And Queen - '39 plays in the end credits.
I just saw the movie yesterday. I overall liked it, I think it could have changed some things with the script and editing and it would have been a lot better, but I appreciate it for what it was. Matthew McConaughey was great, I especially loved when he was watching the 23 years of videos. I loved the design, it was a beautiful movie, both on Earth and in space. I really liked the robots, both the cool design of them, and Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS.
I do wish that Ann Hathaway’s part was better. She’s a good actress, and she did the best she could with her part, but it was underwritten. That speech about love being so powerful was terrible. And it was weird her getting her foot trapped on the water planet and having to be rescued by TARS, it made me think of a woman breaking her heel or something running from the monster and having to be rescued. And I was unclear about how Wes Bentley got killed then, why he wasn’t already back in the ship. And I wish she didn’t have a connection with Edmunds, it would have been more interesting to me if the disagreement about which planet to go to was based more on the facts, instead of her wanting to go see Edmunds because of love. There would have been reasonable arguments for both Mann and Edmunds planets.
Also, that was really weird about how the decisions seemed last minute about where they were going to go to. I would have thought that would have all been much more planned out, rather than talking at the last minute about which planets to visit and in what order. Maybe I missed something and they were basing it on information they only got after going through the wormhole, but I’m not sure.
I’m excited to see what Christopher Nolan does next. There are directors who do “smarter” movies, but he seems to be one of the few directors who is given a big budget to do big, ambitious, original things.
Yeah, it would have been interesting to hear more about Earth and how it got that way, but I thought they did very well telling fairly quickly how things had deteriorated. I thought that was plausible.
-
Yeah, the “solving gravity” stuff was really weird to me. But I guess the whole purpose of the movie was to get humans off of Earth, so they couldn’t just end it by building biodomes or something like that. That could have been written better, though I don’t know how I would have done it.
-
I go back and forth on this, but it doesn’t bother me too terribly much. Like maybe that humans can be too suspicious, so if a message appeared carved into the earth with an equation about space travel, people would think it was a trick by the enemy and it would kick off World War 3 (or 4). Or once humans are evolved into 5 dimensional beings, they’re beyond regular communication with us, just like we can’t have normal communication with ants. Or they are able to do subtle messaging and pointing like they did here, but things would be thrown off too much if they sent a direct message. I don’t know, I can roll with it, but I can understand if other people can’t.
-
This is what got me. It’s so annoying, and such a cliché. It feels like there are so many sci-fi movies that throw that in about love being the most powerful thing. I like Ann Hathaway as an actress, and I felt bad for her having to give that speech about love.
Ha, I didn’t even think of that, but you’re right, he was never mentioned. He could be dead, since Murphy was pretty old and he was her older brother, but Cooper could have asked.
Also, it was weird that Murphy and Cooper seemed to spend very little time together, and that her family was unfazed by him being there. I would think some of her kids and grandkids would have heard stories of her dad who went out into space and would want to talk to him about that stuff.
The teacher did emphasize that his old textbook was a federal textbook. Some areas of the US today want to have textbooks that teach creationism is real and that the theory of evolution is just some half-baked theory; I could imagine some parts of the US in the future believing that the Apollo missions were actually propaganda. One of the reviews I read mentioned something about a war having happened, I don’t remember that being mentioned, but it’s obvious that the world has deteriorated. I could see less money being available for things, including education, and some politicians and radio show hosts spreading the idea that if you believe in the moon landing you’re crazy.
I was wondering about that too. John Lithgow said something in the movie that made me think he was a kid in our present time, so that means the movie would be about 60 years in our future, but I don’t remember what it was he said that made me think that.
Yeah, there’s a scene where he says something like “When I was a kid, there was a new gadget coming out every day! Phones, blahblahetc.” and then Coop goes on to say “When I was a kid we were too busy trying to not die to worry about that stuff.” so it gives us a vague time frame on when things went really bad.
There definitely seems to have been some major civilization-destroying event. War seems likely, or nuclear exchange or something.
Yeah it seemed to me the Grandfather was my generation or slightly younger and Coop was born during the famine and climate catastrophes that changed the word and killed most of the population.
Nolan has explained the robot’s fate, in an online comic.
The major civilization-destroying event was the appearance of the Blight that wiped out huge numbers of food crops and caused widespread famine. During the movie we were down to corn and okra as the only food sources left and okra was on its last season of usable growth. When Murph visits the farm with Eric Foreman, everything they served was corn.
No, I don’t think so. That is what is killing civilization in the NOW. If it were “just” a Blight that killed crops one by one (which is basically what the NASA folks say) then there wouldn’t have a been a sudden big die-off, which Coop and the general state of the world generally seem to indicate is the case. SOMETHING happened. There are ex-military drones flying around with no one listening. NASA was disbanded when they “refused to drop bombs on people”. Something HAPPENED that got the world into the slowly dying state it’s now in.
I assumed it was a mix of the Blight and climate change wreaking havoc.
Yeah, really didn’t enjoy this film. Much too long, too emotional and too silly.
Though I am not alone in this, enough people loved it that I find myself as far away from popular opinion as I can recall being. I guess one factor is I saw it at a regular cinema, not IMAX; pretty much everyone who saw it at IMAX has been wowed by it, it seems.
I find it especially perplexing that friends from a science background say it was generally accurate, when I could certainly count more inaccuracies than, say, Armageddon (which at the time I thought was a pretty silly film, but it stands up well in retrospect).
I mean we’re talking about a film where he flies into a black hole, and all that happens is the flight becomes a little bumpy for a moment.
All the stuff about love, love being interdimensional, a parent’s love meaning they’d fight harder than a robot, wasn’t just schmaltzy but obviously flawed, and bizarre that most of those lines were delivered by astronauts. Matt’s character was apparently the only one that could stay sane for 5 minutes.
The characters losing their minds was one way they artificially created peril, but there were others. They land the ship on the water world, and get out and walk around. Ergo, they must have known the water was only knee-high about a solid surface. How could they not know that there were also 1km high waves?
A few of the reviews have mentioned how daft it was having a crude explanation of what a wormhole is when they were hours away from arriving at one. For me, that was fine; the kind of thing you have to accept in any sci-fi movie. More daft for me was things like Matt’s character saying stuff like “OK, I think I’ll just swing round that neutron star…” like he’s planning a trick shot in pool.
I have more things to rant, but no-one reads long posts. Just glad to get some of it off my chest…
So this website (of uncertain truthiness) says that Interstellar was originally meant for Spielberg, not Nolan, and that an alternate first draft script would’ve changed the story in various ways:
-
There would’ve been no Americans sent through the wormhole before Cooper. Instead, they only sent drones. One of these returns and crashes on Earth to be discovered by Cooper. He follows its homing beacon back to NASA and they send him to investigate the ice planet for its biocompatibility.
-
Once through the wormhole, they discover several alien species: one that can manipulate spacetime the way we play with playdough, and one that eats off neutron star radiation and lives on the ice planet. They also discover an abandoned Chinese outpost on the planet, explaining that the rest of the world did exist and continue to do things, but communications were cut off. Anyway, the ice planet aliens save the humans, and in exchange the humans help the aliens escape their planet before the black hole engulfs it completely.
-
Eventually they enter the black hole and enter something pretty much just like the tesseract, but in there they find TARS (who was abandoned earlier in this alternate storyline), who has spend hundreds of years in the singularity researching time travel. Cooper ends up learning from TARS and sending back the space probe that past-him would discover.
-
It turns out that the whole wormhole and spacetime disruption were created by the aliens not to interfere with or save humanity, but just to get them to go to the ice planet so the ice aliens that they were really interested in saving could hitchhike out of the black hole’s vicinity.
-
Cooper goes through the wormhole, meets his descendants, and then reembarks on on further exploration with TARS.
So that version solves some plot holes, but still has that annoying time travel element. At least it dispenses with the absurd A/B plan, the “love” spiel, etc.
Yes, the apparently near universal praise has me baffled. I can only conclude that there is such a serious public hunger for “big” hard science fiction movies that depict a human future in space exploration, that people are willing to overlook any amount of plot holes.
Well I want to a 7:30 pm showing on Sunday evening and I was the ONLY one in the theater, so I don’t know how well the movie is doing. Maybe everyone was watching Kirk Cameron save Christmas.
I think this version seems way better. I don’t really see what role the time travel plot plays? As put like this it seems we could just sort of ignore the spacetime aliens. Finding the probe doesn’t seem that unlikely that is has to be explained this way.
Give me time travel over aliens anytime. At least time travel is plausible.
You have an extremely strange definition of ‘plausible’.
Is this a woosh? Aliens are far more plausible than time travel.
While I agree that there is most certainly extraterrestrial life elsewhere in this galaxy, I believe that the likelyhood of humanity ever coming in contact with it is less than humanity using an enormous gravity well to travel forward in time.
Oh, I just remembered another thing that bothered me about this movie’s astrodynamics.
After taking off from Mann’s planet, their fuel supply is too low to get to Edmunds’ planet unless they slingshot around the black hole. The problem: a gravitational slingshot only works if the thing you’re slingshotting around isn’t the thing you’re orbiting. (Think of the gravitational slingshot the Voyager probes performed at Jupiter, to give them a little boost on their way to Saturn. They robbed Jupiter of an infinitessimal bit of its momentum, and in so doing accelerated.)
But by leaving orbit from Mann’s planet, and putting themselves on a trajectory to get close to the black hole, they’re now on an interplanetary trajectory within that star system. By definition they’re orbiting the same thing the planets are orbiting – namely, the black hole. You can’t do a “slingshot” around the thing you’re orbiting!
I agree that the movie’s pace was too slow, that the time travel paradoxes were a problem like they usually are, and the story couldn’t decide whether it was pushing science or mysticism.
One other issue that confused me was Mann’s plan. What was he trying to accomplish by sending false data? Had he just reached the point where he just wanted the follow-up expedition to come rescue him and didn’t care about the consequences? Or had he deluded himself to the point where he really believed Plan B would work on his planet?
I loved roughly the first half of the film. Then it got a little mediocre. Overall it was definitely above average, but flawed.
I loved the pacing of the film. I loved the juxtaposition of societal regression with certain advanced technologies. I loved the use of time dilation - something nearly every other science fiction film or television show ignores. (Sometimes it makes for better story-telling to ignore it, but it was used well here.) It managed to capture an exciting and scary sense of discovery and exploration. Basically, I loved nearly everything up to the speech about the power of love.
I thought it might get back on track after that, since the result of that speech seemed to be that the crew agreed she was being irrational. Still, it was embarrassing to even listen to. And then at the end we get more “love will save the day”.
They should have left out the time travel (the time dilation is fine) and focused more on the technological and psychological problems of their mission(s). The movie really shined when it captured that sense of exploration and danger.
Little Nemo, Mann sent out bad data to lure them to his planet so he could live instead of die. I don’t think he had any illusions about his planet being suitable. Recall his speech about the survival instinct in humans. He thought he was willing to take the risk of sacrificing himself to potentially save humanity. But when faced with a lingering death millions of miles from any other human, he broke. He couldn’t do it. Instead he faked his data so others would be sent to investigate what they thought was a promising prospect for humanity’s new home. I don’t know exactly what he planned to do after stealing their ship - go back to earth?