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Film: 'Interstellar'

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Tyger

Tyger

Paranormal Adept
[BTW - just an aside - why isn't there a film/movie thread or better - Category? Seems like there should be. Hint! Hint!]

Well, today we went to see 'Interstellar'. Kip Thorne did not disappoint. Tons of interesting ideas to sort out.

The film itself was serendipitously cast: Casey Affleck (Ben Affleck's younger brother) has a very nice screen presence in a minor role that still makes you sit up and take notice. Matt Damon is excellent in an unexpected role - must be careful not to give out spoilers. Matthew McConnaughey - excellent, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway - all great. Nice seeing Russ Fega getting in some acting chops, albeit teeny-tiny. :)

That said about spoilers - I don't see any spoiler buttons - do not read on: SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!

Getting past all the obligatory OTT emotional, human interest scenes (though I admit there was a point to all that, too), the film itself was an interesting tale, well spun imo. I liked all the layers to the story. I particularly liked the use of 'them' being 'us'. I have long had a suspicion - or an idea (hardly know if I am right, of course) - that some UFO stuff is actually events coming to us from the future. This would apply most particularly to the more personal types of UFO encounters.

Space-Time across which gravity is the operative - yes. One thing: with all the high-tech, I am certain that in some not too distant time, audiences watching the use of laptops on a spaceship will be wincing. :cool:

I very much liked the robots - excellent visualization. Makes perfect sense for the robots to be functional at-will moving machines at many levels and not a 'teddy bear' friendly construct.

I like that the film had an actual finish - there was a point when I was fearful we were on the verge of '2001: A Space Odyssey' ground. I would not have been happy. All-in-all, a little bit of everything and put together well. Some great special effects, both on the various planets and in space. Loved the silence of space - finally that has been done well.

A film I will go see again while it's still in the theaters.
 
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While I admire Nolan bringing aboard Kip Thorne for input I wonder if there was still some liberties taken with scientific facts or in this case scientific theory. I have yet to see it as well but I understand a planet they land on is close enough to a black hole whose drag on their spacetime is such that 1 hour there was equivalent to 7 earth years wouldn't the gravitational forces crush most objects such as ships and astronauts ?
 
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Christopher O'Brien said:
Can't wait to see it! As soon as I get off the frickin road already... 3 weeks and counting.... *sigh*
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Be sure to say what you think! If you go on IMDb the reviews are astounding. Be very cautious of spoilers. It is a good film to better see without too much fore-knowledge. :) Good fun.
 
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Wade Ridsdale said:
While I admire Nolan bringing aboard Kip Thorne for input I wonder if there was still some liberties taken with scientific facts or in this case scientific theory. I have yet to see it as well but I understand a planet they land on is close enough to a black hole whose drag on their spacetime is such that 1 hour there was equivalent to 7 earth years wouldn't the gravitational forces crush most objects such as ships and astronauts ?
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I thought this was a screenplay based on a Kip Thorne short story? Science Fiction. I'll check that out. I've known for a while that Lynda Obst was mounting this Kip Thorne story. Great to see it a finished product. I think it's okay. Hope to see more stuff like this coming out of the Hollywood machine.

Yes, there is some intriguing stuff being played with. Particularly Time - Time as something one 'spends' and allows for in a malleable way - interesting use of the Eisnsteinian paradox. The return from that gravity world has a startling moment - really drives home the issue of time.

Anyway, be sure to say what you think after you've seen it. :) I'm going to catch it again next weekend.
 
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REVIEW:
Incomprehensible w/ 'more holes than a donut shop.'

I'm very disappointed and still scratching my head after seeing this overly tedious, pretentious morass of a film. Sure, if you are the average movie goer, the film's attempt at combining lofty ideals w/ cutting-edge physics would come across impressively, but if you have even the slightest understanding of science, you too would scratch a furrow in your brow. The film's vaunted science made little sense and toward the end was combined w/ the new agey concept of love explaining the role of gravity. I could go on-and-on about the preposterous use of quantum physics, but what pissed me off the most was Hans Zimmer's atrocious soundtrack that droned on and on with the same five note sequence for hours through way too many scenes. Two or three times the sequence was so loud it literally drowned out important plot element dialogue! I have never seen/heard this before. Inexcusable, but at least these passages helped keep me awake... On the plus side, I thought the acting was far better than the plot and script, there were some cool scenes that were a mix of locations and green screen cgi and there were a couple of clever plot twists. But none of these pluses could possibly outweigh the film's many glaring deficiencies. If I sound a bit harsh, read the New Yorker Magazine review or many of the other reviews the screwer this turkey to the serving plate far better than I.
 
I haven't seen the movie "Interstellar" yet --- but I'm not a fan of wormhole interstellar travel on a starship --- which would probably need the power of a supernova to create a wormhole. Yet if a starship enters the wormhole, it would cause vibrations that would collapse the wormhole unto itself.
Also..I'm not a believer in any kind of time travel in a starship. Time is time...and nobody is going to escape father time.
 
So I guess we disagree. :p For me it was great fun. It's Science Fiction. I always suspend judgement. I guess I'm 'the average movie-goer'. Though the science is not as 'off' as you're suggesting - see Tyson above for one.

I agree about the music - pretty strange and makes no sense. I personally did not like the OTT emotional sub-text, as mentioned.

Anyway, to each his own. :cool: Overall, I enjoyed it. Tomorrow we go see it again.

Christopher O'Brien said:
REVIEW:
Incomprehensible w/ 'more holes than a donut shop.'

I'm very disappointed and still scratching my head after seeing this overly tedious, pretentious morass of a film. Sure, if you are the average movie goer, the film's attempt at combining lofty ideals w/ cutting-edge physics would come across impressively, but if you have even the slightest understanding of science, you too would scratch a furrow in your brow. The film's vaunted science made little sense and toward the end was combined w/ the new agey concept of love explaining the role of gravity. I could go on-and-on about the preposterous use of quantum physics, but what pissed me off the most was Hans Zimmer's atrocious soundtrack that droned on and on with the same five note sequence for hours through way too many scenes. Two or three times the sequence was so loud it literally drowned out important plot element dialogue! I have never seen/heard this before. Inexcusable, but at least these passages helped keep me awake... On the plus side, I thought the acting was far better than the plot and script, there were some cool scenes that were a mix of locations and green screen cgi and there were a couple of clever plot twists. But none of these pluses could possibly outweigh the film's many glaring deficiencies. If I sound a bit harsh, read the New Yorker Magazine review or many of the other reviews the screwer this turkey to the serving plate far better than I.
Click to expand...
 
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Christopher O'Brien said:
REVIEW:
Incomprehensible w/ 'more holes than a donut shop.'

I'm very disappointed and still scratching my head after seeing this overly tedious, pretentious morass of a film. Sure, if you are the average movie goer, the film's attempt at combining lofty ideals w/ cutting-edge physics would come across impressively, but if you have even the slightest understanding of science, you too would scratch a furrow in your brow. The film's vaunted science made little sense and toward the end was combined w/ the new agey concept of love explaining the role of gravity. I could go on-and-on about the preposterous use of quantum physics, but what pissed me off the most was Hans Zimmer's atrocious soundtrack that droned on and on with the same five note sequence for hours through way too many scenes. Two or three times the sequence was so loud it literally drowned out important plot element dialogue! I have never seen/heard this before. Inexcusable, but at least these passages helped keep me awake... On the plus side, I thought the acting was far better than the plot and script, there were some cool scenes that were a mix of locations and green screen cgi and there were a couple of clever plot twists. But none of these pluses could possibly outweigh the film's many glaring deficiencies. If I sound a bit harsh, read the New Yorker Magazine review or many of the other reviews the screwer this turkey to the serving plate far better than I.
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Thanks Chris. After reading your review and other Internet comments I think I will pass on this movie. I read more than a few people say the soundtrack is overly loud. That, plus an ending that has everyone scratching their heads will keep me home.
 
DaveM said:
Thanks Chris. After reading your review and other Internet comments I think I will pass on this movie. I read more than a few people say the soundtrack is overly loud. That, plus an ending that has everyone scratching their heads will keep me home.
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The soundtrack is overly loud at certain junctures, not all the time. The ending is not ambiguous - at least not to me. This may be a film that develops a cult following. Won't be the first time a genuine classic gets initially panned by some/many.

Anyway, I'd say give it a chance, you never know. If anything the film covers too much ground. There's a lot there imo.
 
Wade Ridsdale said:
Spolers; Interstellar gets a science stamp of approval from Neil deGrasse Tyson | Science! | Geek.com

Watch: Neil deGrasse Tyson Explaining the End of 'Interst | Indiewire

NDT made an interesting point, in a way yet another spolier, that it would probably be a lot less costly and more logical to just fix what's going on with the earth than to send another mission to another planet and geoengineer it.
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LINK: Interstellar gets a science stamp of approval from Neil deGrasse Tyson | Science! | Geek.com
TEXT: "Over the last two years in particular, Tyson has taken special care to point out the scientific fallacies found in popular space-based films in an attempt to educate everyone who might see special effects as fact.

"While Interstellar is a fantastic exploration of science fiction, wielding mind bending special effects and a popular cast of talented actors to tell a curious survival story, a ton of work went into the film to ensure it was scientifically accurate. Tyson points out in his tweet storm [in which he also tweets about some of the banal oddities/plot devises, like knowing the location of books on an old bookshelf in order to push them off in sequence, etc.] that the film nails concepts like Einstein’s Curvature of Space and the way zero gravity works, which is significant if you paid any attention to how he criticized the film Gravity for struggling with similar concepts. While Tyson deliberately avoids discussing the plot or his opinion of the film as an entertainment vessel, he can’t be any more clear that the science in Interstellar is sound.

"It shouldn’t be totally surprising that scientific accuracy is one of the pride points of Interstellar. As a part of the promotion for the film, Paramount Pictures partnered up with Google to create classroom lessons based on the concepts delivered within this story. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne also wrote a book, The Science of Interstellar, in which he documents the work he did withInterstellar director Christopher Nolan to ensure the scientific accuracy of the film.

"While none of this tells you whether or not the film is actually good, you can walk in to the theater knowing it will be both visually stunning and packed full of actual science."
 
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Since Chris threw down the gauntlet, here is yet another 'take' on the science of this film with a bit more detail. More to the point, it speaks eloquently regarding science fiction films, in particular (so-called) hard science fiction. There is hard science in this film but it is also a science fiction film. It's a ride and it's why I'm a science fiction fan - for the fun of the ride, not the demons in the details.

Interstellar Gives a Spectacular View of Hard Science
November 12, 2014 | by Alasdair Richmond
LINK: Interstellar Gives a Spectacular View of Hard Science | IFLScience

TEXT: "Science and science fiction are uneasy relatives, and classic sci-fi often folds under scientific scrutiny. HG Wells wrote great and prophetic sci-fi, but the great (such as The War of the Worlds) wasn’t prophetic and the prophetic (such as The Argonauts of the Air) wasn’t great. Science fiction usually uses scientifically derived fictional concepts to pit humanity against a hostile universe.

"Worthwhile sci-fi can be downright inaccurate. Wells’s rampaging Martian tripods survive in the public imagination while more realistic predictions of mechanised warfare fade. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the relevant parable about totalitarian mind-control for all that its titular year came and went without copying its namesake. However, so-called Hard Science Fiction takes its science seriously, only adopting as premises real theoretical possibilities recognised by current science.

"Hard sci-fi gives writers interesting constraints, but the results can date quickly and narrative needs can tempt even the “hardest” writers to fudge facts. That is the case with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. It might appear to be very “hard” – dealing with concepts rooted in actual science, but it only aspires to those ideals. The story plot fudges many scientific aspects.

"Of course, there are science-fiction treats on offer: gnarly space-flight vessels spinning to produce centrifugal pseudo-gravity, hibernation in eerie-looking pods, a planet with icy clouds, familial relations strained by time dilation and witty robots that initially annoy but end up more sympathetic than most humans.

"And it shows this with stunning imagery. There are beautiful depictions of gravitational-lensing by wormhole, distorted starscapes during wormhole transit and faux Earth interiors on a giant, revolving space-habitat. Wormhole mouths and black holes are depicted as genuinely three-dimensional holes, while the high-energy colliding matter in the accretion disc around a black hole’s equator is vividly portrayed. So impressively does Interstellar render these phenomena that if we ever see such things close-up, reality may suffer by comparison.

"Nolan tries to get the science right most of the time. Just as one harrumphs: “genetic diversity?” when there is a mention of seeding other worlds, Anne Hathaway’s character neatly addresses the problem. Relativity does allow gravitation and motion to produce time dilation, which means that time plays out at different speeds for different people. Wormholes could theoretically connect otherwise distant space-time points. And, yes, “Hawking Radiation” means black holes aren’t strictly “black”.

"But where it might annoy Hard sci-fi fans is that some essentials get fluffed. Visits to a planet’s surface could produce temporal discrepancies – an hour-long jaunt on the surface might seem to take years from the point of view of an observer in orbit – but only if the surface gravity is thousands of times stronger than that of Earth. Wormholes traversable by crewed spacecraft require unfeasible quantities of gravitationally repulsive “exotic matter”, which theoretically has negative energy density and breaks just about every energy condition we know.

"Sneaking past a black hole’s event horizon, scanning the hole’s singularity and retrieving gravity-mastering data is impossible. As for falling into a black hole and seeing tidal forces disintegrate your vessel without making you into spaghetti, then entering a region prepared by your future self only to re-emerge into normal space-time via wormhole… well, criticism seems superfluous.

"And, yet, this is a film worth watching. Interstellar offers much besides visuals to commend. It takes climate change seriously, is realistically cynical about political and educational preparedness for the future, doesn’t soften ethical dilemmas in saving humanity and suggests climate solutions will owe everything to scientific imagination and initiative."
 
I'm not really sure people are understanding "Interstellar".
Here is the story as I saw it: The planet Anne Hathaway ends up on at the end is habitable. Humans eventually colonize it, and sometime in the distant future after they have learned to control gravity (and since gravity transcends time) they create the wormhole, possibly using the black hole to power it, but that's a guess.
Anyway, those future humans with future technology save Matthew McConnehay (sp?) after he falls into the event horizon along with the robot, and also make the Escher-like construct for him to send back, via gravity waves, the necessary information for his daughter to complete the gravity calculations and save mankind.

Besides that, it IS science fiction. And I really wish people would look more to what could be possible than being so concerned with what current science may say is impossible. 50 years ago the cell phone and the micro computer were impossible. 75 years ago it was impossible for man to go to the moon. 100 years ago television was impossible. 150 years ago heavier than air flight was impossible.
So when someone says "Oh that's impossible"...I have to laugh at their lack of imagination. Nothing is impossible.
 
exo_doc said:
Besides that, it IS science fiction. And I really wish people would look more to what could be possible than being so concerned with what current science may say is impossible. 50 years ago the cell phone and the micro computer were impossible. 75 years ago it was impossible for man to go to the moon. 100 years ago television was impossible. 150 years ago heavier than air flight was impossible.

So when someone says "Oh that's impossible"...I have to laugh at their lack of imagination. Nothing is impossible.
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You wrote: "it IS science fiction. And I really wish people would look more to what could be possible than being so concerned with what current science may say is impossible."

Exactly so. Well said. As the reviewer says in a post above: "Hard sci-fi gives writers interesting constraints, but the results can date quickly". We see this all the time in science fiction films. It's the films that use science as an imaginative jumping off point that we still talk about. Still, someone may dislike Interstellar because they think as a film its a lousy film. That's fair. I think it's a good film - with some flaws that are really minor. I can live with loud music in order to set my eyes on the visual feast Interstellar provides, as well as indulge the thought-provoking nudges.

The sum effect of Interstellar and Gravity on me - and a reviewer mentioned this, too - is how much I like being on Earth. Gravity had that effect for sure. Colonizing other planets will never be feasible until we genuinely can do 'Terra-Forming': "The term was coined by Jack Williamson in a science-fiction story (Collision Orbit) published during 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, but the concept may pre-date this work." LINK: Terraforming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terraforming - an idea whose time is fast approaching. An idea whose time has come, perhaps.

Reality catching up with science fiction.
 
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But Stephen Hawking's new theory claims that there is no "event horizon," but an "apparent horizon" surrounding a black hole, where matter or photons is absorbed but some of the photons are released at near the speed of light as in two polar jets --- besides giving off Hawking gamma radiation.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson sounds like a Carl Sagan redux, who never admits that alien starships have visited our planet {same as the late Carl Sagan}, and espouses time dilation as some kind of way to escape growing old compared too his same brethren on our home planet; while he's off on some interstellar journey is beyond my comprehension.
 
Erno86 said:
But Stephen Hawking's new theory claims that there is no "event horizon," but an "apparent horizon" surrounding a black hole, where matter or photons is absorbed but some of the photons are released at near the speed of light as in two polar jets --- besides giving off Hawking gamma radiation.
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There will be lots of 'new theories' - some will prove right, some will prove wrong, and some will prove half way right/wrong. Why should a film be bound by someone's recent new twist? A film will be made with a premise - at some point the shoe has got to drop and the film created within a context. Usually what one looks for is internal consistency, but even that will get thrown out for expediency sake. (Famous one is the submarine still in the man's body in the film version of Isaac Asimov's 'Fantastic Voyage'.)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson sounds like a Carl Sagan redux, who never admits that alien starships have visited our planet {same as the late Carl Sagan}, and espouses time dilation as some kind of way to escape growing old compared too his same brethren on our home planet; while he's off on some interstellar journey is beyond my comprehension.
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Carl Sagan met with and encouraged Tyson in his scientific ambitions as a teen-ager. Sagan was Tyson's mentor, so there might be similarities in thinking. Of the two men - personally - Tyson is a far less toxic presence imo.
 
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