Interstellar - The Movie

I have until now avoided this thread completely. At first it was because I had no idea what it was about. Then when I found out this was a movie I avoided it because it looked like a movie I wasn't going to like, and if I did see it I didn't want to wade through 10 pages of spoilers anyway.

So for lack of a better film to see last night (saving The Hobbit for my nephews and niece tonight) I saw Insterstellar with my brother.

Basically I give it a thumbs down. To be more precise, about 2 stars out of 4.

Without reading the whole thread I'm sure I don't have to go into all the reasons why the physics were dumb or at least dumbed down, or about how the astronauts seemed like they were launched after a 5-minute cup of coffee and had to make it all up as they went along, or about the stupid Maytag refrigerator robots (if I kick it hard enough will it dispense a Coke?).

Only one I will bring up is the magic lander with magic fuel that can land and take off from a planet next to a black hole without re-tanking, even after being drenched under a giant tidal wave. Yeah, when do I get to fly one of those in real life?

Someone told me that Anne Hathaway's acting was bad. I found her to be one of the bright spots in the movie. Also, the visuals were cool. Gravity also had cool visuals mixed with poor realism. Notice the trend?

The pacing of the film is poor. All that business with the Midwest farmers I could do without. The interviews with old people about the blight; were they trying to make this a fake documentary or a drama or what? McConahee (I don't know how to spell his name and I'm not going to look it up) voice got on my nerves. The family drama felt forced, and took up too much of the film. By the end of the movie I was actually laughing when he was crying behind the bookcase. I was kind of hoping they would fail and all humans would perish in a giant downer ending.

But that's just me.

By all means ignore this post if it bothers you.
 
Andy44 said:
I was kind of hoping they would fail and all humans would perish in a giant downer ending.
Click to expand...

But it's worse than that; the whole construction of the movie precludes a bad ending and the director tells you that just before the final scene (see #130 for explanation). This makes the final scene reduntant, which in turn makes the whole buildup prior to this point (i.e. the rest of the movie) redundant.
 
By that logic the Star Wars prequels were also redundant.
And yet, they made a lot of money.
 
Hielor said:
Unfortunately, the people in charge of balancing audio levels also thought that the music was the best part, and frequently drowned out the voices with music!
Click to expand...

Less talk, more space!! I actually enjoyed the movie a lot up until the whole "love transcends space" nonsense. After that I kinda got lost, but I thought the matched RPM docking was awesome because of how many times I've simulated it on Orbiter.. I just don't know how an explosion could be precise enough to make it spin on just the one axis.
 
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Hielor said:
Unfortunately, the people in charge of balancing audio levels also thought that the music was the best part, and frequently drowned out the voices with music!
Click to expand...

After years of watching movies at night I can say: Every person who ever balanced audio thinks that. Dialogue? Turn up sound. Music? Dammit, too loud. Too loud! TOO :censored:ING LOUD!
 
Kyle said:
I just don't know how an explosion could be precise enough to make it spin on just the one axis.
Click to expand...

Actually, I'll give that one credit where it's due. Given the physical configuration of the vehicle, being wide and flat, the low-energy spinning state of the vehicle would be about the docking port, roughly. Even if it nutated and wobbled after the blast, it would quickly settle into a spin about the axis shown in the film.

Of course, the credit may be misplaced; it's likely they got it right out of luck because they need it for the scene to work.
 
I just saw the film via cam torrent. I'm going to put out my statement. In going to try to ignore all the flaws that were deliberately left there to make a good plot(ie: 4d scene)

My criticisms:

The beginning interviews with the old people talking about dying plants seemed unessesary. Especially since you only get the reason why such interviews were being made at the very end of the movie.

When cooper and daughter chases down the drone, they talk about it being from the Indian military and they mention that Indian military headquarters went dark 10 years before. They make no mention of any other part of the world or any other part of the U.S.. Hell! They don't even say where the movie takes place(I presume it is Texas because of low gravity and plains). They don't give any basic explanation as to why the Federal Government collapsed or what emerged in its place...the characters always refer to it in a past tense.

When cooper finds the hidden base, they are confronted by a that robot. And instead of being arrested by local authorities, they are taken down into the base. How is the base hidden? Do the local authorities know about the base...especially when it's large and swarming with people and robots. How are they able to keep launches secret? How did they keep the last 12 launches secret?

When they launched the spaceplane into orbit, they used a 2 stage rocket plus the engines on the spaceplane...Yet when they were on other planets, they were able to do SSTO easily.

Wormholes are unstable when close to planets and stars... Unless they are of sufficient mass themselves. The minimum distance for a stable low mass wormhole would be close to a hundred au away. The wormhole does have mass since they claim that an observation probe has been orbiting it. Is the wormhole still there after the mission is done?

How did the ice planet have ice clouds? Given the high gravity(0.8g) I would think they wouldve collapsed by now.

In the final scenes, they show an oneil cylinder in orbit around Saturn. Who governs this station? Does the blight carry on to the space station farms? Is NASA still needed for the habitat? Is this station even part of the U.S.? Why has technology and culture remained stagnant even though they now can build world sized structures. Has earth been abandoned or is there still people living there?

To be honest, based on the state of the world economy, which is now agrarian, it would seem that they would have an extremely hard time building new worlds when they barley possess enough infrastructure to find a cure for this blight or build domed cities on earth. I doubt they would even be able to jumpstart a space based infrastructure and build giant stations in the 84 years stated.

Good things:

The movie overall was pretty awesome. I wish i could've seen it on the big screen. I really felt like the world was ending during the earth scenes. I also felt really emotional when thinking about the 1 person exploration missions that we're going on. I still can't come to grips with fact that a person is carrying out a long duration suicide mission so far from earth. I still am thinking about that girl left on that habitable planet preparing to impregnate herself with the embryos to start life over again.

The movie(even with its minor scientific and plot flaws) managed to impress my simple mind. And it is now ranks close to 2001 in terms of scientific accuracy, artistic expression, and plot.
 
fsci123 said:
I presume it is Texas because of low gravity
Click to expand...

What? :shrug:

fsci123 said:
To be honest, based on the state of the world economy, which is now agrarian, it would seem that they would have an extremely hard time building new worlds when they barley possess enough infrastructure to find a cure for this blight or build domed cities on earth. I doubt they would even be able to jumpstart a space based infrastructure and build giant stations in the 84 years stated.
Click to expand...

They were building these O'Neil colonies on Earth as bunkers while hoping that someone (Murph) would invent anti-gravity to lift them up. NB building these things is where most of the tax money went -- this is suggested in Cooper's conversation with the school teacher ("- We have no money for that. - There is no army any more, so where is all the tax money going?").

Of course the problem with this idea is that once you have a finished, hermetic, self-sustaining colony on Earth, there is no need to lift it up, practically speaking...
 
fsci123 said:
I presume it is Texas because of low gravity and plains
Click to expand...

Last time I was in Texas I didn't see any corn fields. Try a bit north of that.

When cooper finds the hidden base, they are confronted by a that robot. And instead of being arrested by local authorities, they are taken down into the base. How is the base hidden? Do the local authorities know about the base...especially when it's large and swarming with people and robots. How are they able to keep launches secret? How did they keep the last 12 launches secret?
Click to expand...
Oh, good question!


When they launched the spaceplane into orbit, they used a 2 stage rocket plus the engines on the spaceplane...Yet when they were on other planets, they were able to do SSTO easily.
Click to expand...

Also a good question.

The movie(even with its minor scientific and plot flaws) managed to impress my simple mind. And it is now ranks close to 2001 in terms of scientific accuracy, artistic expression, and plot.
Click to expand...

Even after the giant flaws you pointed out?
 
I thought it would be Texas because i remember hearing that Texas and Florida are the most ideal locations for space launches due to the slightly weaker gravity and the proximity to the equator. Also the nearby sea would absorb any blown up rockets. Of course, this is an apocalyptic world so maybe launches could take place near the north because there aren't any people downrange or environment to care about.

As for the oneil colony being constructed on earth. The resources for the construction would be noticeable to say the least and would probably be raised by local bandits or militias if any person spotted those robots guarding the perimeter. Even if they did construct the anti gravity devices, aerodynamics would start to rip it up as soon as they tried to life off.

Also i presumed that saturn orbit would be an awkward location to place the first colony. I thought that there was some other colonies in earth orbit or cis-lunar space. Wasn't the Saturn colony a memorial for the wormhole of something?

And that brings me to my other issue... It took 2 years for murph to travel from near earth space to the Saturn colony. The same as the rocket in the earlier scenes. Wouldn't antigravity eliminate such long travel times because fuel would no longer be limiting factor.



The flaws in the movie were manageable. I just wished something's could be explained more... Maybe by using news paper articles or pop phrases or a couple more minutes of dialogue or ambience.

Edit
I wish they left the builders of the wormhole a mystery instead of saying it was future humans. Because that brings up the question of why didn't the omnipotent humans send past humans through some biblical form of torture when they had the means to save humanity before the apocalypse.
 
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Andy44 said:
Last time I was in Texas I didn't see any corn fields. Try a bit north of that.
Click to expand...

"The state of Texas is a great producer of corn; the final estimate of corn produced in 2010 was some 301 million bushels on 2,300,000 acres (930,000 ha) of land, totaling to $1.2 billion of crop." - Wikipedia

It's not as much as some other states but, in a world where growing corn is all anyone can do, there will be plenty of corn growing in Texas.
 
Quick_Nick said:
"The state of Texas is a great producer of corn; the final estimate of corn produced in 2010 was some 301 million bushels on 2,300,000 acres (930,000 ha) of land, totaling to $1.2 billion of crop." - Wikipedia

It's not as much as some other states but, in a world where growing corn is all anyone can do, there will be plenty of corn growing in Texas.
Click to expand...

Learn something new evey day I guess...my guess would've been Nebraska.

Other question: Family was using a pickup truck that was obviously decades old at the beginning of the movie, and they beat it like a rented mule. Yet more than 25 years later the son was still driving the same truck, in the same condition...
 
Andy44 said:
Learn something new evey day I guess...my guess would've been Nebraska.

Other question: Family was using a pickup truck that was obviously decades old at the beginning of the movie, and they beat it like a rented mule. Yet more than 25 years later the son was still driving the same truck, in the same condition...
Click to expand...

Its really the truck from twister.
 
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