Anyone saw Interstellar ?

[Aike]

It tried too much to be the next 2001: A Space Odyssey but it was quite entertaining. Compared to Kubrick's classic, which left its psychedelic ending open to interpretation (the right choice in my view), Interstellar made an ambitious attempt to close every single plot hole and explicitly made clear the whole meaning of the movie (apparently the audience is too stupid to infer it by themselves). Also, whereas Kubrick's film was more skeptical towards technology (remember HAL 9000?), Interstellar culminated in a rather naive celebration of Science & Progress.

[Cuddly]

It tried too much to be the next 2001: A Space Odyssey but it was quite entertaining. Compared to Kubrick's classic, which left its psychedelic ending open to interpretation (the right choice in my view), Interstellar made an ambitious attempt to close every single plot hole and explicitly made clear the whole meaning of the movie (apparently the audience is too stupid to infer it by themselves). Also, whereas Kubrick's film was more skeptical towards technology (remember HAL 9000?), Interstellar culminated in a rather naive celebration of Science & Progress.

I agree, but I still thought it was done well enough. Those strange happenings needed explaining and they got it, even if it was a bit much, I'd still prefer it the clever way it was done, over the alternative (lol benevolent aliens did it all for no reason just because they are so advanced blabla). That's the part I'm trying not to spoil.

[MikeW]

I agree, but I still thought it was done well enough. Those strange happenings needed explaining and they got it, even if it was a bit much, I'd still prefer it the clever way it was done, over the alternative (lol benevolent aliens did it all for no reason just because they are so advanced blabla). That's the part I'm trying not to spoil.

Now, now, don't go trash talking our alien overlords. We'd all still be living in trees and wearing hair suits if it wasn't for them!

As for the movie, I think it utterly sucked on so many levels I can barely wrap my head around it. I mean, truly, it was just plain DUMB! People are comparing it to 2001 -- not even close.

[Aike]

As for the movie, I think it utterly sucked on so many levels I can barely wrap my head around it. I mean, truly, it was just plain DUMB! People are comparing it to 2001 -- not even close.

Can you elaborate? I wouldn't say it's as good as Space Odyssey but I wouldn't go as far to say it's "just plain dumb" :eek:

[MikeW]

Can you elaborate? I wouldn't say it's as good as Space Odyssey but I wouldn't go as far to say it's "just plain dumb" :eek:

Ugg... where to even begin?

Pft. Hardly worth the effirt. NOTE THERE ARE SPOILERS in what I have to say, so if you're reading this and get egged by spoilers stop reading.

First thing that irritated me is the sound quality was bad. I could only understand about 1/3rd of what was being said -- this is due in part to my hearing loss but it wasn't only that. The dialogue was often muffled and then there was the irritating score that often played over the dialogue. Not that any of it mattered, everything they talked about was utter nonsense. Theoretical physics about black holes, relativity, singularities , fifth dimensions. Give me a break. Even understanding only about a third of what was said, I got that the whole thing -- all the gobbledygook pseudo-science -- was just absurd. Too much yack in muffled colloquial english with fake mid-west drawls. BORING!

The whole post-apocalypse aspect: What the fuck happened? The US government is gone? People ran out of food? All they can grow is corn?? Massive dust storms? From what? And then there's the whole crop burning stuff -- HINT: GREEN CORN DOES NOT BURN. I don't care HOW much fuel you pour on it -- and why waist the fuel?

Ok, so there are these weird things happening. A drone flies over and they take control of the it and make it land. Hugh? They figure out these gravitational anomalies are coordinates to a hold-over pre-apocolypse NASA facility that just happens to be within driving distance and just happens to be sending space craft searching for new habitable planets through a worm hole that just happened to appear in our solar system. Oh, and the facility? Well, that's a space station build under ground that COULD, conceivably, save some remnants of humanity if they could ever crack the equation that would allow them to overcome gravity?

WHATF??? And it just happens that our protagonist with the fake drawl is a retired astronaut and he's very quickly recruited to fly the last mission to find out what happened to the previous missions that had gone off a decade ago (apparently only a few minutes ago their time) to explore potentially inhabitable planets relatively close by on the other end of the worm hole. Utterly awesome. OH... and lets not forget that there is communication through the worm hole! They'd received messages back and our illustrious crew are able to receive intergalactic skype calls once they're in the other galaxy. Sweet.

So, all this stuff goes on and they get where they want to this planet with gigantic waves. Wow. And they didn't know the planet has these gigantic waves. And in between the waves the water is as calm as a lake. Hmmm... they have the ability to get through a worm hole to another galaxy and go to planets in a star system far, far away, but they don't have any means to assess the potential hazards of the planet? WTTF? Don't these people ever watch Star Trek? If there's no land, why land on the planet? Or, if there is land, why not land on the land and not on the water?

Just DUMB.

Then they get to another planet and all these screwy things go on with reviving the Matt Damon character. That turns out to be a total fisco and the end up having to fly into a black hole as their last desperate attempt to save humanity? Say what??

And oh yeah, the black hole takes them to a hyper dimensional tesseract that allows the protagonist to communicate back in time by twitching the second hand on a watch on earth which the daughter just happens to notice and figure out is her dad communicating with her.

Wow.

I mean, seriously?

The thing is, I have no problem with absurdities as long as they're in the context of PURE entertainment. But this movie wants to present itself as a "serious" movie. It isn't fun. It isn't particularly thrilling. Yeah, some of the visuals are nice -- but even they aren't all that great. If it has any kind of message I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is -- or, rather, the message that it does have is so sicky-sweet sentimental that it is just more of the absurdity. But, w/e, they get the space station off the ground and save at least some remnant of humanity and they all lived happily ever after.

THE END

[Aike]

Wow. So much hate :eek:

So, all this stuff goes on and they get where they want to this planet with gigantic waves. Wow. And they didn't know the planet has these gigantic waves. And in between the waves the water is as calm as a lake. Hmmm... they have the ability to get through a worm hole to another galaxy and go to planets in a star system far, far away, but they don't have any means to assess the potential hazards of the planet? WTTF? Don't these people ever watch Star Trek? If there's no land, why land on the planet? Or, if there is land, why not land on the land and not on the water?

In defense of the movie: they DID assess the potential hazards of the wave planet. The reason they didn't know about the waves is that the positive signals they received only covered what was - due to a major time discrepancy - a very short time period on the planet (thus, as they figured out after landing, the crew which landed there originally had died "only a few minutes ago").

As for all the pseudo-science - one of the reasons I was I was actually quite curious about Interstellar is that Nolan and his crew actually consulted a theoretical physicist called Kip Thorne in the making of the film. From Wikipedia:

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film, to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. "For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole," he said, "we discussed how to go about it, and then I worked out the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations."[59]

In creating the wormhole and a supermassive rotating black hole (which possesses an ergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with visual effect supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 computer effects artists at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the artists, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and resulted in 800 terabytes of data. The resulting visual effect provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and will lead to the creation of two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.[60]

Christopher Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. However, Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives. "What we found was as long as we didn't change the point of view too much, the camera position, we could get something very understandable".[61]

Because the black hole is supermassive, it would also allow a character to cross the event horizon without experiencing spaghettification.[62] While it is normally impossible to get out from a black hole, it could in theory be done by entering a five dimensional universe.[63] The portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is considered scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.[64]

The accretion disks are described by Thorne as "anemic" and without a jet, with a temperature about that of the sun that is emitting light but not much X-rays, giving the astronauts inside it have a chance to survive. The side where the gas is moving towards Endurance would have looked bright and blue in color while the side going away it would look dim and red because of the Doppler effect, but was left out intentionally for cinematic reasons. Some lens flares were added to create continuity from the IMAX cameras to the CGI.[65]

Early in the process, Thorne laid down two guidelines: “First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations... would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter.”[16] Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. At one point, Thorne spent two weeks trying to talk Nolan out of an idea about a character traveling faster than light before Nolan finally gave up.[16][66] According to Thorne, the element which has the highest degree of artistic freedom is the clouds of ice on one of the planets they visit, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength that ice would be able to support.[16]

Can't blame them for not trying!

[MikeW]

Wow. So much hate :eek:
........
Can't blame them for not trying!

I had read that Thorne had been consulted. I think that the movie was meant to appeal to science nerds (no offense) and, indeed, from their ages and appearance, I'd say the majority of the audience I was seated with fell somewhere in that category. The theatre is only a block from the UC Berkeley campus.

Not finding myself particularly engrossed in the film, I spent some time watching the audience itself, and I had the distinct impression that many of them were as disappointed in the film as I was. My suspicion is that, for them, this disappointment may have had more to do with the preposterous and sentimental plot than anything theoretical, where for me the annoyance lay equally in the theoretical underpinnings.

I maintain that a theory that can ignore practical limits is fundamentally flawed. Such theories operate fine in the context of fantasy based film (and, indeed, fantasy based cosmology), but when you couple them with a plot concept that is to be experienced as 'reality based', they often fall flat.

Where I most differ with the majority of the theatre audience is that I question the fundamental principals upon which much of contemporary astrophysics is based. The problem is that many anomalous theoretical constructs -- such as parallel universes, hyper dimensions, 'dark' matter, signularities and black holes -- are just that: Theoretical constructs derived from mathematical theories that are meant to account for observations underpinned by a gravitational model of the universe. Using this model, there is a tendency in astrophysics for the mathematics to run into infinities. A process euphemistically called “renormalization” is used to deal with this problem. But as any high school student knows, there is nothing normal about infinity. Introducing infinity into an equation, effectively dividing by zero, allows you to “prove” that 1 = 2.

For example, infinities abound in the literature on black holes. The infinitely weak force of gravity is balanced by postulating an almost infinitely dense object – the black hole itself. Playing with infinities like this can give you any result you desire. It sidesteps the fact that we do not understand the real nature of gravity, or the relationship between mass and matter, or the electrical response of matter to gravity, or the electrical nature of the universe. The force of gravity is effectively zero when compared to the electric force -- which is a thousand trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity. If you allow for the electrical structure of matter, the almost 2,000 fold difference in mass of the electron and proton will ensure that, in a strong gravitational field charge, separation will operate to prevent compression. Charge separation prevents the collapse of stars thus rendering theoretical objects such as black holes literally impossible.

No, one can't blame them for 'not' trying, I suppose, especially when the failures of the gravitational model of the universe is the true underlying fault. Parallel universes, hyper dimensions, 'dark' matter, singularities and black holes were *created* to explain anomalies within what will soon be understood as an utterly failed cosmological model.

[MisterLove]

I loved it but Memento is still my favorite Christopher Nolan movie.

And unlike most of Christopher Nolan scripts, this one was actually quite simple, straightforward and comprehensible - even though it raises complex questions.

The science in Interstellar seems to be very accurate and I actually believe the movie makes a good case for creationism.

* HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD *

Humans search the entire universe and only find three planets that could support life, right?

And in the end it seems none of them really works for us.

This seems to imply that our presence here was not some weird cosmical incident, it was actually planned by a superior intelligence.

[MisterLove]

Wow. So much hate :eek:

In defense of the movie: they DID assess the potential hazards of the wave planet. The reason they didn't know about the waves is that the positive signals they received only covered what was - due to a major time discrepancy - a very short time period on the planet (thus, as they figured out after landing, the crew which landed there originally had died "only a few minutes ago").

[...]

!

I'm no scientist, I know nothing about astrophysics and I wouldn't dream of objecting to what MikeW is saying but it seems they got Einstein's relativity theory right.

And most importantly, they used it for great dramatic effect - e.g. the final encounter between Matthew McConaughey and his daughter.

[Haruka]

That gigantic wave still gives me nightmares.