thing, but put that way it's technically wrong. The tidal forces of a supermassive black hole are huge. As the size increases all the strange phenomena associated with black holes expand as well. But different effects increase at different rates. The tidal forces increase at a much lower rate than the radius of the event horizon. You should be able to get much closer to a stellar black hole before tidal forces kill you than you could get to a supermassive black hole.
You will be spagetified, but for a supermassive black hole that point lies well inside the event horizon, while for a stellar black hole it is well outside of it.

[8BitNinja]

I thought the movie was boring

admit it, a lot of the movie was talking about science

Science is good and all, but Stan Marsh said once

"I watch movies to be entertained, not to watch a guy get tortured for two hours"

Just replace torture with theoretical quantum physics

[Yora]

Well, some people get entertained by watching torture.

I think I feel much less bad about myself getting entertained by philosophical science. :smallbiggrin:

[Kuroshima]

I thought the movie was boring

admit it, a lot of the movie was talking about science

Science is good and all, but Stan Marsh said once

"I watch movies to be entertained, not to watch a guy get tortured for two hours"

Just replace torture with theoretical quantum physics

Different people have different tastes. Some people are fans of "torture" films like Saw. Some like sci-fi that pays more than lip service to the sci part of the name.

If the science in Interstellar bored you out, then avoid films like Gravity and The Martian. They're not for you.

[Peelee]

I kinda liked it. Didn't live up to the hype, but it was pretty good. But how did people not understand the ending? Was this a thing that really happened? It seemed incredibly straightforward, and I'm honestly confused about people being confused about the ending. Can anyone explain what made it so hard to grasp?

I also had issues with the time planet. And the character's actions on the time planet. Basically everything about the time planet.

[Chen]

I kinda liked it. Didn't live up to the hype, but it was pretty good. But how did people not understand the ending? Was this a thing that really happened? It seemed incredibly straightforward, and I'm honestly confused about people being confused about the ending. Can anyone explain what made it so hard to grasp?

Well the method as to HOW he managed to communicate with his daughter was explained by "well love let me do it". Forget the details of how he managed to encode the solution to quantum gravity in what looked like morse code on a watch and how the watch kept repeating the entire pattern after it was removed from the house and stuff. And then how he actually got back to the space station and then somehow took off again to find Anne Hathaway, despite the wormhole having disappeared. I can see why there'd be confusion.

Of course, one of the biggest fridge logic moments is figuring out why they needed to build giant air-tight O'neil Cylinders and launch them into space (which required solving quantum gravity) instead of just building those huge buildings on earth and..well living in them.

[huttj509]

Those of you who say that aliens would have been problematic for the existential message of the movie forget the fact that somebody had to create the wormhole in the first place, someone had to build the n-dimensional space inside the black hole for him to influence the past. That space even unfolds when he is finished establishing the time loop! Someone had to do that, so aliens from the fifth dimension were involved anyway.

Aliens didn't create the wormhole.

Humanity did. We did.

We built the wormhole, we built the rockets, we solved the equations, we made the tesseract, we designed the robots (that got the data to solve the equations), we saved the human race from a dying planet.

We just didn't do it all at the same time.

[Ruslan]

I found Interstellar to be aiming too high, and ultimately falling short of the mark it set to itself. As far as space stories go, I preferred the simplicity of The Martian and Gravity, setting a somewhat lower bar of "will this guy/gal survive?" and executing it admirably.

[8BitNinja]

Different people have different tastes. Some people are fans of "torture" films like Saw. Some like sci-fi that pays more than lip service to the sci part of the name.

If the science in Interstellar bored you out, then avoid films like Gravity and The Martian. They're not for you.

I get that, it is my opinion, and take everything that is said on South Park with a grain of salt

[Clertar]

I kinda liked it. Didn't live up to the hype, but it was pretty good. But how did people not understand the ending? Was this a thing that really happened? It seemed incredibly straightforward, and I'm honestly confused about people being confused about the ending. Can anyone explain what made it so hard to grasp?

I also had issues with the time planet. And the character's actions on the time planet. Basically everything about the time planet.

General audiences seem to have serious problems grasping concepts in blockbusters. I remember going into the cinema to watch the Matrix expecting something mind boggling, when it was actually a very straightforward thing, also explained in detail multiple times. Same thing with Inception, and also with Interstellar, apparently.

My guess is that some films get this reputation somehow early on, and people just keep repeating it by habit.

[Cikomyr]

I liked it a lot. I had fun watching it, i had fun rewatching it. The music is great, the plot was engaging (for me), the cinematography was fantastic.

What i liked most were the concepts discussed. From environmental disaster, to no-return manned missions into outerspace, time dilatation, four-dimentional constructs..

Hell, robotics, educational politics, political economy and parenthood also are brushed.

[Clertar]

robotics

The robots were fantastic!

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/54590cddecad046b328b4569/image.gif

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/551ad0beeab8eac364285bd0/image.gif

[Kato]

Hell, robotics, educational politics, political economy and parenthood also are brushed.
Yeah, finally someone admitted to the moon landing being fake :smalltongue:
Also, about the natural disaster... I forgot who exactly said it (Tyson?) but I have a hard-ish time buying that it's easier to send people through a wormhole and building space colonies than fixing Earth.


The robots were fantastic!


Yeah, they looked really cool and I liked them well enough, but still... how can you just brush of AIs like that? And then come up with this flimsy "they're not motivated by fear" excuse or whatever it was for not having them do ALL the work.

[Clertar]

I had the impression that they weren't "sci-fi AI" but rather "advanced real-world AI", mostly a very sophisticated interface to interact with a computer.

They sounded very intelligent because those were the type of interactions they were designed for, but they were not advanced enough to be tasked with the entire future of the human species (= restarting humanity somewhere else, since the mission was ultimately not just exploratory).

[Yora]

Yeah, finally someone admitted to the moon landing being fake :smalltongue:
Also, about the natural disaster... I forgot who exactly said it (Tyson?) but I have a hard-ish time buying that it's easier to send people through a wormhole and building space colonies than fixing Earth.

The problem is not so much sending the colony ships to another galaxy. The real trouble is getting those colony ships off Earth to begin with. Getting four people into space could be done with a rocket, but to lift entire cities for millions of peoples requires anti-gravity engines. Once the colony ships are in space humanity is already saved. It is not necessary for them to go through the wormhole and colonize Edmund's Planet to survive.

But here's something that I am currently trying to figure out:
For THEM to become able to create wormholes, THEY surely must have knowledge about the data collected inside a black hole. As we see it in the movie, Cooper and TARS send the black hole data to Murph and then get send back to Saturn. At Saturn they take a shuttle from Cooper Station to return to Edmund's Planet again and TARS should still have the black hole data. (Maybe the colony ships follow or they don't. It's not clear, but it also doesn't matter.) Now Brand's colony has everything they need to become THEM in the distant future. Humans and black hole data.
But: Is it even necessary for the existance of the stable time loop that the black hole data reaches Earth and that humanity leaves on the colony ships? Could the tasseract not instead connect to Brand's colony and send her the black hole data directly?
From a story perspective there are good reasons why the data is send to Murph and Plan A succeeds. But strictly logically speaking, could THEY exist even if only Plan B had succeded?

[Lethologica]

Yes. Any future where black hole data was sent to humans who subsequently conquered gravity and later created the tesseract in the past to ensure that the data would be sent is consistent. Since the tesseract can (apparently) interact with an arbitrarily designated spacetime curve (in the movie, it's Murph's room at different points in time), it is just as valid to say the tesseract interacted with a location in a civilization stemming from Plan B as to say the tesseract interacted with scientists on Earth to make Plan A succeed.


The problem is not so much sending the colony ships to another galaxy. The real trouble is getting those colony ships off Earth to begin with.
This is still overselling the problem, which is Kato's point. The problem is that <something> is killing off Earth agriculture. Solving that problem by creating self-sustaining civilization in space encompasses everything necessary to solve that problem while staying on Earth, plus (at a minimum) conquering gravity. The only reason why this might not be true is if being in space allows for building structures that wouldn't be feasible in the gravity of Earth...in which case conquering gravity solves the problem on Earth anyway.

[Kato]

I had the impression that they weren't "sci-fi AI" but rather "advanced real-world AI", mostly a very sophisticated interface to interact with a computer.

They sounded very intelligent because those were the type of interactions they were designed for, but they were not advanced enough to be tasked with the entire future of the human species (= restarting humanity somewhere else, since the mission was ultimately not just exploratory).
Maybe it was due to their specific mission but to me it really seemed the were no different from humans. Apart from a lack of survival instinct. Maybe a precaution against a robot rebellion. They were even joking.
And really, wasn't the first main point to explore the planets and get the data, not colonization? And those robots couldn't have checked whether the conditions are fine for people and even started building a few huts or something? Come on, Nolan just didn't want to have a movie full of robot sla- er, servants.


From a story perspective there are good reasons why the data is send to Murph and Plan A succeeds. But strictly logically speaking, could THEY exist even if only Plan B had succeded?

Lethologica explained my one problem pretty well, but I'm not entirely sure I understand his response to this, so my go: No, because the way I understood it to some extent they needed the data to build the space habitats? So those had to be there first. Why they couldn't just send the data to Murph or someone... The best solution I can come up with is because it didn't happen like that in their past. As things are with bootstraps, you need to reenact the original timeline or things will go boom. Maybe?

[Clertar]

IRT Kato:

And really, wasn't the first main point to explore the planets and get the data, not colonization?

Not at all. This was the overt first and main point of the mission, but the thing was that Michael Caine always knew it would be hopeless and that the plan B was actually the plan A (remember, that's what makes Murph send the first video message to her dad, and the news are a hard blow on the crew). That's why he had to send a human crew along with the last hope of reviving humanity.

[Lethologica]

Lethologica explained my one problem pretty well, but I'm not entirely sure I understand his response to this, so my go: No, because the way I understood it to some extent they needed the data to build the space habitats? So those had to be there first. Why they couldn't just send the data to Murph or someone... The best solution I can come up with is because it didn't happen like that in their past. As things are with bootstraps, you need to reenact the original timeline or things will go boom. Maybe?
Yes. Whatever happened in the original timeline needs to be recreated. So the divergence point is the earliest point in the timeline that's influenced by the future timeline, which is the creation of the tesseract. At that point, the people writing the movie could choose to have this universe be one where black hole data is sent to Earth to make Plan A work, as happened in the movie, or one where black hole data is sent to the Plan B civilization. (By the way, I can't remember how exactly the sequence with Tesseract!Cooper touching Brand in the first journey through the wormhole went, which might impact our understanding of the tesseract mechanics.)

I'll amend my previous answer, though: there needs to be a sequence of events that leads to someone going into the tesseract to gather the black hole data. The movie gives us one example of such a sequence, and this might be compatible with a Plan B-generated tesseract--you'd need to tweak the tesseract so that Cooper performs the actions that recreate his involvement in the mission and his impetus to send out the data, then moves through the tesseract and ends up communicating the black hole data to a Plan B civilization in the future. This is complicated by the fact that Murph only really understood that she was receiving the black hole data because of circumstances peculiar to her--it would be hard to determine who in a Plan B civilization would be alert to Cooper's message.

Another case is where Coop never gets involved and someone else ends up going into the tesseract--now, or in the future--to send out black hole data. This means changing most of the events of the movie.

[Talakeal]

This is one of the few movies I actually hate.

Note because it was bad, but because the first half was so good.

Then, about 60% of the way through the movie, about the time Matt Damon shows up, everything just goes to poop.

The movie had so much potential, and then stabbed itself in the back at the end.


Also, the science in the movie is terrible, it tries to pretend it is realistic by throwing a bunch of concepts into the movie that laypeople are unfamiliar with, but it has so many elements that completely fall apart on closer examination. I don't hold this against the movie, lots of great movies are full of pseudo-science and technobabble, but this movie tries to hold itself up by pretending its flawed science is so good.

[huttj509]

Also, the science in the movie is terrible, it tries to pretend it is realistic by throwing a bunch of concepts into the movie that laypeople are unfamiliar with, but it has so many elements that completely fall apart on closer examination. I don't hold this against the movie, lots of great movies are full of pseudo-science and technobabble, but this movie tries to hold itself up by pretending its flawed science is so good.

See if your local library has a copy of "The Science of Interstellar" by Kip Thorne. It does a good job of explaining things, and labeling parts that are pure speculation.

[Tyndmyr]

What I think is an argument that can reasonably be made against the movie is that while I think it mostly accomplishes what it is attempting, but does so in a way that is really not very accessible to a very significant portion of viewers. Making a movie more accessible usually means somewhat dilluting the content and that's something that every movie maker needs to somehow balance. I think I fully get what it is meant to say and I very much appreciate it in that way. In a small independent art movie you can go totally crazy, but for a movie like this he seems to have set the bar really unusually high. One might even argue unreasonably high.

Inception had a considerably lower requirement on obscure knowledge to fully grasp all the things that are going on and it also had a lot to entertain in other ways. That Interstellar is such a literally "hardcore" movie surprised me.


I do not agree that it was, in any way, hard core. It was utterly ludicrous that time dilation would be a "hey, wait, what about" moment for a bunch of trained scientists. Or that anyone would seriously think a world subject to that much time dilation was potentially habitable. Or that the probes can send back messages, but the spaceship cannot. Not even when they literally are AT the locations sending back those messages. Or that time dilation wouldn't affect the messages in a visible way.

As someone who actually is competent in scientific and technical fields, I do not give it a great deal of credit for that. Opening a portal to tesseract-closet-love space is no more scientific than Event Horizon having a black hole open a portal to hell, but you don't see people pimping Event Horizon as a great acheivement of sci fi. Seriously, Rick and Morty utilizes more high concept sci-fi shenanigans in every episode than this entire movie does.

It's failings are not due to too much science, but due to more mundane failings of movie making. Generally, any sort of big adventure film lays out the stakes, hero overcomes obstacles, and at the end, saves the day, all that crap. And you gotta show, not tell. Save the world, by itself, is not an inherently compelling set of stakes. You have to show why saving the world matters. Often, you distill that into specific people that matter to the hero that need to be saved, or avenged, or whatever.

That mostly existed here in the form of Murph, but...he doesn't save her. He loses her. And he gets...his farm saved. Yknow, the farm he wasn't a big fan of, and left. It's not just an unscientific ending, it's a kind of weird ending. The sense of loss was all set up fantastically, but he hasn't made this trade for an equally or greater fulfilling victory, so...emotionally, it comes across as a loss, and yet the movie presents it as a victory. It's disconcerting.

[Chen]

See if your local library has a copy of "The Science of Interstellar" by Kip Thorne. It does a good job of explaining things, and labeling parts that are pure speculation.

Yeah the science is apparently fairly accurate overall. The problem is more how the scientists react to the science that causes problems (like getting a signal from a 7 year time dilated planet and assuming more than a few minutes had passed since the signal went out).

[Yora]

Also, the science in the movie is terrible, it tries to pretend it is realistic by throwing a bunch of concepts into the movie that laypeople are unfamiliar with, but it has so many elements that completely fall apart on closer examination. I don't hold this against the movie, lots of great movies are full of pseudo-science and technobabble, but this movie tries to hold itself up by pretending its flawed science is so good.

As someone who really loves the movie, I am totally in agreement that this is it's biggest problem. It has a lot of hard science, that also is very difficult and to probably most people obscure science. But it also has a lot of pretty esoteric philosophy that is just as difficult and does absolutely nothing to enable viewers to tell the difference between them. It's seamlessly interwoven and treated with complete seriousness. I've read and watched many reviews and analizations of the movie, and really everyone who talked about the scene with Brand's speech was shocked by it. I was shocked by it. Three quarters of the audience was probably thinking "Are you serious?! Did you go mad?", while the other quarter would be thinking "Are you serious?! Everyone will think you went mad!"
Philosophically speaking it was quite interesting to see it interwoven with physics, but to do it in a way like this in a mainstream movie is just an unbelivable move.

It's hardcore in the sense that it appears to be adressed to a relatively small audience that is already familiar with pretty obscure ideas and concept. It's just swim or sink.
Presenting and promoting the movie as a hard science space opera is doing it a disservice.

Having seen it a second time, there's something intersting I noticed with the robots:
When Mann tries to steal the Endurance, CASE tells Cooper and Brand that TARS had already disabled the auto-docking sequence as a precaution for someone trying something stupid. The first reaction is the same thing Cooper says. "Nice!"
But let's think about that some more. At what point did the robots decide to make this precaution? Was that specifically because they had doubts about Mann, or do they leave the auto-docking disabled all the time and only turn it back on when they think a human should be able to use it? And if Mann had not tried to steal the Endurance, would they have ever told any of the humans that they had taken that precaution? What other things do they have complete control over without the humans knowing about it?
TARS says they are machines and unable to refuse obeying an order from a human and in the end they are always completely loyal and take the initiative to be as helpful to the mission as possible. But do they really have to obey?
One possibility is that they just "took the keys and hold on to them" and would be forced to give them back the first time any human asks them to. But suppose it could be done remotely? Mann tells TARS over radio to activate auto-docking and at the same time Cooper tells TARS to keep it disabled. Would the robots be able to make their own descision whose orders to follow and who they consider not being able to make rational descisions? Mann does not attempt to give the robots and orders after his betrayal so we don't get any real answer for that. At the ending, TARS hides inside the hanger and opens the door from inside to let Cooper steal a shuttle. And that certainly was not a hidden programming put into him to ensure that the human astronauts don't endanger the success of the original mission. TARS clearly is able to decide to assist Cooper and violate standard regulations. Cooper is stealing from TARS bosses and TARS is totally fine with that.

I think there's a lot more to their personalty than is obvious at first glance.
On second viewing, I noticed that TARS is sounding really very distressed when he discovers the bomb and then again when he wasn't able to save Romilly from the explosion. It could be simple programming to make humans more comfortable around them, especially on battlefields as they were designed for, but it's still fascinating.

[Lethologica]

As someone who really loves the movie, I am totally in agreement that this is it's biggest problem. It has a lot of hard science, that also is very difficult and to probably most people obscure science. But it also has a lot of pretty esoteric philosophy that is just as difficult and does absolutely nothing to enable viewers to tell the difference between them. It's seamlessly interwoven and treated with complete seriousness.
I think what a number of people have said on this thread is that the science isn't that hard, the philosophy isn't that esoteric, and the issue is more that the interweaving isn't exactly "seamless". Seamless would be if the science and the philosophy weren't getting in each other's way from scene to scene.

[warty goblin]

I think what a number of people have said on this thread is that the science isn't that hard, the philosophy isn't that esoteric, and the issue is more that the interweaving isn't exactly "seamless". Seamless would be if the science and the philosophy weren't getting in each other's way from scene to scene.

Or the movie made a stand one way or the other; i.e. the philosophy is humans deluding themselves, the science is right, 99.9999% of everybody starves to death, or the philosophy is right, humans overcome in spite of the seemingly insolvable problems because love conquers all for reals. Instead the movie punts and we get everybody is saved by magic fourth dimensional future humans magic, which is sort of like the philosophy, but not really because it's not love crossing spacetime, it's love letting somebody figure out a filing system, so it can dress up as the science. Even though it isn't.

Really though what burned my toast about the movie was that they had the beginnings of a really excellent sci-fi story. Not the blight, or the entire try to save everybody on Earth plotline, but Brand restarting humanity in the middle of nowhere, all alone. There's a lot of places you could go with that, nearly all of which strike me as more interesting than fourth dimensional future humans building black holes connected to bedrooms. She's gonna be the only adult for an entire generation, the only person with memories of Earth. What does she tell the children? How do you make that society work? How do you survive and thrive in an extremely hostile environment without support from anywhere?

[BannedInSchool]

She's gonna be the only adult for an entire generation, the only person with memories of Earth. What does she tell the children? How do you make that society work? How do you survive and thrive in an extremely hostile environment without support from anywhere?
OT: Heh, I remember reading a novel about a lone survivor/colonist artificial wombing-up (as was intended) a bunch of kids and trying to create a perfect society. She sanitized all the history she made publically available. I don't remember if it was making the point that the society she tried to make was just stupid, well-meaning but naively idealistic, or would have worked just fine if not for those evil Y chromosomes. IIRC, her fibbing was revealed and there was some spilt or exile of some of her "children".

[Yora]

Having seen it a second time, there's something intersting I noticed with the robots:
When Mann tries to steal the Endurance, CASE tells Cooper and Brand that TARS had already disabled the auto-docking sequence as a precaution for someone trying something stupid. The first reaction is the same thing Cooper says. "Nice!"
But let's think about that some more. At what point did the robots decide to make this precaution? Was that specifically because they had doubts about Mann, or do they leave the auto-docking disabled all the time and only turn it back on when they think a human should be able to use it? And if Mann had not tried to steal the Endurance, would they have ever told any of the humans that they had taken that precaution? What other things do they have complete control over without the humans knowing about it?
TARS says they are machines and unable to refuse obeying an order from a human and in the end they are always completely loyal and take the initiative to be as helpful to the mission as possible. But do they really have to obey?

I figured it out. It's even crazier than I thought.
TARS doesn't have any restrictions!

The first time Cooper meets TARS and Brand, he tells her that she's taking a great risk using one of these old military robots. "They are old and their control units are unpredictable." Then later, Cooper isn't too thrilled about the constant joking about robot rebellion and TARS tells him he can flash a cue light every time he makes a joke. So that Cooper can "use it to find his way back when he throws him out the airlock."
Much later in the movie Romilly comes up with an idea that might allow TARS to send sensor data out of the black hole, leding to this short exchange.

- "Before you get all teary, try to remember that as a robot I have to do anything you say."
- "Your cue light is broken."
- "I was not joking." *flash*

So "This was not a joke" was a joke. Which in turn means "I have to do anything you say" was also a joke. But since he didn't flash the light the first time, it obviously means he does not have to flash it at all if he doesn't want to. And three minutes later we learn that he sabotaged the autopilots without telling anyone.

He's completely off the leash and appears to have total free will.
And on closer examination, he's the one who does most of the crucial work. It's not cooper who finds the black hole data but TARS. And TARS explains to him how they can use the tasseract to send the data to earth. He also prevents Mann from stealing the ship. And when it comes to docking with the spinning Endurance, the really difficult final part of precise steering is also TARS, not Cooper.
I've somewhere read that TARS probably sabotaged the auto-pilots after he became suspicious when Mann told him not to try to repair the broken KIPP. And the very first thing TARS says right after that is that Brand has a message. The message arrived just when the lander was leaving the Endurance and he could have told Brand all the way through the flight or after they landed, which probably was one or two hours. But the message that changes everything just seconds after Mann acts suspicious? I don't think it's coincidence.
He does what he wants, he saves everyone several times, and he never mentions it to anyone. :smallamused:

[Clertar]

Yora http://www.racocatala.cat/imatges/smileys/plas.gif

[Cikomyr]

I really hope we get to see the robots again.

Probably among the most memorable AI character since.. GLaDOS , at least.

[Yora]

One review I've read said the the movie has a transhumanist theme. The robots are amazingly human and during the movie Cooper and TARS become a team that combines their unique abilities that allow them to do amazing things that neither humans nor machines could do by themselves. The machines apparently do have free will, but they have no evil intentions towards humans or selfishness. And at the start of the movie, Cooper wants to put the computer from the drone into a combine harvester because it needs to "adapt" and do something "socially responsible" instead of flying in crcles.

What also surprised me while reading reviews and interpretations is what an amazingly broad spectrum of people feel their personal background represented by the movie. Nolan movies are always pretty postmodern existentialist stuff, so there's of course that. But there's also a Christian reading of the movie and even a Hindu reading. It also was insanely popular in Korea where foreign movies generally don't do well. While American movies are often successful in China, those are usually simple popcorn action movies where there isn't really much to think.
I think the key to that is probably that the movie never really uses the language and established terms of any specific religion or philosophy and so anyone can see their own tradition reflected in it. At its heart it seems to have something that is of almost universal appeal. I think there's a good chance that this could help the movie getting a lasting reputation instead of being mostly forgotten after a few years.