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INTERSTELLAR - Grading & Discussion

Grade the movie...

  • Total voters
    139
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
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
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.... I don't know what more you wanted. We were TOLD in that earlier scene what was happening and how the information was coded. We then see in the tesseract it was Coop relaying the information by manipulating gravity (pushing the books out of the bookcase, blocking the fall of the sand, etc.) So.... what else do we need?

Did you want us to spend five minutes with Coop there going, "Let's see... Okay, the first number is a 5, in binary that's 00000101, so I need a thin line here..."

Anyone paying attention knew what was going on, the movie gave us all of the information we needed:

1. Someone/thing was leaving coded messages using the books and sand in the room.

2. The coded messages were either based on the titles of the books (Murph's theory) in Morse Code (another theory that was floated) or in Binary (what Coop revealed to be the case.)

3. Thin lines/gaps represented one value, wide ones represented the other value.

4. The coded messages were the word "STAY" and the coordinates to the NORAD/NASA base. (As well as the message being left on the watch for the solution to the gravity equation.)

5. Inside the tesseract the "ghost" was really Coop manipulating gravity in order to leave the messages for Murph to use to a)get him to not go on the mission b)find the NORAD/NASA base c)the solution to the gravity equation.

So. I'm not really sure what more we needed. It's like in, let's pick an episode almost at random...

"The Ensigns of Command"!

In the episode Picard is battling with aliens who find human language to be imprecise and a complicated legal document was drafted to precisely lay out the terms of a precarious "peace" treaty between the Federation and these aliens.

We see a couple scenes of the crew's view of the monitor as they go over the document but finally we focus on Picard as he says, "There it is!" and walks off to talk with the aliens to use a legal loop-hole to save a planet of colonists from invasion by these aliens. We're not shown from Picard's perspective what the text is that motivated Picard to make this discovery. In fact when he talks with the aliens he calls out the the numerical location of the clause (page, section, paragraph, sub-sections/paragraphs) but never outright speaks the legal mumbo-jumbo that makes this clause noteworthy.

He simply summarizes it as he explains the loophole to the aliens (and us) and how it allows him to save the colonists!

Infuriating! They gave us all of the information we needed to know how Picard saves the day but they didn't precisely tell us what this information was! I wanted to read several paragraphs of complicated legal text to know precisely how Picard exploited this loophole and discovered it!

Just like you, apparently, wanted to see Coop standing there for 20 minutes doing the math in converting decimal numbers into binary ones and then making the appropriate lines in the sand (no pun intended?) to relay the information to past Murph.
 
Trekker4747 said:
.... I don't know what more you wanted. We were TOLD in that earlier scene what was happening and how the information was coded. We then see in the tesseract it was Coop relaying the information by manipulating gravity (pushing the books out of the bookcase, blocking the fall of the sand, etc.) So.... what else do we need?
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This. It is pretty amazing to see people complaining about a movie as exposition-heavy as Interstellar not having enough exposition.

On the other hand that's exactly why I understand Nolan's including the exposition he does. A lot of it you could technically get away with not using... except that I know now that if he hadn't had that "as you know, Bob" explanation of how wormholes work when they were flying into one, that wormhole would be turning up right now on lists of "maddening plot holes in Interstellar." Same reason Inception was so exposition-heavy and carefully, literally constructed; without all that hand-holding there would have been ten times the number of people complaining about how it was obscure or not explained enough.
 
Am I being out of line, am I missing something? What about Cooper's actions in the tesseract were unclear and needed more explaining than what was already given in the movie? It all seemed clear to me.

Along the mention of "Inception", "Inception" was a great movie, one I have very, very, few complaints about. But one of the complaints, along the lines of exposition, is that so much time is spent on exposition, in teaching us how dream-sharing works only for it all to not matter since a lot of the rules were thrown out the window during the big "heist" at the end. Namely how the "time dilation" works in dream-sharing and that dying in a dream wakes you up. But in the realm of exposition heavy the movie was certain there but a lot of that exposition was fascinating and fun to watch.
 
^ I don't think you're being out of line, no. Like you say, the plot point seemed to me to be explained as clearly as it could be without overkill.
 
People seem to be confused, the movie specifically states the following:

"STAY" and "black hole quantum data" = Morse code
"NORAD coordinates" = binary
 
Trekker4747 said:
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
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
Click to expand...

.... I don't know what more you wanted. We were TOLD in that earlier scene what was happening and how the information was coded. We then see in the tesseract it was Coop relaying the information by manipulating gravity (pushing the books out of the bookcase, blocking the fall of the sand, etc.) So.... what else do we need?

Did you want us to spend five minutes with Coop there going, "Let's see... Okay, the first number is a 5, in binary that's 00000101, so I need a thin line here..."

Anyone paying attention knew what was going on, the movie gave us all of the information we needed:

1. Someone/thing was leaving coded messages using the books and sand in the room.

2. The coded messages were either based on the titles of the books (Murph's theory) in Morse Code (another theory that was floated) or in Binary (what Coop revealed to be the case.)

3. Thin lines/gaps represented one value, wide ones represented the other value.

4. The coded messages were the word "STAY" and the coordinates to the NORAD/NASA base. (As well as the message being left on the watch for the solution to the gravity equation.)

5. Inside the tesseract the "ghost" was really Coop manipulating gravity in order to leave the messages for Murph to use to a)get him to not go on the mission b)find the NORAD/NASA base c)the solution to the gravity equation.

So. I'm not really sure what more we needed. It's like in, let's pick an episode almost at random...

"The Ensigns of Command"!

In the episode Picard is battling with aliens who find human language to be imprecise and a complicated legal document was drafted to precisely lay out the terms of a precarious "peace" treaty between the Federation and these aliens.

We see a couple scenes of the crew's view of the monitor as they go over the document but finally we focus on Picard as he says, "There it is!" and walks off to talk with the aliens to use a legal loop-hole to save a planet of colonists from invasion by these aliens. We're not shown from Picard's perspective what the text is that motivated Picard to make this discovery. In fact when he talks with the aliens he calls out the the numerical location of the clause (page, section, paragraph, sub-sections/paragraphs) but never outright speaks the legal mumbo-jumbo that makes this clause noteworthy.

He simply summarizes it as he explains the loophole to the aliens (and us) and how it allows him to save the colonists!

Infuriating! They gave us all of the information we needed to know how Picard saves the day but they didn't precisely tell us what this information was! I wanted to read several paragraphs of complicated legal text to know precisely how Picard exploited this loophole and discovered it!

Just like you, apparently, wanted to see Coop standing there for 20 minutes doing the math in converting decimal numbers into binary ones and then making the appropriate lines in the sand (no pun intended?) to relay the information to past Murph.
Click to expand...

But in "Ensigns of Command" the director illustrated what Picard saw..we couldn't read it- but he read it aloud.

In interstellar there were things that we couldn't read, and those very things were not read aloud. Not even one cut to a closeup that could allow us to see the books as Murph was seeing them.
 
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
But in "Ensigns of Command" the director illustrated what Picard saw..we couldn't read it- but he read it aloud.

In interstellar there were things that we couldn't read, and those very things were not read aloud. Not even one cut to a closeup that could allow us to see the books as Murph was seeing them.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure there was a shot of her notebook in the first act that showed how she worked out "STAY"

Pauln6 said:
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.
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I believe Professor Brand stated that probes were sent first (remember that the wormhole has been there for nearly fifty years), and I'd assume that data was used to select the twelve Lazarus missions.

I'd postulate that NASA was perhaps training Cooper (without telling him specifics) for a Lazarus mission, but then he married and had Tom which disqualified him.

Trekker4747 said:
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.
Click to expand...

You are correct, Cooper has TARS park Endurance outside of the more significant region of time dilation for the flight to Miller's planet.

My understanding from Amelia what Amelia says is that Miller's planet, Mann's planet and Edmund's planet are all orbiting Gargantua. I suppose that's not too unrealistic, since Venus and Mars might represent the extremes of our own solar system's "Goldilock's zone" - it would also appear that Mann's planet has a pretty elliptical orbit that takes it closer to Gargantua, as seen after the accident when they're too close to escape without the slingshot manuever.

As for the other nine Lazarus planets, we're really not told how travel to those was accomplished, maybe something to do with how the wormhole is entered, maybe it's more like a network than a straight tunnel.
 
In interstellar there were things that we couldn't read, and those very things were not read aloud. Not even one cut to a closeup that could allow us to see the books as Murph was seeing them.
Click to expand...

Again, why?! So YOU could sit there and decode the message?

Anyway, I got back from a second showing of it, this time in IMAX. The IMAX presentation certainly is beautiful but if it's down to a cost issue I'd think a traditional screening would suffice for most viewers.

Nowhere in the movie is it said that the "ghost" was using the titles of the books to relay a message. In fact Murph doesn't even use that as a means to decode the message supposedly being relayed to her.

It could be potentially implied that the book titles are being used when Coop is in the tesseract and is pushing the books off the shelf since as he does he's saying the letters of the word "STAY." But this is obviously just him "thinking out loud" as he creates the code for the word.

He uses Morse Code for "STAY" and Binary for the coordinates to NORAD/NASA and for the solution to the gravity equation.

One sort of wonders why he doesn't simply use the actual numbers on the watch-face to present the numbers and manipulates the hands on the watch for any mathematical operations needed in the equation (I suspect making a division symbol, a multiplication symbol, and an up-carat for exponents would be easier to do than knowing the Binary ASCII code for those operations (though TARS likely was giving him that operation.) Even then I'd think relaying a complicated formula would be very hard to do. I'd almost think it'd be easier to use Morse Code to be able to literally spell it out in words rather than laying out the entire equation. And he either somehow managed to "lock" the equation into the watch or found a way to manipulate it outside of Murph's room since we see her writing it down outside the house and later in her lab at NORAD/NASA.

Even if Coop was sending messages to her using the titles of the books he could have seen them since he many different vantage points of the room, not just the one behind the bookcase.

The movie still sort-of implies different star-systems were visited by the various missions and that the Gargantua one just happened to be the one that showed the most promise.

The waterworld planet was closest to Gargantua and had the greatest amount of time-slippage due to this fact.

It is said/implied it'd be months worth of travel to get from the exit point of the wormhole to the positions of the other planets, as well as to travel between planets. This certainly implies that the Mann's planet and Edmund's planet are both far enough away from Gargantua to not experience the time-slippage effects. In fact in Older-Murph's closing dialogue she says Brand is on a planet orbiting a "different star," so perhaps Edmund's planet isn't orbiting Gargantua (strictly speaking not a star) but the nearby Neutron star. (Ignore that everything we know right now tells us that habitable planets cannot be around Neutron stars.)

It is pretty much stated that wheat no longer can be grown which does bring into the question on how beer is still a thing (to say nothing of hops still being grown.) It's likely that maybe other crops can still be grown in more-or-less some fashion in biodomes, with hydroponics or other non-traditional farming methods but these crops weren't largely primary crops that were being used purely for food and were being used to augment other foods. (For example, being able to make other baking ingredients for breads and the like.)

It's sort of implied that gravitational anomalies or other things were screwing with the autopilot on the drone and the navigation systems on the automated farm equipment but I don't think it's ever fully explained on *what* gravitational anomalies were causing this. At first I thought Earth's gravity or magnetic field was becoming whacked enough to screw with these machines but when we find out Coop's time in the tesseract was causing the messages in Murph's room that seems to explain the gravity problems in their house. (Which obviously was being caused by an intelligent being and not a random gravity fluctuation.) But it's never explained what gravitational problems caused the drone and the farm equipment to misbehave.

That's all I have right now. Seeing the movie again was a great experience and I look forward to owning this one on BD when the time comes around.

After watching it again I think I picked up a touch more on a "love connection" between Coop and Brand, but the real "love story" in this movie is between Coop and his daughter and it's pretty touching.

And it's still amazing to me how much the younger and middle-aged actresses managed to resemble and emulate one another enough to truly make it feel like they were the same character at different ages.

I want my own TARS-bot.

Hell, I want a TV series with just McConaughey drinking a beer and sitting on a farmhouse porch shooting the shit with TARS.
 
You can brew beer with corn - would still need the hops to make it taste like beer, maybe blight hasn't hit hops yet.
 
Again, why?! So YOU could sit there and decode the message?
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No, because I just feel that a few shots were missing. He could show us stuff that might be too complex for the audience to decipher, but showing it, and showing a character reacting and working on it, goes a long way. But I just didn't see those shots.

Despite the fact that coding is something that is beyond me, I still had a sense of what Zuckerberg was doing during The Social Network because Fincher gave us a sense of what was important. He gave the relevant insert shots.
 
Locutus of Bored said:
[QUOTE/]
There were cornfields and dust bowls, which implies a midwest setting, Coop's farm was within a day's drive of Colorado Springs, which suggests eastern Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, or Northern New Mexico. There were also mountains in the background of the farm, probably the foothills of the Rockies.
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I recognize that this is incredibly petty --so obviously not important--, and that the truck's clock and sun position upon beginning the trip might actually provide clarification here, but starting a drive in daylight and ending up in Colorado Springs in the dark actually gives us a much wider range that that.

He could have started in Canada or Mexico. LA or Chicago.

Obviously the topography rules out a place like Chicago, and gas may be hard to come by, but --and I may have missed it-- other than the mountains near Coop's homestead, I didn't see too much that limits the location of his home*.

*Totally willing to concede that I may have missed something obvious.
 
drt said:
I'd postulate that NASA was perhaps training Cooper (without telling him specifics) for a Lazarus mission, but then he married and had Tom which disqualified him.
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It seemed to me that Cooper was training to be a part of Nasa right before the whole world went to hell. Then whatever apocalypse caused all this happened, NASA was officially discontinued for refusing to militarize space and a huge chunk of humanity died out (for unexplained reasons). Then, years later, NASA is reinstated in secret using whichever scientists they can find, which apparently does not include Cooper. I don't think it's that strange that they wouldn't be able to find him - for starters, they have no particular reason to even believe he's still alive after so many other people have died. And he seems to be living a relatively quiet life in a little town in the middle of nowhere in a world that is suddenly far more decentralized than anything we have now.

On a different note, was I the only one who found it odd that a man who was described as 'the very best of us', where the 'us' signifies literally the smartest and most well trained scientific minds left alive somehow didn't know that opening an imperfectly sealed airlock would cause a massive explosion that would kill him and doom the entire human race? I mean, aren't airlock procedures like NASA 101?

Anyway, really loved the movie. All the problems were very minor. Looking forward to seeing it again.
 
<<On a different note, was I the only one who found it odd that a man who was described as 'the very best of us', where the 'us' signifies literally the smartest and most well trained scientific minds left alive somehow didn't know that opening an imperfectly sealed airlock would cause a massive explosion that would kill him and doom the entire human race? I mean, aren't airlock procedures like NASA 101?>>

Apparently we're not allowed to question anything Mann says or does or thinks because he was irrational ;)
 
Mr Light said:
Apparently we're not allowed to question anything Mann says or does or thinks because he was irrational ;)
Click to expand...

Actually I'll give this one a pass because it's an obvious homage by Nolan to 2001 A Space Odyssey. Except this time it doesn't work so well. :)
 
Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
Again, why?! So YOU could sit there and decode the message?
Click to expand...

No, because I just feel that a few shots were missing. He could show us stuff that might be too complex for the audience to decipher, but showing it, and showing a character reacting and working on it, goes a long way. But I just didn't see those shots.

Despite the fact that coding is something that is beyond me, I still had a sense of what Zuckerberg was doing during The Social Network because Fincher gave us a sense of what was important. He gave the relevant insert shots.
Click to expand...

I.... I... I don't... What?!

YOU WERE TOLD WHAT WAS HAPPENING!!!!

There were coded messages in the room.

The coded messages were "STAY" (Morse Code), the coordinates to the NASA/NORAD location (Binary) and the solution to the equation (Morse Code).

Coop was in tesseract giving those messages to young-Murph.

What else is there to possibly know or not understand?!
 
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