INTERSTELLAR - Grading & Discussion

[Scout101]

Agree on the Mann thing. Just admit to being shitty, got crazy bored and sent pings. Didn't realize it would be a last gasp effort when they came for him, etc. He wouldn't win Mann of the Year or anything, but alive and helpful on the next planet. Instead tried to kill everyone to hide his lies. Wouldn't it be tough to explain away as to why he showed up in their space ship to save the day later? Even if he said they died and he heroically caried on for them, they wouldn't have come unless he said it was good, and why aren't they going to his planet? Know he didn't think it though and had gone a bit nuts, but still, just a "sorry, my bad" saves his life, the other astronaut, a robot, and the ship/mission.

The Brand bit at the end doesn't make sense to me either. With how gravity and relativity works, isn't Brand lost to him the instant he says "detach"? He's getting closer to the black hole, she's moving away. As he's deeper in the gravity well, time should essentially stop for him relative to everyone else, so she should be thousands of years ahead of him when he gets spit out. Unless it throws him back in time as well? They treated everything from the middle of the slingshot on (the +37 years or whatever) as static timeframe again, and tossed relativity out the window. Brand relative to Earth COULD be right, but Cooper should be off by a VERY long time as he went deeper into the black hole.

No way he's ever seeing Brand again, and should probably have shown up in Saturn orbit thousands of years later. But we needed the (underwhelming) father/daughter emotional payoff I guess.

 

[DarthTom]

But we needed the (underwhelming) father/daughter emotional payoff I guess.

This is probably the biggest disappointment with the film for me. The emotional connections in the film didn't connect for me. Nolan seems to be about as good as creating emotional moments as George Lucas is at trying to create romance between main characters.

 

[BigJake]

^ It may of course not have worked for you... but since they connected for considerably more people than could say the same for the Padme-Anakin romance I rather doubt you can sell it as being in the same league.

Know he didn't think it though and had gone a bit nuts, but still, just a "sorry, my bad" saves his life, the other astronaut, a robot, and the ship/mission.

Mann had quite plainly come unhinged and was irrationally terrified of being left behind again. Life of course would certainly be easier if people did not go insane, but this is basically like saying the mutiny on the Bounty could have been avoided if Capt. Bligh had just been more personable.

 

[drt]

No doubt, the arguement against Mann's behavior is asking: "Why isn't irrational person rational?"

The Brand bit at the end doesn't make sense to me either. With how gravity and relativity works, isn't Brand lost to him the instant he says "detach"? He's getting closer to the black hole, she's moving away. As he's deeper in the gravity well, time should essentially stop for him relative to everyone else, so she should be thousands of years ahead of him when he gets spit out. Unless it throws him back in time as well? They treated everything from the middle of the slingshot on (the +37 years or whatever) as static timeframe again, and tossed relativity out the window. Brand relative to Earth COULD be right, but Cooper should be off by a VERY long time as he went deeper into the black hole.

The way it's presented, the tesseract pretty much gives them a cheat on the timing of his extraction and return.

 

[Ryan8bit]

Wouldn't it be tough to explain away as to why he showed up in their space ship to save the day later? Even if he said they died and he heroically caried on for them, they wouldn't have come unless he said it was good, and why aren't they going to his planet? Know he didn't think it though and had gone a bit nuts, but still, just a "sorry, my bad" saves his life, the other astronaut, a robot, and the ship/mission.

Who would he have to explain anything to? He wasn't planning on going back to Earth. He was fully committed to Plan B, and knew that so was Dr. Brand. He knew there was only enough fuel to get to Edmund's planet and not enough to go there and back to Earth, so he was only trying to carry out that plan.

 

[DarthTom]

Three posters gave this film an, "F." I'm curious why that was? While I didn't personally think this film was academy award material, it doesn't seem to me deserving of an F? Do any of them care to explain?

 

[Mr Light]

<<7. How is Romilly (David Gyasi), who waited 23 years for Cooper and Brand (Anne Hathaway) to get back to the ship, not totally insane?>>

I wondered that too

Boy, after reading that list of complaints, I'm afraid my opinion of the movie just dropped a little further!

 

[Pauln6]

I really enjoyed it. Some science elements felt a bit rushed to make way for the schmaltz but overall it was intriguing. I did feel that the planetary aspect was a bit hokey. Sending people down to the planets would have been far more resource intensive than sending probes as a first step. If you know it's going to take 7 years to get the data back to the ship it would made far more sense to send you droid down while you go check out the other planets.

Also, none of the scientists seemed to have set up bio-labs. Organic compounds or not, you need to make sure you can grow food. If the planet is so cold that you can only exist indoors then carbon-dioxide/oxygen levels in the atmosphere are less important than the ability to build and maintain bio domes.

 

[BigJake]

^ It looks very much like Brand had a bio-lab set up behind her in the final scene on Edmund's world, now that you mention it.

Of course Miller was killed before she could do anything and Mann had no reason to set one up, he already knew his planet was hopeless.

 

[Trekker4747]

The whole premise of the planet caught outside of normal time was never fully explained as well - or at least not sufficiently. Was it because of the planets proximity to the worm hole or the black hole?

It was explained as much as it needed to be but you probably have to be aware of, to some degree, real-world physics to fully appreciate it.

Gravity distorts time. Your feet are slightly younger than your head since they're closer to the center of the Earth. Satellites in orbit that make up, among other things, our GPS network have to continually adjust their clocks to keep in sync with Earth time because even the the difference is femtoseconds it adds up over time and would eventually cause the whole system to no longer work.

By and large this isn't going to cause many, if any, real problems in normal practice. Because, again, the differences in most all cases are minute. But blackholes massively distort gravity and time, as a result being near a black hole would cause time to move differently for you than is passing for those not near the blackhole. For you time would be behave normally, someone observing outside would see you moving in slow-motion (or apparently still.) You would observe the rest of the universe moving by faster.

Wacky, wacky shit happens around blackholes.

 

[DWF]

The whole premise of the planet caught outside of normal time was never fully explained as well - or at least not sufficiently. Was it because of the planets proximity to the worm hole or the black hole?

It was explained as much as it needed to be but you probably have to be aware of, to some degree, real-world physics to fully appreciate it.

Gravity distorts time. Your feet are slightly younger than your head since they're closer to the center of the Earth. Satellites in orbit that make up, among other things, our GPS network have to continually adjust their clocks to keep in sync with Earth time because even the the difference is femtoseconds it adds up over time and would eventually cause the whole system to no longer work.

By and large this isn't going to cause many, if any, real problems in normal practice. Because, again, the differences in most all cases are minute. But blackholes massively distort gravity and time, as a result being near a black hole would cause time to move differently for you than is passing for those not near the blackhole. For you time would be behave normally, someone observing outside would see you moving in slow-motion (or apparently still.) You would observe the rest of the universe moving by faster.

Wacky, wacky shit happens around blackholes.

All three planets should be in hte same solar system I would have to think, so the singularity should be affecting all three planets. I say all three planets should be in the same system since unlikely they had the fuel or time to travel to three different solar systems.

 

[Trekker4747]

The whole premise of the planet caught outside of normal time was never fully explained as well - or at least not sufficiently. Was it because of the planets proximity to the worm hole or the black hole?

It was explained as much as it needed to be but you probably have to be aware of, to some degree, real-world physics to fully appreciate it.

Gravity distorts time. Your feet are slightly younger than your head since they're closer to the center of the Earth. Satellites in orbit that make up, among other things, our GPS network have to continually adjust their clocks to keep in sync with Earth time because even the the difference is femtoseconds it adds up over time and would eventually cause the whole system to no longer work.

By and large this isn't going to cause many, if any, real problems in normal practice. Because, again, the differences in most all cases are minute. But blackholes massively distort gravity and time, as a result being near a black hole would cause time to move differently for you than is passing for those not near the blackhole. For you time would be behave normally, someone observing outside would see you moving in slow-motion (or apparently still.) You would observe the rest of the universe moving by faster.

Wacky, wacky shit happens around blackholes.

All three planets should be in hte same solar system I would have to think, so the singularity should be affecting all three planets. I say all three planets should be in the same system since unlikely they had the fuel or time to travel to three different solar systems.

As I understood it all of the planets thought to be suitable for possible habitation were in the same system which actually doesn't make a whole lot of sense, really, but we'll go with it.

The first planet -the waterworld planet- was closest to the Gargantua so it had the greatest time dilation which is why Coop had to use some creative navigation in order to get them to the planet while conserving as much time as possible back on Earth (both to get back to his daughter and to save people.)

We're told the time-dilation for the waterworld planet (1 hour:7 years) but we're not old what it is for the other planets. It's likely they had some given the mass of the singularity but it's possible their time dilation may not have been quite as drastic. (If IIRC the normal insertion to the waterworld planet would have brought them close to Gargantua's event horizon.)

Hell, it's probably even possible the the other planets were far enough out that the time-dilation would have pretty much been negligible. I suspect that as you go out from a black-hole that the time-dilation effects steeply diminish.

 

[JacksonArcher]

<<7. How is Romilly (David Gyasi), who waited 23 years for Cooper and Brand (Anne Hathaway) to get back to the ship, not totally insane?>>

I wondered that too

Boy, after reading that list of complaints, I'm afraid my opinion of the movie just dropped a little further!

It might have been more interesting if Romilly was the one that tried to sabotage the mission and not Dr. Mann. I get why Nolan created the character of Dr. Mann and his role in the story - but I think it was a bit predictable for him to become, in a sense, the villain of the story since he was added late to the game and I think if anything movies tell you if there is a character that's introduced more than halfway through the movie he's either going to be the villain or cause some kind of threat or harm. It doesn't always happen, but I figured something was up when Matt Damon was playing the character.

I understand why Mann did the things that he did, but he was a character that was introduced late in the story, which meant Nolan had to dedicate a lot of exposition and dialogue to explain his character and his motivations. If Romilly had played that role, it would have made sense for him to want to sabotage the mission and return home - he had been waiting on Cooper and Brand for over 20 years. The waiting got to him. We really wouldn't need much explanation besides a few bits of dialogue. It would have saved the creation of a brand new character (Dr. Mann) and saved us some time on exposition.

I'm not sure how I feel about Romilly being the villain per se - but I think it would have worked if Nolan had portrayed him as a tragic character like Mann and not an outright villain. I think waiting for that long would make anyone start to not think clearly and make some bad decisions.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

While I loved the directing that Nolan did especiallythe drone chase sequence - which was shot in a very Spielberg-esque style) there are a few lapses in the directing, for me. Like when the "ghost" is communicating through books, there was never a closeup of any of the books, to see what the titles were or how they spelled out the message. Also, the Romily thing, about him staying awake - had such little impact. The only thing that happened was that Hathaway touched his face, but my mind was on Coop that entire scene and it just barely registered that Romily had stayed awake... and it certainly had little impact.. I actually barely knew it happened.

 

[Trekker4747]

I'm going to see the movie again tomorrow in IMAX but, Locutus] and NdGT both seem to be thinking that Coop was using the title of the books to spell out his message. Which isn't what was happening.

I think that was one of the methods Murph was using to try and to "decode" what her "ghost" was trying to communicate, as well as trying to decode it in Morse Code but Coop discovered it was in binary which, really, is sort of an odd way to do it. He'd have to knock over at least 8, more likely 12-16 books for one letter. And that's assuming he somehow knows the binary code for what letters he wanted to communicate. Which in of itself would be very, very unlikely (almost as unlikely as him knowing the titles of the books.)

Communicating the NORAD coordinates in binary is a little easier since there's a way to convert binary to decimal and back and it's fairly easy to do anyone with some degree of more-advanced computer knowledge could do it. (Though depending on how often you used that knowledge I suspect it'd take a good deal of time and thinking to do it. I know for me it would.)

But. again, it seemed to me that in reality the code Coop/"the ghost" was using to talk to Murph wasn't based on the titles but was encoded. (Either in binary or Morse. Between the coordinates and the "STAY", one was one and one was the other. Or both were being used in a number ways to communicate with Murph.)

 

[Skywalker]

The titles of the books weren't what was spelling the message. It was the width of the gaps between them, which spelled "STAY" in Morse code.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Whichever way the message was being communicated.. Nolan never showed any closeups nor did he clearly explain (show) what was happening.

Besides the dust was all widths for binary earlier in the movie.. Morse code doesn't opperate through thin and thickness

 

[Skywalker]

Whichever way the message was being communicated.. Nolan never showed any closeups nor did he clearly explain (show) what was happening.

Besides the dust was all widths for binary earlier in the movie.. Morse code doesn't opperate through thin and thickness

My bad, the watch was in Morse code.

 

[Trekker4747]

Whichever way the message was being communicated.. Nolan never showed any closeups nor did he clearly explain (show) what was happening.

Besides the dust was all widths for binary earlier in the movie.. Morse code doesn't opperate through thin and thickness

Dashes are wide gaps, dots are narrow gaps.

Any number of ways to look at something and find a "code" in it.

And what do you mean Nolan never explain it? Coop out-right SAYS Murph was wrong in her deciphering of the code and that it was in binary (or Morse, or whatever) and that one value was represented by narrow gaps and the other by wide gaps.

Again, I plan to see the movie tomorrow so I'll be sure to take a mental note of how the code on the bookshelf was laid out; and maybe it was the titles, but if it was that'd be ridiculous for the outlined reasons of not being able to see or know the title of the book from the backside unless Coop has a eidetic memory and the arrangement of the books never changed over the years or (possibly) the books were in some-sort of order that also never changed over the years. (Whether it be alphabetical order by title, by author, by author then title, by genre then author then title, or whatever.)

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I know he explained it in that early scene.. but when he got in the tesseract what was happening was not very clear due to a strange lack of closeups of the relevant details. It would be like Picard pointing to something on the science station monitor and the director never cuts to show it