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[INTERSTELLAR] There are spoilers here.
Melkster
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Registered User regular
Seriously, if you haven't seen the film turn back now.
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At the end, after Cooper is finished with the Tesseract/Black Hole, he "is found."
Did they say where he was found? They were orbiting Saturn, so I assume that the appeared in orbit somewhere near the wormhole, which was orbiting Saturn.
Anyway, so Cooper meets up with his kiddo, who tells him to go after Brand.
And then there's a cut to Brand back on the planet on the other side of the wormhole, and we're told that she's just now getting to sleep.
Wait a minute. Why would she just now be getting to sleep? Why didn't Murphy send more scouting runs through the Wormhole as soon as she found The Secret Formula?
(Ohh, as I'm typing this I'm wondering if I missed a critical detail --- Is that her planet orbits close to The Black Hole? And so time passes super slowly there. Something like a hundred years have passed on Earth, but only a couple months or years have passed for Brand?)
And some praise for one big part of the plot --
Other movies present some magical rules to deal with this -- Looper for example.
But I think that Interstellar doesn't make up any imaginary rules. It presents an answer for the grandfather paradox -- that the paradox is impossible. That's why they repeat a few times that "all things that can happen, do happen." You couldn't go back in time to kill your grandfather, because your grandfather was born. If Cooper was suddenly all like "fuck this black hole shit, I'm gonna try and use this magic to get me killed" he wouldn't have been able to. The only thing he could have done is what he actually did do.
Other general praise --
I love the way they presented the wormhole and the black hole. Absolutely stunning, and supposedly fairly accurate, given our limited knowledge.
The two planets on the other side of the wormhole were pretty awesome. Frozen clouds! Gigantic waves!
And some criticism --
So, the blight. It is apparently some kind of fungus or bacteria that kills plants while simultaneously turning oxygen into nitrogen somehow, right? And it's such a horrible thing that you have to leave the planet and start over? Man, I hope they do a really, really good job of decontaminating people before they leave Earth. Because if you take the blight with you, the new planet will be fucked too.
"WHY ARE YOU WHISPERING?! THEY CAN'T HEAR US!"
Best robot since R2D2.
There was one thing that was kind of bad. There is a lot of low talking and mumbling in this movie. It doesn't get in the way, and it's not like I missed anything important but it is noticeable.
Otherwise, gorgeous Tarkovski esque movie, which I highly recommend seeing in IMax.
music
overall
It's pretty interesting to think about how that's going to play out. As the first generation of colonists are made several hundred generations would have been born on stations around the solar system.
Few things:
I also thought the movie handled time dilation and relativity really well. What really set it straight wasn't the videos of the kids growing up or the daughter being old, it hits when they go to the first planet and leave.
Just a heads up for people reading spoilers, don't read this one unless you've seen the film, it's about the end of the film.
Maybe I missed it, but here's the one thing I don't get, at the end:
If there's no wormhole, there's no Cooper in the blackhole knocking over books, doing morsecode, giving calculations; humanity never leaves Earth and we presumably perish and never get the technology to create the wormhole. If there is a wormhole, then the crew goes through the entire events of the film: Anne lands on the planet, starts a new colony, humanity can leave earth, we're saved, we get super advanced and can manipulate space and time to create wormholes, so the crew can go through it in the first place. But that only happens if there's a wormhole in the beginning; that only happens if humanity leaves Earth, and humanity only leaves Earth because Cooper and TARS end up in the blackhole.
So where does the wormhole come from?
But whatever, I guess I'll keep using them.
Everything else was the work of the 5th dimensional beings -- including creating the wormhole and the other gravitational phenomenon that Professor Brand spoke of towards the beginning of the film.
The 5th dimensional beings created the Tesseract specifically for Cooper, and those beings are the descendents of humanity -- people who've discovered how to transcend time itself.
Now, there's still a chicken and egg problem as you point out. There's an apparent causality problem, which you illustrate quite well. But the movie posits that there is no violation of causality. It's an unbroken loop which has no cause outside of itself.
In my mind, my common sense tells me this is impossible. There's nothing to get the loop started -- how can it just exist? I don't think I have answer for that.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/11/07/362273490/pop-culture-happy-hour-interstellar-and-other-space-movies
I'm pretty interested in the general reception/success of this film. I love these sort of films -- huge, high-concept, hard science films. I wish they were more popular. I'd much rather see another film like Interstellar than any of the super hero movies coming out in the next six years.
But it seems like I'm very much in the minority on that point. In that review I linked, the table just weren't into it. It was like listening to people who don't care for action movies reviewing an action movie.
I especially like
At least go see it in theaters. I didn't see it in IMAX but in retrospect I might consider it.
IMAX, now. I loved the film and it had a lot of 2001 in it with arguably the most impressive space sequences ever, but some of the writing was flat out bad.
Bubbly, I thought
Overall I enjoyed it. One of of Nolan's best originals.
Or do you mean, why was Brand still alone on the planet when Cooper was rescued? That, I do not know. I do not think the movie offered an explanation for that. It seems that Murph knew about Brand, so why didn't she send an expedition to rescue her? I wonder if a bit of dialog explaining it was cut.
As far as the haven for humanity -- do you mean the ship on which Cooper awoke? I believe that was the NASA facility was in towards the beginning of the movie. Did you walk out and use the bathroom then? Michael Caine's character shows Cooper "Plan A", which is evacuating from the NASA facility, which is a spaceship that can only be lifted if he discovers the Magic Formula.
The only holes really in the movie are that it plays fast and loose with black holes (not that there's explicitly any evidence to the contrary, but I'm reasonably sure no black hole is remotely survivable... I could be wrong, I'm not Hawking or anything), and that it induces a spontaneous causal loop, which is... yeah.
Very much enjoyed the movie - I would wholeheartedly recommend it to any sci-fi fan. It's not the hardest sci-fi out there, but for Hollywood it's pretty damn hard.
The human interactions are well done too.
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I almost laughed out loud when Cooper said
one other thing
Shogun Streams Vidya
that was my interpretation watching it
even if she knows from her own contact with brand, brand just got to the planet I think. I don't feel like much time passes from when the two split to when he's found floating. maybe I misunderstood though
edit: scratch that I forgot her boytoy had gotten there first and was apparently dead when she got there
Shogun Streams Vidya
So, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says...
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/after-cosmos-neil-degrasse-tyson-dives-science-interstellar-n243796
Oh wait a minute. Trolling the internet lead me to this--
http://screenrant.com/interstellar-ending-spoilers-time-travel/3/
...
Using a reversal of the film’s primary relativity theory, Cooper hops into a ship, with the knowledge that even though nearly one hundred years have passed since the Endurance first set out, time on the other side of the wormhole is moving much slower – meaning that a second trip should allow him to reunite with Amelia on Edmonds’ planet only a short time after Cooper first sacrificed himself and dropped into the singularity. We don’t actually see the reunion, so Cooper’s actual fate is left up to some interpretation, but there’s reason to be optimistic that he reaches Amelia and helps ready the colony for humankind.
Except
Also, see it in IMAX, it's gorgeous.
I was wondering about this too.
Ok so after sleeping on this the movie is way more about time than it is space or space travel. Chris Nolan really, really wanted to play with the opposing forces of relative and gravitational time dilation.
Shogun Streams Vidya
So there are 'others' who created the wormhole, but they weren't the ones who sent the messages to Murph. That was Cooper, who sent the messages that got him on the mission (stable time loop), then the calculations they needed.
And in the same way that Cooper gets the calculations to leave Earth back to Murph, they created the wormhole, and the Tesseract (possibly the black hole itself?) to ensure their own existence. After all, if they came from humanity, they needed humanity to survive so it could turn into them. So, there were two separate forces setting up stable time loops, both for their own preservation.
I think.
Still, just got back from the movie and absolutely loved it, quirky plot holes and macguffins aside.
Also having Murph taking way too long at her brother's farm just made the ticking clock fail as it kept going and going. Yes, time wise for the movie it was quick, but it kept being "we're out of time, he's coming back....eventually...wait he's here in time for your hug!" If it had been tighter it would have been far more effective.
Otherwise I really enjoyed the movie even with the problems pointed out by others.
The robots were stellar. 8-)
I thought the misinterpretations of basic physical realities were annoying and then it pivots to ridiculous misinterpretations of human cognition!
But actually the reason this fell flat for me was that despite taking place in the most hostile possible natural conditions, the ticking clocks introduced were almost entirely immaterial.
Every time something needed to be done... and fast it was for no goddamn reason. They could have hashed most of the decisions out for a goddamn week instead of crying at each other.
The best part is that they essentially set out for the viewer that the appropriate order is 3 - 2 - 1 to expend fuel while you've got it while saving time. Then they just fuck it all up, and without even taking a second to say literally look out the goddamn window at the planet they're about to land on.
Going for 3 - 2 - 1 takes you down the line with fuel and time as equalized as possible. They act like "it will take months!" is some sort of obstacle when the other option is "one of us will stay up here for 2 years, if we're absolutely as lucky as possible"
Then they head down because no time for discussion even though actually there's apparently years worth, and they run into something that is enormous in scale and could probably have been observed in some manner if they had taken a bit of time instead of just looking at the apparently phantom YES ping.
And the thing that marked the end of me being really invested was when he embarked on a mission that would take a minimum of 2 years without getting a chance to reconcile with his kid because you know... they have to... leave... today? I guess? Whenever that day was. If they didn't, they would have completed their mission in it literally didn't matter because there were no plans to do anything but colonize a place!
There was a lot of shouting and crying about situations that they had months to think over and resolve.
Annnnd the but you can love a dead person speech was painful to watch. Astrophysics is a science, but psychology is magic that we feel our way into truths about.