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Basebf555 posted:My 90 year old grandfather brought up to me that he had tried to watch Interstellar but pretty much hated it. He's been a sci-fi fan all his life but age has effected his ability to enjoy modern stuff, especially something like a Nolan movie where the exposition comes so rapid fire. Anyway he didn't really have anything good to say about it. See, I'm surprised you say that because I would say this film is almost a throwback to the age of slower Sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (obviously) or Silent Running. I would have imagined it would hold up pretty well with an older viewing audience.
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# ? May 20, 2015 17:45 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 06:39 |
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Applewhite posted:
It would need a counter-rotating spining wheel with enough angular momentum to compensate the one of the habitation ring. So just think it was something that was not shown in the movie, but was there all the time. (Of course, if you have a loving big spinning wheel you don't actually need thrusters to start/stop the rotation, but meh...). Incidentally, the "red planet" ship nailed it with its two counter rotating rings.
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# ? May 20, 2015 17:45 |
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Applewhite posted:See, I'm surprised you say that because I would say this film is almost a throwback to the age of slower Sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (obviously) or Silent Running. I would have imagined it would hold up pretty well with an older viewing audience. For my grandfather even something like 2001 would probably considered too new to really be something "of his time". He's more into the somewhat less cerebral post-war stuff from the 50's.
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# ? May 20, 2015 18:36 |
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Applewhite posted:Recent first time watcher also checking in. Can we talk a little bit about how TARS was the best character? If you're talking about after a big chunk of it got blown off, yes, and thank you for being the only person besides me who thinks that was a problem. The center of gravity would have been shifted enough to make docking like they did fairly impossible.
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# ? May 20, 2015 21:00 |
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Basebf555 posted:But I asked him specifically about TARS because who could possibly hate TARS, and sure enough as soon as I mention it his face lit up and we talked about TARS for like ten minutes. Even 90 year olds who are totally disconnected from current movie-culture love TARS. I think he'd be a bit too old to be a good human slave for TARS's new robot colony.
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# ? May 21, 2015 01:03 |
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Amberskin posted:Incidentally, the "red planet" ship nailed it with its two counter rotating rings. So much of the science in that movie was unforgivably bad. Those counterrotating rings would be a good design, but they were handled really badly by the plot; they stopped when the ship ran out of power, implying that the ship had to overcome lots of friction to keep them going, and then spun up to full speed instantaneously when power was restored.
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# ? May 22, 2015 06:21 |
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Chamale posted:So much of the science in that movie was unforgivably bad. Those counterrotating rings would be a good design, but they were handled really badly by the plot; they stopped when the ship ran out of power, implying that the ship had to overcome lots of friction to keep them going, and then spun up to full speed instantaneously when power was restored. Yea but on the other hand who cares.
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# ? May 22, 2015 14:16 |
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Applewhite posted:See, I'm surprised you say that because I would say this film is almost a throwback to the age of slower Sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (obviously) or Silent Running. I would have imagined it would hold up pretty well with an older viewing audience.
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# ? May 22, 2015 14:55 |
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Bleh. Just watched this and I could barely keep my eyes open throughout. The dialogue throughout most of the film, coupled with actors who didn't seem at all sure of their character's motivations took me right out of it. It's weird how stilted it all felt, like they were going for a sort of romantic and sentimental tone but everything was just too sterile to carry it off convincingly. None of it felt like there was anyone there. It felt like a movie rather than a story, with actors rather than people, if that makes any sense. I know nerds love this movie because it manages to have at least a high school understanding of physics and doesn't outright insult the audience's intelligence every five seconds, but it feels completely soulless. If you're going to do mawkish emotionalism and have people set out to save mankind and all that crap, you've got to somehow invest me in mankind's fate. None of the characters came across as relatable, likeable or real and so I had no stake in what happened. In fact, as the film wore on I got to loathing most of the players for various petty reasons and entertained hopes that they'd fail and doom their dirt-farming dust bowl dwelling fellows to certain starvation. Even the visuals didn't really interest me. I've seen so many pictures of space thanks to reddit atheists now that the universe in all its splendour has no capacity to awe me. There was an empty, yawning void at the heart of this film and we spent altogether too much time staring at it. Also, it's pretty apt that relativity was a major plot device of the film, because it was already long enough at circa three hours, but managed to feel like twice as long. Sorry for ranting like a dour, negative bastard. I usually love big scifi movies, so it was crushing to be so disappointed by this one.
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# ? May 27, 2015 09:15 |
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TomViolence posted:Bleh. Just watched this and I could barely keep my eyes open throughout. The dialogue throughout most of the film, coupled with actors who didn't seem at all sure of their character's motivations took me right out of it. It's weird how stilted it all felt, like they were going for a sort of romantic and sentimental tone but everything was just too sterile to carry it off convincingly. None of it felt like there was anyone there. It felt like a movie rather than a story, with actors rather than people, if that makes any sense. I know nerds love this movie because it manages to have at least a high school understanding of physics and doesn't outright insult the audience's intelligence every five seconds, but it feels completely soulless. If you're going to do mawkish emotionalism and have people set out to save mankind and all that crap, you've got to somehow invest me in mankind's fate. None of the characters came across as relatable, likeable or real and so I had no stake in what happened. In fact, as the film wore on I got to loathing most of the players for various petty reasons and entertained hopes that they'd fail and doom their dirt-farming dust bowl dwelling fellows to certain starvation. I'm sorry you did not like this ' science fiction' movie, and that you are empty and hollow inside.
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# ? May 27, 2015 19:18 |
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"the universe in all its splendor has no capacity to awe me." is a pretty bold statement. Sad though.
Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 27, 2015 |
# ? May 27, 2015 19:21 |
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TomViolence posted:Even the visuals didn't really interest me. I've seen so many pictures of space thanks to reddit atheists now that the universe in all its splendour has no capacity to awe me. There was an empty, yawning void at the heart of this film and we spent altogether too much time staring at it. drat, this guy's seen a lot of Reddit Atheist posts... too many perhaps. I'm picturing a grizzled, war torn veteran of Reddit here. so badass..
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# ? May 27, 2015 19:24 |
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Last Chance posted:drat, this guy's seen a lot of Reddit Atheist posts... too many perhaps. I'm picturing a grizzled, war torn veteran of Reddit here. so badass.. He is the overman!
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# ? May 27, 2015 20:09 |
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Tenzarin posted:He is the overman! He is the reach-around.
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# ? May 27, 2015 20:12 |
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TomViolence posted:I usually love big scifi movies, so it was crushing to be so disappointed by this one. You remind me of my view of Gravity.
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# ? May 27, 2015 20:42 |
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Last Chance posted:drat, this guy's seen a lot of Reddit Atheist posts... too many perhaps. I'm picturing a grizzled, war torn veteran of Reddit here. so badass.. Every time the camera panned out to a view of space I mentally envisioned some irrelevant Neil Degrasse Tyson quote superimposed over it. Maybe that's what bugged me most, like the movie was pandering to the science fetishists (by which I mean they have fetishistic and superficial understanding of what they call "science", before y'all get on at me) that infest that hellpit. Add to that all the warm, humanistic "pioneers, explorers, adventurers" nonsense McConaugheyhey's character comes out with throughout the film. Myrddin_Emrys posted:I'm sorry you did not like this ' science fiction' movie, and that you are empty and hollow inside. But, see, my problem with the movie is that it was the one that was empty and hollow inside. The only word that I can think of to describe it is "sterile." It's like they had all the ingredients together to make a compelling story and somehow cocked it up. I know I'm in the minority here, but it failed to enthuse, inspire or grip me with its plot or characterisation and the tone of it throughout was characterised by this constant emotionalism that felt forced and overplayed. To be honest, I think it's a recurring problem of Nolan' films, where the characters aren't nearly as fleshed out as the gadgets or MacGuffins that do all the work in driving the plot. Which goes some way to explaining why TARS is the most likeable character in the film.
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# ? May 28, 2015 11:56 |
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I love this movie, but I do think it's quite sterile. Nolan doesn't seem to trust subtlety or subtext to do the emotional lifting. Characters' emotional lines are marked by keyphrases or straight-up exposition about their beliefs and needs. Even the scenes of peak feeling (scenes I did find really affecting!), like the messages from home or Coop's departure from the farmhouse, are clearly calculated. Love isn't just a personal force, it's a requirement of the plot. You can see the operation of the mechanism. I don't mind it but I can see how it would turn some watchers off. I've just come to expect and accept it in Nolan films. e: I think it's sterile but I don't think it's hollow inside at all! It's just crammed full of gears.
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# ? May 28, 2015 13:11 |
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I kind of feel like all of Nolans movies have that "sterile" feel to them
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# ? May 28, 2015 13:16 |
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Zzulu posted:I kind of feel like all of Nolans movies have that "sterile" feel to them I totally agree. The Prestige, for example, kind of feels the same way.
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# ? May 28, 2015 16:22 |
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he has huge scope intricate ideas that most people would not be able to make work but things tend to feel a bit hollow or soulless. thats just his specialty/weakness.
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# ? May 28, 2015 22:54 |
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Hooooooooookay. So I finished watching this about 20 minutes ago and I'm still putting pieces of my brain back together. Do I need spoilers? I'm going to assume no because the movie came out last year. So if you ARE worried about spoilers, don't read on. So this idea of relativity. Basically it says that time is affected by gravity and is a relative concept like weight, rather than an absolute concept like mass. So since different planets have different gravity, time moves faster\slower on different planets. So then Coop falls into a black hole. A black hole has absurd amounts of gravity so that means time gets completely hosed up in that black hole, so he's able to gently caress with the past and be the ghost guy thing. Then when he has hosed with the past enough to change the future, the black hole spits him out and other stuff happens. ...Am I on the right track? I"m sure this has been discussed to death, but I just finished watching it and I'm trying to piece my brain together. I loving loved the movie. I felt it really captured the emptyness of space and really captured this feel of loneliness. I loved that part when they're near Saturn and that guy says something along the lines of: "Between a few inches of aluminium and me is a few million miles of absolutely nothing". When whatsisname was trying to dock, but loving it all up, I couldn't help but think: "Dude, even if this works, what are you gonna do? You're in space motherfucker! Can't exactly duck down the street to your mates house". Plus, Murph and Matthew had great chemistry and I actually gave a poo poo about those two. TARS is awesome. The visuals are orgasmic and the score is immense. I'm still not sure WHAT this movie is, but I loved it.
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# ? May 29, 2015 13:41 |
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My understanding is that not only was Coop sucked into the black hole by "some beings" so that he could gently caress with time and causality, the beings that did so are also some super far-flung descendants of humanity. The black hole didn't just spit him out randomly so much as he was targeted to be found precisely when and where he was supposed to be. I read Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time and Titan many years ago and seeing some of those same concepts and themes, as well as actually having such space phenomena visually represented on the big screen just floored me, multiple times.
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# ? May 29, 2015 14:11 |
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Hammer Floyd posted:Then when he has hosed with the past enough to change the future, the black hole spits him out and other stuff happens. He didn't change anything. It's what always had happened. Hammer Floyd posted:...Am I on the right track? I"m sure this has been discussed to death, but I just finished watching it and I'm trying to piece my brain together. I loving loved the movie. I felt it really captured the emptyness of space and really captured this feel of loneliness. I loved that part when they're near Saturn and that guy says something along the lines of: "Between a few inches of aluminium and me is a few million miles of absolutely nothing". When whatsisname was trying to dock, but loving it all up, I couldn't help but think: "Dude, even if this works, what are you gonna do? You're in space motherfucker! Can't exactly duck down the street to your mates house". Plus, Murph and Matthew had great chemistry and I actually gave a poo poo about those two. TARS is awesome. The visuals are orgasmic and the score is immense. I'm still not sure WHAT this movie is, but I loved it. You and me both.
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# ? May 29, 2015 14:42 |
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Kull the Conqueror posted:He didn't change anything. It's what always had happened. Yea the key thing to remember there is that future Coop is the one who sends the coordinates back to Murph's room, leading them to the NASA facility in the first place. So there is no "original" timeline or anything like that where the bookshelf ghost doesn't exist; it exists because Coop went through the black hole, and Coop went through the black hole because the bookshelf ghost led him to it. Its not a paradox because we aren't shown any alternative version, what we see in the movie is the way things went, and they couldn't have happened any other way.
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# ? May 29, 2015 14:50 |
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Needs to be mentioned that closed time loops are not as illogical as they may seem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle (one of the coauthors of that paper is Kip Thorne, the physicist who adviced all the crazy science stuff in the movie).
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# ? May 30, 2015 02:20 |
Also the whole "gravity leaks across dimensions/time" is a real theory as well, it's used in several versions of string and brane theory to explain why gravity is so weak compared to the other three fundamental forces (which stay local to our dimension/time).
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# ? May 30, 2015 02:38 |
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GORDON posted:Finally watched it, liked it. That book sounds like something a retard would write.
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# ? May 31, 2015 04:07 |
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SweetAsselin posted:That book sounds like something a retard would write. Pournelle and Niven turned out to be a couple of dumb yahoos.
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# ? May 31, 2015 12:08 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:I read Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time and Titan many years ago and seeing some of those same concepts and themes, as well as actually having such space phenomena visually represented on the big screen just floored me, multiple times. 1) Earth is going to poo poo and we have to send a single spaceship on a desperate mission to do something about it 2) A lonely man adventures around in space, which is mostly desolate and empty, and is time dilated decades / centuries away from his own time 3) Future advanced civilization communicating with current day civilization 4) Black holes are a plot point 5) Sort of hard scifi but not really It's just missing the soul-crushing depression.
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# ? May 31, 2015 13:43 |
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JOHN SKELETON posted:Oh yeah, there's many similarities to Baxter's work in this movie. I wonder if the Nolans are fans of his books. Let me see here: Would legit watch a movie based on one of the Xelee cycle stories.
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# ? Jun 1, 2015 15:34 |
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Just watched it for the first time, spoiler-free. The scifi elements of it worked for me. The character and emotional elements did not. Since it felt to me like it wanted to be an emotional movie, it felt like it failed. It's entirely possible that I wanted more of a scifi Man vs. Nature instead of a Man vs. Man or Man vs. His Kids movie. I think it was just the disappointment of such a grand concept used for so little. I had the same problem with Inception; being able to navigate someone's dreamscapes allows for some pure creativity to unfold onscreen but that never happened, instead opting for a personal story that could have happened on any earthly landscape (sans the hall tumbling). I wanted Interstellar to focus on something different than what it did, so it's possible I didn't like it just on a pure expectation level. Even something as a little more planet exploration would have gone a long way for me. I know Nolan is capable, I thought The Prestige was wonderful, I liked the Bat films, etc. but this one fell flat to me. I recently had rewatches of Sunshine and Europa Report and although both of those have flaws I just preferred the approaches a lot better. They still hit emotional beats while being much more focused on the scifi.
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# ? Jun 2, 2015 01:38 |
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Did M. Night Shyambalaja write the last 3rd of this movie, everything leading up to the climax suddenly rushed into a vortex of nonsense. Even after realising the idiotic twist surprise! it was Coop pushing those books all along! at about the hour mark, I feel like a team of writers got their hands on the screenplay and just Frankensteined their ideas unto it, and the director had to run with it. A ship goes to space to save us from corn blight, love is a universal force like gravity and transcends time, mankind sends the black hole through time to tell McCoughnagey the coordinates to the NASA research lab, long periods of cryosleep can turn you into a deranged psychopath. Each of these items could've made a whole movie on themselves. I still loved this movie more than that overhyped and overrated piece of cow dung inception flick.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 05:17 |
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Ka0 posted:
This is an actual thing in a lot of sci-fi, even in some kid shows like EXOSquad. I found the conversation where Hathaway brings it up interesting because she's saying it less for herself and more to convince Coop. She already gave a real explanation for why her choice was better beyond her being in love with the guy so it was like a last resort argument. In general I liked how almost every character has aspirations of being a hyper-logical tactically flawless intellectual, not realizing how much their personal fears and passions are informing their decisions.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 08:20 |
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Ka0 posted:Did M. Night Shyambalaja write the last 3rd of this movie, everything leading up to the climax suddenly rushed into a vortex of nonsense. Even after realising the idiotic twist surprise! it was Coop pushing those books all along! at about the hour mark, I feel like a team of writers got their hands on the screenplay and just Frankensteined their ideas unto it, and the director had to run with it. no you see it's brilliant because they hired real scientists who said that certain elements weren't completely nonsensical, and the comic book movie guy was trying to reference 2001 which was a Good Movie
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 08:59 |
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The love thing is overblown or misunderstood by a lot of people. Its a major theme, which is why the characters mention it so much, but the mechanism used by Coop while inside the tesseract at the end is based on gravity; it has nothing to do with love in a literal sense. Coop and Murph were chosen by the aliens/future humans because they represent a unique set of circumstances(whatever can happen, will happen) necessary to deliver the message. A father who is an engineer and pilot of experimental aircraft, whos disappearance will lead his daughter to become an expert in the exact field necessary to interpret the quantum data and solve the gravity problem. Coop ends up using the watch as the conduit for the message because he knows Murph will come back for it, which is where love comes in, but its not like he's using the "power of love" to influence Murph or the watch directly.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 15:49 |
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Basebf555 posted:The love thing is overblown or misunderstood by a lot of people. I understood it fine, I just found the movie repeating LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOOOOVE really cringe-worthy in a trying-too-hard kind of way.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 21:28 |
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Ka0 posted:long periods of cryosleep can turn you into a deranged psychopath. You didn't pay attention.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 21:39 |
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I wasn't bothered by her love speech, BUT I realize why lots of people were. Any kind of exposition that a character makes about her own or anyone else's motivations is always pretty lame. It shows that the director couldn't make the same point without words. It's kind of like explaining a joke. It may be true, but it's really boring.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 23:41 |
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Basebf555 posted:The love thing is overblown or misunderstood by a lot of people. Its a major theme, which is why the characters mention it so much, but the mechanism used by Coop while inside the tesseract at the end is based on gravity; it has nothing to do with love... It does if you consider theory of a dyad. I think it works both thematically and on scientific grounds, although it would have been fine if it didn't too.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 23:44 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 06:39 |
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Roadie posted:I understood it fine, I just found the movie repeating LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOOOOVE really cringe-worthy in a trying-too-hard kind of way. The people who say this probably watched the trailer too many times because it only shows up like twice in a 3 hour movie.
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# ? Jun 20, 2015 00:17 |