10 thoughts on “Interstellar: Fantastic Visuals”

  3. I’m probably going to see it, because I want them to make more pro-space movies. My fear is that I might regret doing so.

    Guess I’ll wait for more reviews…

  4. I watched it as a preview screening last night. Of course, very few of these sorts of movies gets every detail right, but that said, it was truly a beautiful movie, and not only on a visual level. Truly a wonderful experience, don’t discount it too soon, folks.

  6. I’ll wait for the at home version, but if they have an astronaut playing with his tether, I’ll turn it off.

  7. My only problem with it is that it appears to be about 3 hours long. Yikes. Bring an empty bottle and a long coat…

  8. Short review:

    The premise of the film is that the Earth’s crops are being destroyed by a blight. Only corn is left, and that will soon be affected as well. When people started getting hungry, the US military decided to bomb them, because that’s what the military does. So, the military was disbanded and the entire world is peaceful, although hungry. The world “produces more food than ever before — for now,” and the population is much smaller than in the past, yet everybody is hungry. Everyone has to be a farmer and there are no other occupations to speak of. But farms are highly automated and all the work is done by advanced robots, so it’s unclear why they need so many farmers. We’re also told that the blight breathes nitrogen instead of oxygen, so it’s slowly converting the Earth’s atmosphere into pure nitrogen and, soon, people won’t be able to breathe, either. This detail is mentioned in passing, then immediately forgotten. There’s also dust everywhere, because of the blight — or maybe the dust caused the blight, it’s not quite clear.

    NASA is in hiding, because no one wants to spend money on space anymore. So, instead of figuring out how to cure the blight or develop new food sources, the government decides to mount a huge interstellar program to find a new planet with oxygen, water, and edible food.

    I would like to reassure you that the rest of the movie makes more sense. But I can’t.

    NASA uses a leftover Saturn V to launch their cool spaceplane to rendezvous with their cool interstellar spaceship. We later see that the cool spaceplane is an SSTO capable of landing and taking off, even on a planet with a 2.3-g gravity field — after performing high-delta-v maneuvers in the vicinity of a black hole. So, I guess NASA just used that old Saturn for the sake of nostalgia.

    The crew explores two exoplanets, both physically and geologically implausible. e..g., oceans that are only three feet deep but have waves that are miles high.

    Ultimately, the mission fails to find a new home for humanity. For a while, it looks like the hero will never make it home to see his family again, but he’s saved by a 2001-esque deus ex machina.

    When the hero returns, he discovers that interstellar colonies aren’t necessary because humans have built O’Neill colonies instead, and the colonies can somehow grow lots of food, despite the disease which everyone seems to have forgotten about now that the hero is back home.

    That’s only half the story, though. In the final scene we discover that the not-quite-love interest is still alive on yet another exoplanet, so the hero prepares to set off on a rescue mission in his trusty spaceplane. Cue credits and roll camera for “Interstellar II.”

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