14 thoughts on “Interstellar”

  1. Here’s mine:

    If you have the option of going to this movie stoned, take that option.. otherwise don’t bother, it’s horrible.

    McConaughey mumbles so much that I’m pretty sure they asked the other actors to mumble a bit too so everyone sounded as unintelligible. That didn’t stop them taking their characters on occasional existentialist rants that are about as profound as your average college frat party – even when Michael Caine starts quoting poetry (no, really) – or, dare I say it, an Ayn Rand novel. Even then, you won’t be able to hear most of the dialogue because so much of the movie is covered in loud mood music telling you how to feel about the poorly established characters and their unrelatable situation.

    Anyone who thought Armageddon was a stupid caricature of NASA may want to go rewatch it after seeing Interstellar, as I think you’ll now agree it does a much better job. The NASA worm is splayed throughout almost every scene in the movie, which hopefully has a “don’t look too closely at this” effect on certain demographics as the wardrobe department for this movie seems to have raided a laser tag surplus store. The space hardware, which I’m sure many people on this forum are salivating to see, is not just unrealistic, it seems to be inconsistent with what we’re told about the world the story is set in.

    At almost three hours, more if your theatre shows previews and ads, you’d think they left nothing on the cutting room floor, but you’d be wrong. There’s large sections of the film missing and significant shortening of scenes throughout. With it a lot of the exposition is dropped – leaving a good portion of the audience I saw it with completely baffled – which is kinda ridiculous when you consider the long rants that I mentioned earlier. I guess the editor had the choice of whether to leave out plot or “high art” and figured no-one would remember this film for the plot (ala 2001.)

      1. It’s an effort not replying to folks on Twitter saying they thought it was the best movie evar. I figure they must have been high, otherwise they’re just stupid. This is why we can’t have nice things.

        1. Trent, the first draft was 90 minutes long, and had everybody dying in the dust, no mention of space. The studio didn’t fund it.

  2. Maybe they could make a movie where instead of everyone being farmers who believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, they could take it farther and have everyone living in stone castles and fighting with knives and swords because some centuries prior they had a revolt against machine intelligence?

    Only they have interstellar travel because they have this caste system where some humans operate interstellar space ships, but no one is permitted to see these, hmmm, should I call them Navigators, who people talk about not really being human anymore?

    And because they don’t use machine intelligence of any kind, not even computers as we know them, they need to develop and mold human powers through the use of drugs, which are all derived from a mysterious raw material, heck, let’s call it Melange, that is only available on this planet with very little water, and . . .
    Oh, never mind! If they produced something like this, no one would understand it, and the movie would be awful with all of this voice-over narration.

  3. Ann and I saw it last night and the best part was the villain named Mann who faked climate data to make a planet seem warmer than it actually was. Bwahahaha!

  4. I loved it. I will possibly go see it again. I will definitely buy the BluRay when it comes out.

    The Physics were well done… as you would expect with Kip Thorne giving them the real math behind what it would look like. The plot did not use any more made up devices than one would find in some the great Clarke, Hienlien, Asimove and Anderson novels. There was no noise in vacuum, only inside ships. The equations on the chalk boards were probably the real deal, from Professor Thorn. The space settlement was a look at what we in L5 really prophesied. It was a far, far, far better world view than that really awful and forgettable movie about dem evyil rich folks up on the gravity hill from a year ago, a movie whose name I actually and mercifully *have* forgotten already.

    The astronaut who was pilot reminds me of some folks I have met who actually *are* that person. in real life. I score them realism points for a realistic portrayal of the breed.

    I enjoyed the rug they set under the irrational supernatural types… just so in the end they could pull it out from them with great vigor and a little bit of 5th dimensional physics… again all laid out for them by one of the top gravitational physicists of our time.

    Oribital mechanics were obeyed. Trip times were realistic. Someone actually calculated the relativistic time effects.

    I am sure there are folks who despise the greats of science fiction. Those folks will hate this movie. It’s hard SF of the genre that most of us consider to be the real thing.

    Did I like it? Damned straight I did.

    I’m also having a ROFL moment over someone who would claim I am stupid for thinking it is great. Sorry to say it Trent, but I am laughing at you. I won’t be mean or nasty about it or call you names. I just think you overstepped and embarassed yourself.

  5. Sorry, but I found the film to be incoherent.

    How come a secret, slimmed-down NASA was able to send a series of massive manned ships to Saturn? Where were all the thousands of people working at their contractors, and how were they kept quiet about the project? Had nobody noticed the sight or sound of such massive rockets being launched?

    Why did the aliens park a wormhole in orbit round Saturn but appear unwilling to show themselves or communicate in plain English?

    Why, when Cooper was presented with his daughter’s bookcase as a child, and was desperate to prevent himself from leaving Earth, even though he knew that it was already too late to do that, did he give Murph the coordinates of the secret NASA base, thus starting the whole thing off? Or did someone else provide that information?

    I know Kip Thorne is a respected physicist, but do black holes really provide solar spectrum illumination to Earth-analogue planets which may be orbiting them? And over a sufficiently broad Earth-analogue habitable zone to contain three such planets?

    How did finding the solution to reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics enable the secret NASA to save the world? If space colonies were the answer, then why not start building them straight away?

    How did NASA find out that the far end of the wormhole was in a different galaxy, rather than a different region of our own galaxy?

    Why is the movie called “Interstellar”, when it features an intergalactic journey, which is also a journey between the region of our own Sun and the region of a black hole, but not any journey between our Sun and any other specific star?

    My worst complaint is the association between interstellar flight and abandoning a ruined planet Earth. This is a stick which environmentalists like to use to condemn spending on space exploration, and is in my view malicious and untrue: we’re not going into space because we’ve destroyed Earth, but in order to enrich it.

    Stephen

  6. I suspect you are a person who finds most epic hard SF incoherent. I would note that there were no aliens at all; that movies do have to take some liberties here and there to add human emotion and love to a romp through higher dimensions; that you probably didn’t like Balmer’s epic series “When Worlds Collide”; that a small rump of NASA with late 21st century technology (think Elon’s factory Falcon assembly line plus 50 years) and with a collapsed military industrial complex and nothing but a last ditch effort to save our species might possibly work under a different ethos than today’s porkfest which a lot of those NASA folks secretly despise as much as we louder mouths do; and the fact that it is indeed an epic science fiction like many I have read over the years, brought fully to life on the silver screen.

    I will add that at no point in the movie did I not understand what was going on and why and how it fit together with all the other peices. If I could do so, I see no reason why others could also do so.

    At no point in this movie was there anything with a non-physical law solution. They may have stretched some things and imagined… but the did it the same way the great SF writers did so. They took a complex physical idea; they came up with a good story to explicate it; they created characters that you can related to and who through whom they explicated some of those physical ideas.

    There are a few items they left open because the explanations probably fell to the cutting room floor because they were not critical to the core story.

    This movie is going to be a classic of this century and it is going to win some academy awards.

    1. I haven’t seen the movie, but judging from the trailers they repeat one of NASA’s most glaring space suit mistakes – wearing white after Labor Day. There is simply no excuse for an advanced space fairing culture to continue to make such a fashion faux pas. Even the Russians know this, making suits in grey, tan, and orange because white is not always appropriate.

  7. I think the movie wrapped together nicely given its premises. Not sure why intelligent people would find it confusing or incoherent, given the pretty clear time travel implications. And it wasn’t aliens – it was “us”, doing the decent thing by giving us a leg up. Clearly bulk transport off Earth was needed and flying in the shuttle craft – even multi-flight SSTOs – just wasn’t enough.

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