INTERSTELLAR - Grading & Discussion

[Starbreaker]

I can't stop thinking about this movie. I remembered getting excited about it when it was first announced Jonah Nolan was working on the script way before Christopher was ever attached. And I thought that was just a few years ago, but it was way back in 2007. I waited for this movie for 7 long years based on the words "wormhole travel." I am nerd.

 

[Trekker4747]

I suspect the moon-landing denialism was similar to when in "The Truman Show" Truman's teachers tried to discourage him from exploring. It was less "this didn't happen" and more "discourage hope in order to prepare for the harshness they have to look forward to."

Did anyone else think the adult version of the son looked a little too, ahem, "well fed" for someone living in a world with scarce food supplies almost entirely based on corn?

And at one of the dinners we see them eating cornbread which means other crops as well as livestock must still be around in order for there to be things like eggs, milk, sugar, baking soda/powder, etc.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I do have a few qualms though fairly minor to the overall picture. The first is the premise. I still have a problem with the dust bowl scenario, mainly because there are lots of ways we might fix problems if they occur. I don't think there will ever be a food shortage problem, only a distribution problem! We already produce an excess amount of food in the world, vertical farming and other techniques can mitigate any disaster that may come in the near term. I suppose I just felt another dystopia wasn't necessary to tell the story, though maybe it dramatically added some weight to the events as well as urgency.

What got me about that point (now that you mention it) is that humanity has GMO foodstuffs in development, and yet, we didn't find a way to use them to stave off the blight, or to make crops that were resistant to the blight, and just grow food hydroponically in underground facilities. It's possible that humanity listened to the anti-GMO crowd way too much and nobody bothered to do any research into GMO's, or just use the GMO's we'd developed to grow food and never mind said crowd's objections to it.

Do they explain what caused the blight in the film? If not, maybe it was a byproduct of some Monsanto-like exclusive pesticide resistant GMO gone wrong that killed off other crops. Could explain much of the extreme technophobia in the film promo posted earlier (I still haven't seen the movie itself).

 

[Snaploud]

^GMOs typically lack genetic diversity, so there are actually two potential reasons why future humanity could be anti-GMO: a) a GMO could be the direct cause of the blight (as postulated above), or b) the lack of genetic diversity in GMOs could have made the plants more susceptible to whatever destructive process was begun by the blight.

 

[Trekker4747]

I do have a few qualms though fairly minor to the overall picture. The first is the premise. I still have a problem with the dust bowl scenario, mainly because there are lots of ways we might fix problems if they occur. I don't think there will ever be a food shortage problem, only a distribution problem! We already produce an excess amount of food in the world, vertical farming and other techniques can mitigate any disaster that may come in the near term. I suppose I just felt another dystopia wasn't necessary to tell the story, though maybe it dramatically added some weight to the events as well as urgency.

What got me about that point (now that you mention it) is that humanity has GMO foodstuffs in development, and yet, we didn't find a way to use them to stave off the blight, or to make crops that were resistant to the blight, and just grow food hydroponically in underground facilities. It's possible that humanity listened to the anti-GMO crowd way too much and nobody bothered to do any research into GMO's, or just use the GMO's we'd developed to grow food and never mind said crowd's objections to it.

Do they explain what caused the blight in the film? If not, maybe it was a byproduct of some Monsanto-like exclusive pesticide resistant GMO gone wrong that killed off other crops. Could explain much of the extreme technophobia in the film promo posted earlier (I still haven't seen the movie itself).

Something about us having a nitrogen-rich atmosphere and with plant life dying off not enough oxygen being produced.

 

[Danny99]

A-

I went into this one with high hopes, having wanted to see it since I saw the earliest previews. It was a good movie, but there are some things that were cons.

I have no problem with the fact that Cooper was able to communicate his message back in time, but the fact that his daughter was able to understand it by a flicking second hand on a watch that has been in a box for forty years and actually understand that that's what is going on was a little much. If she had been studying the books falling off the shelf for all those years and with then realized she had the answer in that, that would've been a nice tie in and have used the watch as some sort of other prop piece.

So Michael Caine knew even before the ship was launched that the ship was the mission was hopeless? So he sat around for forty years watching Murph chase her tail why? I understand he was trying to prevent a panic, but it seems a little bizarre that he just gave up.

So Cooper's house was a museum and they just let him move into it? Huh? I could understand if the museum was for him, but it was for Murph and then, he escapes the station with no alarms? The future seems a little too trusting.

That being said, I enjoyed the exploration, the Matt Damon portion, but it lost me in the last thirty to forty minutes.

 

[Snaploud]

A-
So Michael Caine knew even before the ship was launched that the ship was the mission was hopeless? So he sat around for forty years watching Murph chase her tail why? I understand he was trying to prevent a panic, but it seems a little bizarre that he just gave up.

...not just gave up...actively messing with a protégé for decades by having her work on a problem using assumptions you know are bad...Yikes...

One would think he would be spending all that time trying to figure out ways to get readings past the event horizon of a black hole. He has proof that somebody figured it out, and humans now have relatively easy access to a black hole. It seems ridiculous that nobody was focusing on that problem.

As for Murph...seriously...? Why would you bother working for NASA for decades just to spend all that time resenting your father for being a part of the program? Was it just for the free food...? Talk about a disconnect... And what idiot spends those decades resenting their father for trying to save humanity from extinction? Grow up already...

 

[Warped9]

It's amazing the baggage people can carry for years on end. It happens.

 

[Trek4Ever]

Loved the movie, rated it an A. I do have some issues with the sound dubbing and it left me with questions, but in a good way.

However, I do have one nagging question that I hope someone here can answer. If the people at NASA want to colonize another world wouldn't it be easier to colonize Mars? I've read that theoretically people can live there. Wouldn't it be less risky to attempt a colonization on the red planet than using up limited resources to go through a wormhole and explore other worlds?

 

[Trekker4747]

Loved the movie, rated it an A. I do have some issues with the sound dubbing and it left me with questions, but in a good way.

However, I do have one nagging question that I hope someone here can answer. If the people at NASA want to colonize another world wouldn't it be easier to colonize Mars? I've read that theoretically people can live there. Wouldn't it be less risky to attempt a colonization on the red planet than using up limited resources to go through a wormhole and explore other worlds?

Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere, no liquid water, great temperature extremes and doesn't have a (or enough of a) magnetic field to protect beings on the surface from solar radiation.

With very, very good biospheres, terraforming equipment and other things it might be a colony to try and start over but by no means a real solution. The plan seemed to be have a place where we could "start over" and this would mean a place we could be out and about in and have conditions for live-stock and crop production.

Here's a question:

I'm a bit confused on the "equation" Michael Caine was working on.... What was it, exactly? And why was it working dependent on having data from the black-hole?

It seemed about launching the ships from Earth but, erm, what's that have to do with a black-hole in a distant galaxy? (And, sheesh. Did it have to be another galaxy? I mean there are 100s of billions of stars in our own galaxy, certainly one of them could work, future us!) Why did he need this equation, and data from the black-hole to figure out "accelerate your ship faster than 9.8m/s. No matter how large or massive your vessel is gravity isn't going to change what it takes to launch that mass, fuel needs, sure, but the gravity/data from your billions-of-light-years distant destination? Not so much.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

^Mars has no air to speak of, is laden with dust storm, ice, cold, solar radiation, and everything has to be made there, plus any buildings have to be pressurized against the solar radiation and wind. As well, getting water there is hard, disposing of human fecal matter is hard when there are no native organisms to get rid of it (y'know, e.coli), plus a ton of other things.

For further study, I'd advise reading the Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) as well as the second Venus Prime book that's set on Mars and is about the terraforming of Mars.

 

[royalfan5]

I gave it a B-. For me, I spent a lot of time thinking about how it was a less fun Disney's The Black Hole, especially with the talking robots. I did enjoy the blatant CaseIH product placement in the farming scenes, as well as the camera finding the CaseIH logo on the pedal tractor in one of the farm scenes.

 

[Warped9]

If it can be believed gravity research as well as study of possible antigravity has already been going on for decades. If this could be solved in a way we could exploit it could have significant implications for interstellar travel. Indeed if we could manage to construct our own wormholes (which, in the film, our distant descendents can) then we could possibly go where we wanted.

What confused me some is that Murphy appeared to solve the equation Professor Brand said was insolvable. So what did it change for them? We saw they built themselves a space habitat where gravity was generated by centrifugal force, but that's something we can already envision and there is little particularly exotic about it.

 

[davejames]

Yeah I wasn't very clear on that. It kinda sounded like they were trying to solve this "gravity equation" that would allow them to lift up the big lab/space station they had built on Earth. Which apparently would have made evacuating Earth a lot easier than putting everyone on a bunch of rockets.

But I could have just totally misunderstood what they were talking about.

 

[Warped9]

Yeah I wasn't very clear on that. It kinda sounded like they were trying to solve this "gravity equation" that would allow them to lift up the big lab/space station they had built on Earth. Which apparently would have made evacuating Earth a lot easier than putting everyone on a bunch of rockets.

But I could have just totally misunderstood what they were talking about.

That's also what I thought. Solving or manipulting gravity in that way would greatly facilitate getting iff the planet.

 

[Trekker4747]

But what did that have to do with/was dependent on the black-hole? And, I just don't see the equation being that hard. Escaping gravity is easy we've done it countless times we do it ALL of the time. Sure, the larger your mass the more fuel you need to launch it but if they were bulk-evacuating the planet what difference does it make how much fuel it takes? Unless there was something in there about the fuel they'd need to launch their ships being greater than the supply they had (which seems unlikely unless rocket-fuel resources (hydrogen and oxygen) were very, very scarce.)

 

[Snick27]

This got to be one of the worst movies ive ever watched.
3 hours with nothing happening, 3 hours of spinning and turning and making me sick and at the end the movie was just a closed loop. Blah

Really did they go out of their way to have nothing happen in the whole movie? This was as bad as Contact but no, just one boring ass movie that made very little sense and really had no point.

U had what 12 planets so instead of sending actually people, how about spend probes to see if it can handle life etc.

If McConaughey wanted to change the past then dude don't push the books over and give yourself Nasa address.

But they wanted to stick the closed loop so fine, just was too long and not enough action for me and confusing at times and made me sick with the rolling camera.

I get everyone likes this for real science feel of it, guess that is why I was bored with it.

 

[Talosian]

"This got to be one of the worst movies ive ever watched."

Some opinions can be rejected out of hand. This is one of them.

In an age of Fast and Furious movies, comic book sequels ad nauseam, Shrek CG cartoon clones, and mindless horror flicks your judgment is worthless.

Moving on -

For years I'd been hoping for an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama and that Morgan Freeman would finally get his project off the ground.

After seeing Interstellar I no longer feel that desire. Nolan has fulfilled Arthur C. Clarke's vision.

 

[Agent Richard07]

Interstellar came in 2nd place domestically this weekend.

1. Big Hero 6: $56.2 million
2. Interstellar: $52.2 million ($50 million weekend + $2.2 million film-first screenings)

Worldwide totals as of November 9th...

Interstellar: $132,151,000
Big Hero 6: $79,200,000

Unlike Interstellar, Big Hero 6 is being rolled out slowly internationally.

 

[Shaw]

But what did that have to do with/was dependent on the black-hole? And, I just don't see the equation being that hard.

Really?

I am bewildered at the fact that MOST professional physicists today have no idea what gravity is 100 years after Einstein first put forward General Relativity. Not only is gravity not easy, most have skipped real understanding and rely on the math works and really bad visualizations of how it works.

I went to this movie because the trailer struck an emotional cord with me and was expecting to have to sit cringing through the science aspect. I was amazed at what I ended up with... until I was looking at the credits and saw that Kip Thorne had worked on this (I had met Professor Thorne when I was a student at UCSD and his book Gravitation, co-written with Charles Misner and John Archibald Wheeler, is the best text on the subject).

That having been said, I did cringe a bit when they went to a place where the time differential was one hour to seven years. The operative aspect of gravity that we fight against is time... and the amount of energy needed to get away from Earth (a differential of one year to one year and the smallest fraction of a second) is daunting, so how would they be able to get away from where that planet was?

But yeah, gravity is a subject that most physicists have avoided because it is hard. The mathematics is hard, the concepts are really hard (it is amazing that Einstein had the theory before he had the math) and it isn't something that you can manipulate which rules out experimentation (and leaves you with only observations). The Professor Brand character was a good surrogate for where we are in physics today with gravity... we feel helpless to make any further progress because we can't manipulate it in any meaningful way to experiment on it. And part of the reason for people looking for a new theory of gravity is because the current theory makes us feel helpless to explore it further (it isn't like there could be an LHC type project for gravity).

So until we can see gravity in real extreme situations, we'll never really make any significant advances... and the only place were those types of conditions exist are near black holes. The problem is that once you have the observational data, you are no longer able to relay it to the rest of the universe. Once you have the answers, you can't share them with anyone.

The energy needed to put a few people in low Earth orbit is massive, to move billions away from Earth completely... it can't be done conventionally. Without something else, (as the movie put forward) there was really only ever Plan B.