SWMBO and I saw it today. Loved it. Jennifer Lawrence is a very talented actress.
Since I happened to by passing by, I slid this over to Cafe Society for you.
Something wrong with this thread?
[Moderating]
Eh, that thread is based on trailers and reviews. This is a “seen it” thread. There’s room for both, I think, unless the OP would rather we merge them.
Also saw it. Liked it very much. Pratt was not portrayed as a weird sicko. More as a desperate man.
I just posted in the ‘other thread’. The review there totally mis-characterized the movie IMHO.
But this is the thread I was looking for when I went into the other. I’ve got one or two technical issues I’d like to point out. Maybe see if anyone disagrees or has any others to add.
First, the EVA room. Why is there an EVA room for untrained personnel in the first place? And why would a system that advanced allow someone to open the outer lock without a suit? I’m not going to believe that there was no way for it not to know he wasn’t properly outfitted. But allowing that there were facilities available, why were there only two suits available for passengers and crew of over 5000?
Second, once they know everything is malfunctioning and shutting down there’s a race against the clock to locate the critically failing system because the diagnostic subsystem is one of the failed modules. Wouldn’t it have been faster, easier, and simply obvious to repair the diagnostic module and let it pinpoint the fault?
Third. I’m sure I’ll think of a third and fourth given time.
Its possible there were more than 2 EVA rooms scattered throughout the ship. That would grant access to different areas of the exterior should you need it. There were only two suits in each area because there were maybe only 2 tethers available (just guessing). Multiple tethers increase the chance for tangling. I’m also assuming there were more than 2 suits in each area, since the suit sizes were different. Its also possible that the outer door would not have opened if he tried to open it. The failsafe may have been at the end ot the sequence. The system may have scanned for “living” bodies and shut down before the final opening of the door.
Query why all of the entertainment systems were up and running if no one was supposed to be awake.
I assumed they all started up along with the life support systems when Jim’s pod woke him up. I wonder where all the food they were eating was coming from. I assume there was some kind of molecular assembler to produce food, but hydroponics where shown (though it wouldn’t make any sense for them to be active before anyone woke up). Also it was a little strange that Jim was able to hack the systems in the à la carte restaurant, but not the main passenger dining facility. :dubious:
It would make sense that there would be more than on airlock, and it seems like the one Jim & Aurora used was set up to offer passengers recreational EVAs. Presumably there would be crew present to supervise normally, but for some reason there weren’t any actual restrictions programed into it requiring a crewmember’s presence unlike the auto-doc (which can’t even reveal a terminal diagnosis to without the medical staff or a crewmember present). What’s really bizarre is that there’s only one auto-doc on a ship carrying over 5,200 people. :dubious: What happens if more than one person needs it at the same time? Do they just give priority to crew over Gold class over steerage?
If you’re wondering how they eat and breathe, and other science facts – just repeat to yourself “It’s just a show; I should really just relax.”
This flick sounded skeevy to me, and not in any kind of fun way. I never opened the other thread, by the way.
I’d say that the movie was decent. It was the setup for a true sci-fi plot, undertaken with a standard Hollywood aesthetic. If there was a dog, it would live. How happily the characters might have lived out their final days is merrily swept under the rug. The highest ranking person on the ship is black…
And of course is killed promptly.
I assume that the original script was properly sci-fi all of the way through and then was progressively watered down over several rewrites, but I’d say that enough remains for you to at least come out of the movie thinking about all the places where the movie clearly made an about-turn to avoid having to deal with a particularly hard issue. The evasive maneuvers are so obvious that you can’t help but think about how things should have gone. So you end up still asking the sorts of questions that a sci-fi movie would prompt, even if the movie did its best to escape asking those questions.
Granted, I don’t really want to applaud that sort of thing. But I have to admit that the movie doesn’t suck and goes close enough to asking the questions, that it still provides some good discussion after you’re out of the theater. I’d rather people watch Passengers than watch The Island, even if neither of them compares to something like Moon or Gattaca.
I somewhat suspect that the original version of the male character was probably less “good” than the one we got in the film. But I actually would have liked to have seen a better version of the film with that sort of protagonist. I would have liked to have had him start crying the instant she woke up and told her and apologized for what he had done, even if he couldn’t help himself.
I would have liked to have seen her asking herself whether he was really a decent guy, or if he was just the only guy and she was just as needy, over time, as he had been.
I would have liked to have seen them doing the math to figure out how many people could stay awake on the ship and deciding to start a mini-colony, and then looking through the passenger profiles to find people who could possibly help recreate hibernation technology. He could then wake up a small group of experts, figuring that in the worst case, they can all live together as a group if the technology doesn’t pan out.
(One plot hole in the movie is that he clearly states that there are replacement parts for everything on the ship, but then accepts that there is and can only be a single infirmary pod. Why not build a second one from spare parts?)
Realistically speaking, I would have liked to have seen him break into the pilot deck. There just ain’t no material that you can’t eventually get through given enough time and persistence.
And, of course, I would have been happy to have them die. Though, at the same time, I would have been happy to not have the only solution to saving the ship not require a noble sacrifice. :rolleyes: If you’re going to write that sort of thing in, you may as well let the characters survive. Though, it certainly would have been fun to have had a How to Train Your Dragon ending, where he comes back with no feet, because the flame ripped through his ankles.
I did like one bit where Pratt is confronting the ship about being awake and eventually the ship (thourgh the bartender) just says “you’re right, it’s impossible that you’re awake” and then just continues simultaneously providing some services but not others.
In terms of physics/science/why was that there:
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When the ship loses power, it loses spin. Wouldn’t work that way.
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The ship appears to be under thrust the whole way but also maintaining a steady 0.5c velocity.
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I can accept that the food and entertainment systems would work automatically if anybody was awake but why would the ship be programmed to suggest people go to a viewing lounge as they did a slingshot maneuver around Arcturus. Nobody’s supposed to be away at any time other than int he destination system.
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Why do they need to do slingshots? They’re apparently capable of relativistic speeds.
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What would be the g-forces on a slingshot at those speeds?
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When they did their EVAs connected by just a flexible tether I was looking forward to when the spin of the ship would cause them to whip around and get smashed into the hull.
That’s the beautiful thing about gravity: Zero. The only gravitational effects you need to worry about from anything you’re not connected to are tidal effects, and even skimming the surface of an ordinary star, those are going to be negligible for something the size of a person.
A gravitational slingshot (aka a gravity assist) around a star (Arcturus in the movie) implies a change in velocity (i.e. change in course and/or speed). The movie also stated that they were traveling at 0.5c. **Obfusciatrist **brings up a valid point, Chronos. What would the acceleration be for a gravity assist while traveling at 0.5c? Surely not zero, right?
On a related point, I think the movie took a lot of Hollywood liberties with the speed of the vessel, such as with the interaction with the asteroids. For one, space is essentially empty, and dense asteroid fields would not likely be encountered in interstellar space. For another, striking even one of the asteroids shown at 0.5c would release a phenomenal amount of energy, surely enough to obliterate the ship (shields or no). After all, the energy has to go somewhere.
Quick calculation: striking an asteroid 1 meter in diameter (approximately 1,361 kg) at 0.5c would release 6.12 x 10[sup]19[/sup] J of energy. This is equivalent to a 14,621 megaton [of TNT] nuclear explosion.
Besides this, asteroids approaching at such speeds would not be visible, any more than a bullet is, and a bullet is essentially stationary compared to the velocities being discussed here.
Agreed.
IIRC, they didn’t actually say that they ship was traveling at a constant speed; just that 0.5c was the current velocity. With constant thrust (i.e. accelerating for the first half of the journey, then flipping around and decelerating for the second half), the travel time is greatly decreased. The only type of drive that makes sense here is a low-thrust ion drive, but such a drive would not vaporize objects as shown in the movie. (Chalk that up to more Hollywood effects.)
Agreed.
I was thinking of the physics of the EVAs and the tethers as well. First off, the living areas are rotating, presumably to produce 1g of rotational acceleration. So a person on the outside hull is also subject to this acceleration, and standing outside using those magnetic boots would be similar to trying to stand on the side of a vertical surface (like a building). Human ankles don’t work that way.
It gets worse once they release the boots, because their radius from the center of rotation increases. They would freefall until the tether halted their outward motion (relative to the ship), which would be just like jumping off a building on Earth with only an inelastic tether on your back to stop you. (Think bungee jumping with a wire cable instead of bungees.) Worse, the acceleration at the end of the tether would be even greater than 1g. If the tether didn’t break, the person at the end surely would.
P.S. All of these physics errors are just Hollywood screwing up a perfectly good science fiction story, IMHO. (And the vast majority of the movie-going public will never even notice them.) Overall, though, I liked the movie and the themes that it brought up (not that I necessarily agree with the characters’ actions). And like any good science fiction story, it makes you think. See my comments in the other thread here.
The non-gravitational acceleration would be zero. The gravitational acceleration would depend on the object they were flying by and how close they got to it, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because gravitational accelerations can’t be felt.
No, they didn’t say it. But when you first see the ship at the beginning of the movie (and 30 years into the trip) you see it from behind and it certainly appears the ship is under active propulsion.
One thing I think would have been a good post credits stinger:
Seeing what the response from Earth was 35 years later. Presumably some version of “Ooh…that sucks…”
I’m sure you’re right, but I’m not grasping it.
They were going in a straight line then were shown experience a very rapid change in direction while apparently experiencing no effects of acceleration from that. You’re saying that’s correct, they’d feel nothing?
I’d also be curious how much of a change in direction you could get from a flyby at 0.5c. Arcturus is close to solar mass and they got very close to it (say orbit of Mercury or closer). I’d have to see the scene again but it seems to suggest at least a 90-degree turn in a very short period of time.
I did see Hidden Figures yesterday but can’t say it helped with my grasping of the math of orbital mechanics.
I’m not disagreeing with your statements that the ship appears to be under thrust and under active propulsion 30 years into the trip.
I’m disagreeing with your statement that the ship also appears to be “maintaining a steady 0.5c velocity.”
As I recall, they never say that the velocity was steady, just that it currently was 0.5c.
As I stated earlier, all of this can be explained with an acceleration profile consisting of accelerating to some fraction of c (obviously greater than 0.5c since they are still accelerating) for the first half of the journey, then flipping the ship around and decelerating for the second half. Such an acceleration profile also dramatically shortens the travel time for interstellar trips.