You asserted that Brand believes that “they” is mystical and supernatural, right?
I asked you for evidence and you cited…nothing. Except the failure of NASA’s scientists to articulate the word “alien”. Ok.
I do believe we’re at an impasse here. The assumption that Amelia Brand–despite being on a spaceship, heading to distant planets possibly containing intelligent life–thought they were being guided by spirits just is not a logical one to me.
The point being that your evidence for the opposite is just as well sourced as my evidence. Why begrudge other folks making assumptions for underlying motivations and worldviews when you are doing the exact same thing? Who the passengers and NASA assumed “they” were is entirely up to speculation. However, regardless - “they” are beings that can exist in other dimensions than us.
I’m not begrudging you that! You’re perfectly entitled to your assumption.
My problems aren’t with the paradox of the library or anything. It’s with the fact that if you can build a space habitat, you can build that same thing on the ground, without anti-gravity technology.
If all humanity needs to be in habitats, moving those habitats into space seems like a solution without a problem.
The lander craft’s fuel supply bugged me a bit. Also, the idea that the humans on Earth, or rather in the Earth system, never sent anyone to assist Hathaway. Once they have the gravitic technology and the crisis was over, it wouldn’t be so unreasonable to put-put through the wormhole and see what’s going on on the other side.
“Eureka!”
The movie was shit. “Eureka!” paper-tossing is the lowest hanging shit-fruit to pluck from the shit tree, but make no mistake. It’s shit all the way through.
I saw it last night, and have mixed feelings.
I agree that it needed some editing, and probably an adjustment to the plot. Brand’s “love” speech was cringingly bad, as was the callback later while Cooper was tesseracted.
Some parts just didn’t seem to make sense, as though there was a subplot that was cut. And looking at the pieces that were left, I can sort of reconstruct what it was supposed to be. I think there was a major backstory/subplot/theme surrounding Anne Hathaway’s Brand character that got left on the cutting room floor. Her character was supposed to be counterpoint to the Cooper/Murph relationship.
Why did they lose Doyle on the water planet? He was way closer to the ship when Brand got stuck, and he didn’t try to help her. He just sort of waited around until the doors closed? Or something? What if he actually did go to help her, and there was only enough time for TARS to save one of them, and he sacrifices himself for her.
Why did they lose Romilly on the frozen planet? There was the standoff between Mann and Cooper, and then… explosion! I guess Mann rigged the place to blow to protect his secret? Or something? What if there was a scene where Romilly tried to stop Mann to save the others.
I think we were supposed to see, in Brand, that sacrifice for someone else isn’t enough. It’s not enough to love someone or something so much that you sacrifice yourself so they survive. You also have to be with them, or they are alienated by grief.
The robots were excellent. The high point of the movie, and I will love it for that reason despite its flaws. I honestly can’t get over how good their concept and execution were. They managed to give TARS and CASE distinctively different personalities, which is hard to do with mostly-CG walking monoliths. All their dialog was tightly written. I loved the many homages to 2001, including the fact that locking the human out of the airlock is the right thing to do in this movie. It just all worked so well.
I thought the time travel thing was fine in concept, but as executed, required stupidity on the part of the characters. Once we realize that the ghost is actually communicating information, it’s basically screenwriting law that it’s going to be one of the two characters communicating with it. So it would make much more sense if Cooper, on the other end, were somehow limited in what he could say. Rather than Cooper sending “STAY” for, really, no good reason, there should have been some external pressure on him. Some way to send a message that was misinterpreted at the time, then reinterpreted later. But the coding theory explication scene would probably be even worse than the relativity ones.
I agree that finding a new planet as a solution to the blight was sort of weird and doesn’t really work. But it’s maybe worth it for the thematic resonance. The Dust Bowl is enough a part of the collective consciousness that it’s effective shorthand. You see the dust and hear the depression memories, and you can say “Ok, this movie is Okies in Space” and you have a solid foundation to build on.
Finally, the movie got a lot of little things right. “The World Famous Yankees” playing for a crowd of 100s was great, as was the dinner table laden only with corn products.
This scene really bothered me. It made no sense at all. He literally just stood by the open door of the spaceship and waited to die?
This one, less so; I got the distinct impression from somewhere that Mann indeed didn’t want the robot tampered with, and then Romilly was in there preparing to access its memory or whatever, which would have spilled the beans about Mann’s secret.
YES!
I agree about the robots.
“knock knock”
“Want to try for 55%?”
I have to say just as a general comment that I’m quite surprised by the amount of negativity in this thread about this film. I really enjoyed it. From a visual perspective seeing it in IMAX was key. The pervasive thing about love was a little hokey but Nolan was intending the father-daughter relationship to be one of the underlying themes of the film.
As for the above specific comment, I am among those who found the science broadly accurate, with a whole bunch of obvious artistic liberties (like the tesseract) taken to support the story line. That was my impression watching the movie, and I only found out later that Kip Thorne – one of the foremost theoretical physicists living today – was both a consultant and executive producer on the project. Apparently Nolan was going to introduce a faster-than-light plot element and Thorne so stubbornly opposed it that Nolan eventually gave up. I suppose Thorne was less concerned about some of the more minor artistic liberties.
And really, what would you expect would happen when you fly into a black hole? For moderate-sized black holes you’d be torn apart by tidal forces. But if the hole were large enough the gravitational gradient would be gradual enough that falling through the event horizon would be easily survivable. The bumpy ride seems like reasonable artistic license and even plausible, perhaps because of interactions with the accretion disc or the presumed switch between time and the radial space dimension once you cross the event horizon.
Absolutely, and just on a technical side note, Nolan insisted that seeing it in true 70mm film projection IMAX was the only way to see this film. From what I can tell the San Francisco Metreon is one of the few remaining such theaters. The others have either switched over to IMAX Digital or were digital right from the start. IMAX Digital is far superior to an ordinary theatrical experience, but still quite a different experience from the real 70mm film projection.
See, this is another example of the movie supposedly getting the science wrong when the problem is just that it’s not adequately explained. Or maybe it was and we both missed it. In any case Kip Thorne’s explanation is that the gravitational slingshot is based on the fact that stars and small black holes congregate around massive black holes like Gargantua, and Cooper’s team identify a small black hole orbiting Gargantua that is positioned to give them the trajectory deflection they need. So it’s not Gargantua itself that is providing the boost, but rather one of the other bodies in orbit around it, and as such it’s no different than the gravitational slingshot that NASA routinely uses within the solar system.
Yeah but why are we giving Interstellar such a pass? If we allow all the conceits of how a planet can be orbiting a black hole, how they can be so close to a black hole and even fly into it, and then just a magic realm inside the black hole, then we’d have to call pretty much all science fiction (and indeed science fantasy) “broadly accurate”
The way I heard it, Kip Thorne was basically just involved in the rendering of the black hole, which was as accurate as we could depict based on our current understanding.
And indeed, this analysis from Dr Roberto Trotter, senior lecturer in astrophysics at Imperial College London, seems to bear this out:
No, Kip Thorne was a major collaborator throughout. In fact he recently wrote an excellent book, The Science of Interstellar, on all the scientific aspects of the movie, in which Nolan writes an introduction crediting his contributions.
Because while Thorne may have given in to Nolan’s insistence on some of the stretches of plausibility for plot purposes, he worked hard to keep the major scientific premises on track to keep them consistent with what we think might be possible – as with my example about his insistence on not using faster-than-light travel as a plot device. Personally I’m giving it a pass because I enjoyed it, it led to some interesting after-movie conversations about the fact that amazing phenomena like neutron stars and black holes are very likely real things, and complaining about incorrect science is some mixture of not understanding what Thorne had in mind (as with the gravitational slingshot example) or – it seems to me – just cynical nitpicking.
That makes sense, but it’s absolutely not what they said in the movie. :smack:
And there are a number of books out on the science of star trek.
If he’s used the film as a jumping off point to explain relativity and maybe even post some theories of his own, good for him. But we’re evaluating the film.
I quoted a lecturer in astrophysics who thinks the science is wrong, and he’s not alone. And the scientific inaccuracies played only a very small part in why I didn’t enjoy the film, but it’s just the one thing in my post you’ve chosen to focus on.
That’s quite true, and here’s a bit of background on that. The slingshot was actually a two-step maneuver, accelerating down to Miller’s planet and then decelerating again. With regard to the second maneuver, Cooper at one point does say “Look, I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate”.
But a neutron star of sufficient mass to do the job – according to calculations from Gargantua’s mass, which itself was determined by the plot necessity for it to dilate time – would have destroyed the ship due to very strong tidal forces. The appropriate object would have been an intermediate-mass black hole, but Nolan thought that more than one black hole in the movie would be confusing to a mass audience already struggling with a lot of unfamiliar science. So he opted for the artistic license of a neutron star, for much the same reason that the detailed mechanics of the gravitational slingshots weren’t exhaustively articulated.
You mean there are books out on the fantasy of Star Trek. Thorne’s book is about the science of Interstellar, and it’s not a “jumping off point” for anything – it’s a detailed account of his exhaustive start-to-finish involvement with the scientific background of the film. Obviously there are some very speculative elements like the wormhole itself, but Thorne’s efforts were to make sure that all the foundational science leading up to them were as sound as possible. The attention to detail in many areas was really quite remarkable. When Nolan insisted that the space near Gargantua had to dilate time at the rate of one hour to seven years on earth, Thorne first insisted that it was impossible, then eventually plowed through a mass of relativistic equations that showed the conditions under which it was possible – unlikely, and just barely possible as it would have to have a tremendous rate of spin – but possible. So it went into the story. But when Nolan wanted faster-than-light travel, a la Star Trek, Thorne flatly refused.
You are perfectly entitled to not like the movie – that’s not my argument here. I obviously disagree, as do many critics, but with respect to its scientific values, I really do object to claims that the science is all wrong when, in fact, great efforts were made to get it right. As already said, just because sometimes it’s not practical to fully explain it, as in the example I just gave, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t understood by the filmmakers or that it detracts from the realism. If all the details of the gravitational slingshot had been explained in laborious detail, there would be whining that it wasn’t realistic because “real astronauts don’t go around explaining basic physics to each other”. This is a story, not a physics lecture, and if some things need to be clarified after the fact for those interested, so be it.
It’s also wrong to say that Kip Thorne just contributed some black-hole models when in fact he was deeply involved in the entire scripting and production process from start to finish – which Chris Nolan duly and gratefully acknowledged – and wrote a whole book backing up the science.
Nor did your quote in any way discredit any of the science. Accretion disks around black holes are theorized to emit a wide spectrum of radiation including potentially lethal gamma rays and X-rays, but only in proportion to the amount of matter being accreted and the consequent temperature and the strength of the magnetic field confined by the disk’s plasma. In Interstellar, the plausible assumption is made that Gargantua may not have accreted significant star matter in a long time and that its accretion disk is therefore relatively cool – about the temperature of the sun’s surface and with similar emissions; as Kip Thorne put it, a relatively “anemic” disk, thin and nearly confined to the equatorial plane. It’s entirely plausible, even likely, that many such black holes may exist.
But what I think wasn’t plausible was that the mothership appeared to have suffered no time dilation whatsoever, despite the extreme time dilation at the surface of the planet. I get that Nolan probably didn’t want to confuse the viewers with 3 separate perceived times but it was extremely distracting to me that the mother ship apparently stayed perfectly in sync with earth time throughout all of it’s manoeuvres.
Apologies for the late response. I was traveling for the past few days and doping only intermittently.
I believe – correct me if I’m misremembering – that the speech was basically Brand’s response to the “Which planet should we go to?” question, during which Cooper was insinuating that Brand’s feelings for Edmunds may be clouding her judgment.
I’d think a response to an accusation like that would be “Yeah, I do care strongly about him and you may perceive that as a conflict of interest, but here are the other reasons why I think this planet is a good choice…” not “but love!”
It’s fair to say that I don’t know Brand better than anyone else. All we have to go off is what we see of her character on-screen, and my point was not that the speech and the feelings behind it were altogether impossible, but that the Brand character was insufficiently developed up to that point to give a convincing delivery of it. I can’t speak for every scientist ever, only the ones I’ve met, and that just seemed like a really strange thing for one to say absent a backstory portraying otherwise.
I have no trouble believing that Brand was spiritual on some level. I’d be surprised if most astronauts weren’t. But that was a bit too much, too quickly, too suddenly.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that topic… thanks for sharing your thoughts and for listening to mine 
Strangely, the touched-by-the-hand thing didn’t much bother me. I think anybody traveling through a miraculously-placed wormhole for the first time, on a mission to save humanity, with your ship possibly disintegrating any second, seeing a floating hand in the air that your copilot also sees… well, that is probably not a moment where everyone’s calm and analytical (unlike the which planet question).
The robots! Oh, how could I forget the robots? It’s probably the best cinematic depiction of both AI and physical future robotics I’ve ever seen. We’ve come along way since the fear of Hal. The robots mirror Alien’s Bishop in believable empathy, even humanity, and are useful, well-designed and just mind-numbingly awesome overall. I hope the Borg Queen is taking notes.
And if nothing else, I appreciate this movie for the discussion it’s generated here and elsewhere. It takes a lot to pique public interest in science, especially relativistic astrophysics (see, doesn’t that even sound boring?), and this came at a great time after Cosmos, Gravity, and the comet landings. So-so-scifi is much better than no scifi.
By now I’ve seen the movie on three separate occasions, totaling to about 170% of the whole film (long story). I still think the movie had potential to be great, and it was only because it aimed so high that I feel like it fell so far. I still suspect that scenes/plotlines were cut or modified to suit test audiences or whatever. A director’s cut of this would be very interesting.
I found them disturbing, reminding me as they did of those two occasions when I was chased across a desolate landscape by a giant asterisk.
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