Interstellar (Post-release)

[joshvanrad]

It almost gave me that shock and awe moment I experienced watching the Abyss for the first time, but not quite. Maybe just because I'm older now.

The Abyss is what I kept thinking of throughout the movie. I think it was closer in feel to The Abyss than 2001. Or maybe it's like 2001 and The Abyss had a night of reckless abandon and made some crazy life choices, and Interstellar is their love-child.

 

[p51]

When he ended up behind the book case, that sealed it for me.

Same here. I rolled my eyes so badly from that sequence, I think I saw my own brain.
Interesting copout for the plot; anything you can't explain, have someone say, "I guess that's us in the future who did that..."

 

[Bryancd]

Just came back, my high hopes and expectations based on early word was already in doubt by later reviews... but, I still went in fairly spoiler free (I was surprised when Matt Damon showed up) and a genuine want to like this movie and for it re-ignite my interest in space/sci-fi.

I guess the first complaint is the running length of this movie. There's no reason for this movie to be almost three hours....

Again I'm simply amazed at the amount of accolades I am reading about Interstellar - how does this get 9.1 on the IMDb? Yes, there are some basics for a great movie here, but it just never got there for me... it never became more than an "okay" movie. There's just so much wrong here, so much misdirection... it just baffles me.

Yes, it looked amazing - a little too dark at times, but amazing.

The score was just too loud, overbearing and seemed to be trying to mimic (or pay homage?) to something that I just couldn't place my finger on.

I did like the robots...

I felt the same way. The score was overbearing. I felt like Nolan swung for the fences and hit a ground rule double.

 

[p51]

I felt like Nolan swung for the fences and hit a ground rule double.

Yeah, but several fans in the stands think he scored a grand slam homer and won't have anything said otherwise.

 

[Bryancd]

Yeah, but several fans in the stands think he scored a grand slam homer and won't have anything said otherwise.

Yeah, everyone I know seems to have universal praise and I was kind of let down leaving the theater until I read some of the more recent comments here, like Cessna's and yours, that both jibbed with my thoughts. Funny you both are named after planes.

 

[joshvanrad]

Well I really liked it. If you didn't care for it, that's all cool. Maybe not the greatest movie I've ever seen, but it was probably the best movie I've seen this year.

 

[Father]

Well I really liked it. If you didn't care for it, that's all cool. Maybe not the greatest movie I've ever seen, but it was probably the best movie I've seen this year.

It was good... not sure it was the best of the year. There's some pretty strong competition this year between Captain American, Guardians of the Galaxy, Edge of Tomorrow... but this is a completely different type of movie. Even though it was sci-fi, it was a lot more than that.

 

[teragon]

I liked it, but its not my favorite Nolan movie. It was probably his most beautiful and emotional movie though.
About the science, it was my understanding that they had a renowned physicist working with them making sure the science was based on real theories and hypothesis ?

 

[Fly4v]

I can understand if someone went in hoping for a great movie thanks to the reviews and feel disappointed.
I didn't see "Inception" so the repeated themes from that movie were new and the last time I heard about real science and had high hopes for a movie was "Mission to Mars"....so my expectations were very low and ended up being surprised.
Perhaps I am suffering from Lost-ism and am making sense of non-sense and filling holes that cant be filled.

But even the non-pseudoscience themes and images were very compelling.

We have centralized education, revisionist history, and propaganda.
There is the end of manufacturing and conspicuous consumerism in America.
NASA as a political tool to buy votes does not work and is unpopular when times are tough.
Doctor Mannic's monolog on why human exploration is important but his actions show why some "one way" missions are better left for robots.

Even the iconic images of the return of the dust bowl....
But, yes, could say this was a remake of Buck Rogers with 2001, "Of mice and men", "Grapes of Wrath" and some HGTV tossed in.

 

[JiminSTLouis]

About the science, it was my understanding that they had a renowned physicist working with them making sure the science was based on real theories and hypothesis ?

Then I think their physicist missed the mark on what happens if you enter a black hole. The ship flies apart but the astronaut floats to the center.

 

[Fly4v]

And we know definitely what happens in a black hole?
There was a time that people thought the digestive system would not work in zero G or even before that be able to breathe if you drove too fast.
We will not know until someone goes there.

Copper was either dead/dying and imagined everything or was transported to the '5th dimension'.

 

[Sandman0077]

How I understood the paradox/wormhole placement thing was that humans in the ORIGINAL timeline (without the wormhole) made a last ditch effort and did a Pandorum-type trip across the galaxy for thousands of years or however long until they could find a new planet. No one else on earth survived.

Then, whenever they evolved/advanced enough to be able to meddle with time space, they created the wormhole in an effort to create a new timeline where it's essentially easier to save more of humanity.

That's my take on it at least. It's kind of a chicken vs the egg paradox in this movie. How did Cooper originally get to the NASA site the first time, BEFORE he enters the tesseract? Who know!

I loved the movie, but wish he would have been found by NASA and earth die, and then left the data to save humanity, completely voiding them movie of any ghost concepts. I feel like we are seeing the looping timeline, whereas I want to see the timeline where he changes everything.

The 2008 plot contained a bit more realism for me. They should have used that idea vs the gravity stuff.


-The Truth is Out There-

 

[Sandman0077]

Then I think their physicist missed the mark on what happens if you enter a black hole. The ship flies apart but the astronaut floats to the center.

My understanding was that the future humans could control the singularity and use its energy to power the tesseract.


-The Truth is Out There-

 

[JiminSTLouis]

And we know definitely what happens in a black hole?

I don't presume to understand what happens in a black hole. I'm going by what they are telling us in the movie. The ship breaks up from the gravitational forces (that doesn't even allow light to escape), so why is Cooper in nothing but a spacesuit OK?

 

[Sandman0077]

I don't presume to understand what happens in a black hole. I'm going by what they are telling us in the movie. The ship breaks up from the gravitational forces (that doesn't even allow light to escape), so why is Cooper in nothing but a spacesuit OK?

He was entering the tesseract. Maybe it was only designed to allow humans in. I get what you are saying. Black holes = ship destroying gravity, but that's only according to current theories. Black holes might not allow light to enter for all we know. We need to send a probe into one to see what happens.


-The Truth is Out There-

 

[CutThumb]

The biggest issue I have is how hard they are promoting this film as based on real science. It simply isn’t. Its based all most entirely on one mans theoretical equations. When even other astronomers and astrophysicists cannot distinguish and identify the difference between a stationary stellar black hole and the rotating super massive one as shown on the screen then how the hell is the general cinema goer ever going to?
Joe Public’s general perception of black holes is that they are extremely hazardous to everything, tearing stars apart and reducing them to nothing. So how in the name of God is a man to survive? And how likely is it that the entire population of Earth is going to find a better planet to live on anywhere near it? Nolan choose Kips theories because they allowed him to play with time dilation for dramatic effect in the story. And that’s been already been done well before in sci fi with Joe Haldemans “The Forever War” and Fredrick Pohls Gateway series and better. Personally I’d be surprised he hasn’t read them.
As it was the film just peppered me with questions as I watched from the outset . I know a little about astronomy and space exploration and if you are attempting to pass a story off on me as a credible scientific take on one, you need to make some respectably logical choices in the script based on the science as we know it today.
Didn’t anyone at Nasa think that a telescope would be handy in the Ranger to make some reasonable planetary observations before they went charging down there for a landing? Does a test pilot think it’s ever a great idea to land his spaceship in an unspecified depth of water when he can’t even see the other craft he’s looking for.? Are “giant solid ice clouds” ever a good idea to have hanging over your head on a windy day? They travelled (via the worm hole)to another galaxy as provided by super intelligent beings. Aren’t there enough stars with habitable planets closer to Earth here that would have been a better choice?And isn’t our own Milky Way filled with black holes? And why did nobody go through to rescue Brand before Cooper returned ,it was, after all ,the habitable planet the human race was looking for. Instead they built the little house on the prairie . And how come Cooper could suddenly think he would reach er in just another Ranger that he pinched from that massive O’Neil cylinder?
Even at the beginning with the messages I thought, a drone comes down near a lake and cornfields. Is it going to be used at some point to observe mathematical symbols carved in either of them, by the gravitation waves or the combine harvesters ,(afterall its more noticeable than just dust or a “broken” second hand on the watch,hell even mine does that when the battery is running out!!! ) . Nope, because its more tear jerking if the guy is yelling at the image of himself being an idiot for leaving his daughter. The code leads them to a secret Nasa base (not that secret if they are launching bloody rockets from it, they tend to stand out abit! ).In there ,as theoffice door slides open, there’s an Apollo Saturn rocket "hiding" behind it. And they needed that just to take up a Ranger ? Isn't it built to land and take off again from planets with a greater gravity than Earth? Talking of which, launching that rocket from inside that tightly enclosed space? station like a firework in a bottle is going to cause a bit of damage isn't. You're going to need a new office at the very least!
And it was dozens of those things that kept popping up all through the film that jerked me completely out of it. WTF moments that were just stupid things to do, that contridict what I had seen before and that made the story very hard to accept.
If you are going to pretend to write a proper story about space exploration than make it so.Don't try to splice an M.Night Shylamalaw storyline into it. It was a good science fiction story but told like it was a science documentary and that just didn't work for me. Arguably I’m now going to have to wait for Ridley Scotts “The Martian” who has hired interestingly enough, Matt Damon in the lead and Jessica Chastain. Read it, its an excellent story which I found gripping because it feels so grounded in plausible science fact but it is most definitely fiction.

 

[joshvanrad]

I don't think the movie was created to be 100% scientifically accurate. It is a work of science FICTION and I feel like Nolan is well aware of that. Did they base certain things off of certain scientific models? Sure, but that's like movies being "based on true events"... we typically know how closely related to true events those films are. At the end of the day I think they were trying to make an entertaining drama/ scifi movie, not a scientific documentary on black holes, and in that respect I think the movie hit it's mark. I found the visuals stunning, the model work superb, and the movie was emotionally stirring at times. There were some really solid original designs that I was really happy with. It wasn't a perfect movie, but what movie is? Again, this is all about how you are viewing this movie, science vs. science fiction. I'm no physicist and I'm not very well versed on the mechanics of time relativity, black holes, or 4th dimensions... so take this with a grain of salt I guess.

 

[Bryancd]

Yes the rocket engine bells hidden behin a moveable wall by an office was way too James Bond.

 

[Bouq]

Hum...
And here comes the Frenchie with his stupid question...
SWGeek, thank you very much for yor explanation about the models in Interstellar.
I'd like to write a few lines about these models in my blog, quoting some of your answers if you allow me to do so.
And the question is: in IDMB Interstellar page, I saw two Lead model makers. Could I ask you which one you are please ?

And, as a conclusion, for this time, Thank you very much for this moment full of emotion I lived yesterday viewing... no, immersing myself in Interstellar trip!!

 

[p51]

Yes the rocket engine bells hidden behin a moveable wall by an office was way too James Bond.

When I saw the movie, when they slid back that wall and showed those engines, I heard someone in the audience say, "Goodbye, Mister Bond," but my wife didn't hear it. It was tough not to bust out with laughter!