I liked the movie. The only thing that really bothered me (other than the music so loud it distorted and the mumfly fumbly voices sometimes)…
was the fact that they’re astrophysicists and they didn’t figure out before landing on planet #1 that maybe there are gigantic, massive tidal forces at work due to the planet being right next to a black hole. I mean c’mon guys, you know what the moon does to the earth and you don’t think shit will be happening with a planet sitting next to a black hole? OK. You just sit there and be shocked that a massive tidal wave is being pushed around the surface even though that was blatantly obvious even to me. Even if there wasn’t water, that crust would be doing some horrific things.
Also, the answer to the babies thing: they planned to only grow 10 at first, then work on the next 50 (using the previously grown 10 to help take care of them I presume), then the next 150 (with the previous 60 to take care of them), etc. And since they gave the explorers two years worth of stuff on their little spacecraft I can only imagine that with the entire Endurance at their disposal, it was stuffed to the brim with diapers, formula, food, blankets, water, tools, etc.
Anyway, Tars and Case stole the movie away for me and I want an action figure of Tars.
Also we happened to be in what appeared to be the last non-digital projector in our cinema complex…and the film was slightly out of focus. Ugh.
Thirded - it reminded me quite a bit of the classic sci-fi I read growing up, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, etc.
I loved the film. It’s not perfect, but what it does right more than makes up for what it does wrong.
I did keep waiting for TARS to turn on the humans, during the Planet Mann sequence, after it’d been decided to shoot TARS into Gargantua. With all the discussion of the power of the survival instinct, and with 2001 being an obvious touchstone for the film, when TARS called Romilly over to manually access KIPP’s data, I was sure he was about to cave Romilly’s head in. But no, the weakness was all in the humans, and our monkey brains.
It did make Gravity seem retroactively worse, more of a theme-park ride than a proper narrative, and underlined what a colossal waste of resources and talent Prometheus was.
A good review and thanks for this tip, will save this site for other reviews.
I read some of this thread, and do plan to see the movie. From the review and what people have said here, it looks like it’s worth seeing, and in IMAX too. I haven’t seen any of Christopher Nolan’s films yet - well, one, Inception. Memento looks like it’s worthwhile. I guess I don’t get out as often as I need to.
I found the movie to be tiresome. The “time loop” nonsense was a cop out - I would much rather they had played the story straight instead of doing the absurd five dimensional stuff. The soundtrack was awful and overbearing - and I NEVER notice this stuff. A lot of the emotions felt forced or absurd. And it was really long.
One thing I did like:
The kept (IMHO) feinting towards a “and now the robots do something awful!” moment, and then they DIDN’T! And it was all “Yeah! Robots are heroes! GO ROBOTS!” and I really, really liked that.
I think the intent of the Nolans when writing the script must have been for this movie to be entitled Gravity, given the 5,000 times that word appears in the script. That pesky Sandra Bullock must have beat them to it.
People of the future sure do look hale and hearty given that they seem to subsist entirely on a diet of corn and corn byproducts.
An interview with Nolan: I could swear I got to it from a link on this thread, but now I can’t find it.
Anyway, here he delivers the news that at the end of the movie, the wormhole completely gone.
This makes zero sense.
When Cooper is hijacking a ship to go after Brand, he would have known about the wormhole being gone. And he wouldn’t have taken the ship unless he and TARS somehow got some future-human magical spacetime mojo equations and could travel those distances fueled solely by the power of twue wuv.
He didn’t love Brand, though, and she didn’t love him. But I guess they were the two main characters representing a heterosexual dyad and were of the same race and not related, so of course they’d hook up, plot holes be damned.
Heck, if you want to end the movie on a mildly dramatic note, have Cooper realizing that Brand was forever out of reach, but she did have her embryo-colonists. Would the long-distant descendants of the arcology survivors ever meet the long-distant descendants of the Brand colony? Would they be “the same age” (i.e. would they even be of the same species at that point) and if not, which would eventually evolve into the future humans who could manipulate time and relative dimensions in space?
Film was garbage but had it been shorter it might have been decent. The robots redeemed it for me. Cliched lone psycho sank it for me. Not enough space vistas although Saturn looked pretty. The love/future vortex thing was silly but not as silly as so much else of the film. Tbh my fave bit was where PTA talks about the Lunar Landing hoax.
Watched the DVD (Blu-ray) last night. Background sound versus dialog was awful. A three hour movie needs to have a lot fast pacing than this one for me to be happy.
I thought they’d developed Plan A (the gravity ship) after Cooper sent that data back to the past, and that Cooper hijacked a gravity ship.
Incidentally, transmitting data by Morse code has got to take forever.
Also, geez, I wish that friggin’ McConaughey would’ve spoken clearly. I couldn’t understand half his dialog. That’s just one reason I think he’s the most irritating actor ever. I’ve only liked him in one movie, and that was Lone Star. Everything else, he just grates on my nerves. Grrrrr.
I haven’t seen the movie. But I’d like to point out that, for some people, having the emotion be too overwhelming seems to actually reduce the ability to empathize. It feels more manipulative than real, like emotion is being shoved upon them instead of arising naturally.
Everyone has this sort of thing to some extent, I think. I bet there are movies where you’ve felt like you were being manipulated into feeling what you felt.
I also note that Phil Plait revised his post pretty much the same day of the last whine about him. And, seeing as everyone is talking about the bad sound mixing, is it necessarily his fault if he missed something?
I just watched on HULU. The film was compelling to watch, but the ending…WTF???
I get time travel paradoxes but…I mean…aw jeez…
Look, if ‘future humans’ and\or ‘future versions of yourself’ are sending messages back through time on how to survive the cataclysmic event…IT MEANS THEY ALREADY SURVIVED IT!! They had to have survived in order to send the messages back. It would have been far better if it were God or benevolent Aliens or just about anything else.
Finally got around to watching this even though I’d intended to see it in the theater.
I guess I got lucky, as I tend to watch movies with the captioning turned on. I didn’t notice the sound problems (or perhaps they were resolved for the DVD/streaming release?).
Overall, I thought it was fun, and I agree with the commentary that it was very reminiscent of classic SF. But there was quite a bit that kept this film from being perfect. I think after more than a year, it’s fair to skip spoilers:
[ul]
[li]I really, really hated the Matt Damon plot. I mean, c’mon. One great scientist gets unexpectedly left behind on a ship for something over 20 years, thinking he’d been left behind forever, but somehow he manages to go on with his work. Meanwhile, Damon’s character, who knew damn well he had a slim chance of ever seeing people again and accepted the mission anyway, goes murderously insane? I didn’t buy it, and I thought it added stupid levels of unnecessary drama.[/li]
[li]After all of the interesting directions this film went with a very interesting idea, the end felt like a cheat. I would have preferred that Cooper had just died, and that TARS had just figured out on his own how to send the needed data back out. [/li]
[li]I know people can be unreasonably stubborn at times, but it didn’t make sense to me that the brother, who I’d thought was supposed to be a smart guy and not just a mindless farmer, would refuse to move his wife and son to safety. On the other hand, it didn’t make sense that the scientist accompanying Murph would insist that after years of bad dust exposure, the family needed to leave that very second. Silly plot device just to add (again, unnecessary) drama to the timing of Murph being in her old room. If the brother had allowed her to stay up there as long as she needed, I don’t think it would have detracted at all from the film or the moment of realization.[/li]
[li]Yes, I realize Cooper’s descendant’s didn’t know him, but they would have known how incredibly significant it was for him to meet his daughter, especially after all she’d gone through to get to him after he was found. It made absolutely no sense for them to all basically ignore him. [/li][/ul]
Again, though, I’m glad I saw it. I thought the acting was well done, and it was creative even when flawed.