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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    BlueKnightGuy

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    Default Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    So I just watched it, and for an almost 3 hour movie, it was really great!
    It's no action movie but it still had some great tense and emotional moments.

    It definitely satisfied my love for hard science fiction and space exploration, that's for sure!

    My only regret was that I didn't watch it in 3-D or Imax, it would of made the traveling and spoilery portions even more intense.
    Last edited by Brance_a_Lot; 2014-11-08 at 02:26 AM.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    There are some things I really love about Interstellar--its ambition, its majesty, its earnestness.
    There are some things I really dislike about Interstellar--its pacing, its sloppiness, its forced narrative.

    Much like Avatar, another movie defined by its ambition (albeit in a different way), I would recommend seeing this movie once, appreciating its awe-inspiring moments...but I don't like it.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Interstellar was good, but did it really need five thousand, five hundred and fifty four sequels?

    I mean the last one was great, but by that point they had no idea how it even related to the first movie.I don't think they even had dialogue by that point.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fralex View Post
    A little condescending
    That pretty much sums up the Scowling Dragon experience.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Scowling Dragon View Post
    Interstellar was good, but did it really need five thousand, five hundred and fifty four sequels?

    I mean the last one was great, but by that point they had no idea how it even related to the first movie.I don't think they even had dialogue by that point.
    -ar, not -a

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Huh? Im not sure what your talking about.
    Quote Originally Posted by Fawkes View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Fralex View Post
    A little condescending
    That pretty much sums up the Scowling Dragon experience.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Scowling Dragon View Post
    Huh? Im not sure what your talking about.
    I'm sure Interstella 5555 is a fine piece of media.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Aww dammit. My joke is ruined.
    Quote Originally Posted by Fawkes View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Fralex View Post
    A little condescending
    That pretty much sums up the Scowling Dragon experience.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    I was ready to call this one of the worst movies I had ever seen. Actuallly, my brother and me were all but ready to leave during the halftime break. It had a few nice effects shots, but everything else about it? Dreadful.

    The pacing? The beginning dragged and dragged, before they finally went to space. And it felt pretty much useless.

    The dialogue? More corn than all those fields and delivered in the most terrible way.

    The acting? Embarassing. Especially the lead, I've never seen anyone cry so badly.

    Plus, the story. Terraforming another world? Really? I don't think there will ever be a point where giving up Earth and moving everything to Saturn, then terraforming something will be cheaper or easier than just using the same methods to clean up Earth. Surely if you can terraform a world, you can make Earth more habitable.

    And then the ****ing space magic "love can do everything" finale. Bleeeeeeergh.

    But the end actually had a few redeeming features. The actual method of transmitting the data from out the black hole was quite nice, even if it felt as if at that point, they'd just given up on being even remotely realistic with the science. And some of the effects and sets were really good. Nice space shots, the wormhole looked interesting at leat and the Tesseract was... well, it was something.

    Plus, the robot was fantastic and the best character by far.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Well, I guess I now know what happens when somebody decides to try to turn their 2001: A Space Odyssey fan fiction into a crossover with The Fountain, or possibly Cloud Atlas. The answer turns out to be something so entirely intent on having Big Ideas it manages to have no ideas at all, although it certainly managed big. I know my bladder was certainly feeling stretched by the end of it, but my mind remained unblown, the stubborn thing.

    It's worth noting that Europa Report provided a much better story about science and exploration as fundamentally human and intrinsically worthwhile in about half the running time and on a zillionth of the budget. Watch that instead, it's actually scientifically semi-plausible fiction about science, contains precisely one big idea, and executes the hell out of it.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    I want those robots. Seriously. If there's a company planning to make them, I'm going to refinance my house and order two.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Yeah, the narrative logic is either kind of a mess or very badly explained, but on balance, with enough willingness to mentally patch over the rough spots, I still kind of enjoyed it. Kinda like Prometheus.

    (I like to pretend that the whole 'mystery blight is destroying crops' thing could be ignored in favour of a 'global warming is going to cause a Permian-level extinction event within 40 years' explanation. That provides a much simpler justification for trying to find a different planet.)

    One aspect that I really couldn't find any way to square with logic is how formulating a Grand Unified Field Theory (as fabulous as that would be) could somehow solve the world's food crisis? Even if it let you open wormholes willy-nilly, the best that will let you do is evacuate the population elsewhere, which isn't much good unless you find a planet that's already 90% human-compatible. (I'm also kind of curious about how you get a luminous accretion disk around a black hole without any visible stellar companion, but I guess that's a relatively minor problem.)

    Technically speaking the 'space magic love' aspect isn't actually invoked to resolve everything, despite much waffling on the subject- it's just reliant on the idea of technology-indistinguishable-from-magic used to send a message back through time, with Coop being useful as a translator. Or at least, that was my take on it. (It's still a kind of stupidly-overcomplicated self-fulfilling-prediction, but that's pretty standard for sci-fi time travel scenarios.)

    And yes, TARS is fabulous.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster View Post
    (I like to pretend that the whole 'mystery blight is destroying crops' thing could be ignored in favour of a 'global warming is going to cause a Permian-level extinction event within 40 years' explanation. That provides a much simpler justification for trying to find a different planet.)
    Yeah the whole blight part makes zero sense. They built giant space stations that held food to feed them (presumably away from the blight). But why not just build those stations ON earth and then use it to feed themselves? We are very good at making hermetically sealed rooms and such. We could just make vast greenhouses that wouldn't let the blight in. I mean there's currently a ton of research being done on how to do all year round farming indoors using LED lights and such. Considering the ships they built in the movie, I assume they should be at least at that level of technology.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Actually, the best part about the Blight was one hilarious throwaway line. It breathes Nitrogen instead of Oxygen. One of the most stable molecules out there, which needs tremendous amounts of energy to split up.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Also, if the blight killed all the non-corn crops, how the hell was everybody still wearing cotton?

    (Not that I disliked the movie because of incorrect fiber choices. That would a tremendous case of Bad Nerding. I was sorta disappointed with it because the early space exploration stuff was really cool, but everything after the second planet was the most endless movie-going experience I've had since the second Hobbit movie, and it managed to really flush any argument the film may have been making for science as a worthwhile endeavor. The pursuit of knowledge as noble can work as a story, technology as shield against the hostile universe can work, but explore space because otherwise we won't eventually become five dimensional plot devices creatures? Waiter, can I get the reality check, please? )
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Really? I thought the end wasn't all that bad, the endless drag was the first hour or so. Anything before they properly went into space.

    I think the Blight didn't kill everything... they just mentioned Wheat and ocra, didn't they? Probably a few more, but I imagine it wasn't everything.

    And yeah. Ever since the first gravity message, it was pretty clear the movie would end by literal Deus Ex. I mean, they started with "five dimensional creatures who control gravity exactly enough to send us messages". Not many ways that could end.
    Last edited by Eldan; 2014-11-09 at 05:09 PM.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    Really? I thought the end wasn't all that bad, the endless drag was the first hour or so. Anything before they properly went into space.

    I think the Blight didn't kill everything... they just mentioned Wheat and ocra, didn't they? Probably a few more, but I imagine it wasn't everything.

    And yeah. Ever since the first gravity message, it was pretty clear the movie would end by literal Deus Ex. I mean, they started with "five dimensional creatures who control gravity exactly enough to send us messages". Not many ways that could end.
    I thought the pre-space bit wasn't bad, although this may have been because it was giving me a bit of a The Long Tomorrow vibe, and I'll happily watch anything that reminds me of Leigh Brackett books. It also contained the better acted bits, and most of the more interesting drama. The next bit was a very pretty and decent space adventure that unfortunately went belly-up about the time they de-orbited the second planet. Everything after that was Big Ideas in the most tedious tradition of making up ridiculous nonsensical crap, and expected me to go 'woah' like I'd never read Flatland, or really insipid mushy stuff. It's not that I object to mushy stuff, but it just didn't work for me. The combination was unfortunately non-additive in the worst possible way.

    All of which left me walking out of the theater and thinking that a bunch of really talented people had spent a lot of time and money throwing stuff up on the screen for the last three hours, but had apparently forgotten to actually make a story about anything. Or at least if it was about anything, I certainly didn't figure it out.
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Yeah... my conclusion was "So someone remade Space Odyssey without Kubrick, then glued an environment plot onto it".

    I liked the ideas of every part.
    "Crops are failing, worldwide dustbowl." Sure. Could make a movie out of that. Classic SciFi, what if story about a future society.
    "Send a second expedition through the wormhole to find out what happend to the first one." Sure. Been done, but sure.
    "Weird sci-fi movie with stable time loops and gravity sending messages through time. Exactly the kind of stuff I love in the very few cases where it's done well.

    The problem was they did all three in the same movie and connected them badly.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Oh, that reminds me- I'm pretty sure the energy-budget calculations were a little off with the 'we'll just park the endurance in a higher orbit and nip down that massive gravity well to conserve fuel and avoid time-lag' thing. Hohmann orbits exist for a reason.

    @Chen/Eldan: The specifics of the blight idea are pretty daft, but I must say I rather liked the movie using direct video clips from Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl (massive drought and crop failures in the american midwest *are* a problem that's totally likely to recur once the Ogallala Aquifer runs dry.)

    And then there's that rather endearing scene where they explain why a wormhole would be spherical, because they got Kip Thorne as a technical advisor, who apparently also managed to get some useful data on stellar accretion physics out of the whole production. (He apparently also argued tooth-and-nail against a scene with superluminal travel for two weeks until Nolan gave up on the idea. Given the amount of other wierd crap in there, I'm not sure why he tried.)

    So, yeah. In technical terms the film's an interesting mix of the bang-on-plausible and the wierd non-sequitur. But on balance, I like the overall philosphical discussion, even if it wasn't as well-grounded as it should be.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    By the way, if anyone knows more about astronomy than I do...

    Could a black hole be that, well, bright? I know that it would have material around it and that some could and probably would glow, but that thing created daylight on the planets around it. At all plausible?
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    By the way, if anyone knows more about astronomy than I do...

    Could a black hole be that, well, bright? I know that it would have material around it and that some could and probably would glow, but that thing created daylight on the planets around it. At all plausible?
    The accretion disk around a black hole does not need reflected starlight to be that bright. Imagine all that spinning material as stuff racing around a Large Hadron Collider the size of the solar system. That's why it's so bright.
    But I don't think planets can be that close to a black hole and still be intact, much less habitable by humans. Because how much mass are we talking about? A black hole the mass of a million suns? I dunno I haven't watched.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    I don't think they mentioned the hole's mass. But the planets were close enough that time distortion on their surface was significant.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    By the way, if anyone knows more about astronomy than I do...

    Could a black hole be that, well, bright? I know that it would have material around it and that some could and probably would glow, but that thing created daylight on the planets around it. At all plausible?
    Latest science leans towards black holes not existing, as the entirety of their mass gets radiated out during their formation.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    There's some recent dispute over the mechanics of black-hole formation, but their existence is more-or-less beyond doubt at this point. We have indirect observations of non-luminous objects with masses large enough and orbital periods tight enough that they can't be explained otherwise, IIRC.

    Quote Originally Posted by MLai View Post
    The accretion disk around a black hole does not need reflected starlight to be that bright. Imagine all that spinning material as stuff racing around a Large Hadron Collider the size of the solar system. That's why it's so bright.
    But I don't think planets can be that close to a black hole and still be intact, much less habitable by humans. Because how much mass are we talking about? A black hole the mass of a million suns? I dunno I haven't watched.
    It's supposed to be supermassive, IIRC. The problem is that the spinning material has to come from somewhere, and gargantua doesn't have a companion star. Even if it did, the companion would probably be consumed in a few million years (though I suppose that's long enough for terraforming purposes.)

    Also, most of the radiation would be in X-ray form, and yes, any orbiting planets would presumably be torn apart by tidal forces long before relativistic effects became significant.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    They seem to completely ignore tidal forces, other than for freaky, skyscraper-sized waves on one water planet.

    As in, flying into the event horizon of a black hole involved only some mild shaking of the ship.
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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Brewdude View Post
    Latest science leans towards black holes not existing, as the entirety of their mass gets radiated out during their formation.
    There's been no word on that paper since September and as far as I can tell it's still not been peer reviewed. I'll take it seriously once it's published in a real physics journal rather than just being on ArXiv.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster View Post
    Also, most of the radiation would be in X-ray form, and yes, any orbiting planets would presumably be torn apart by tidal forces long before relativistic effects became significant.
    For realistic depiction of tidal forces, see Neutron Star, a short story by Larry Niven.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Brewdude View Post
    Latest science leans towards black holes not existing, as the entirety of their mass gets radiated out during their formation.
    We had a thread about this recently (link) but essentially, it has been overreported/overhyped in the media. At best, the paper suggests that there is more work to be done on the maths/physics of black hole generation (i.e. the current model doesn't quite work, according to the paper). But there are things out there that we call black hole which has certain properties, some of which don't fit in relativistic physics and which we don't quite understand, but are definitely there.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Grey_Wolf_c View Post
    overreported/overhyped in the media
    *gasp* Say it ain't so!

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    The actual method of transmitting the data from out the black hole was quite nice, even if it felt as if at that point, they'd just given up on being even remotely realistic with the science.
    There's no such thing as "remotely realistic with the science" when you're talking about the inside of a black hole. Not only can you (obviously) not observe what's in there in any shape or form, but most attempts to calculate or derive what's in there end up about as sensical as what the movie went with.

    I was waiting the part where he starts stretching and disappointed when it didn't happen, though. That's one of the few things you can safely say would happen in some shape or form.

    Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
    Actually, the best part about the Blight was one hilarious throwaway line. It breathes Nitrogen instead of Oxygen. One of the most stable molecules out there, which needs tremendous amounts of energy to split up.
    Don't forget the part where depleting the Earth's nitrogen somehow makes the oxygen go away too. The astrophysics in this movie? By far the most accurate we'll likely get for a very long time. The chemistry and biology? Not so much.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster View Post
    It's supposed to be supermassive, IIRC. The problem is that the spinning material has to come from somewhere, and gargantua doesn't have a companion star. Even if it did, the companion would probably be consumed in a few million years (though I suppose that's long enough for terraforming purposes.)
    The accretion disk could be all that's left of the companion star, though I couldn't tell you how it would get into an approximately-stable orbit like the one shown.
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    That's how wizards beta test their new animals. If it survives Australia, it's a go. Which in hindsight explains a LOT about Australia.

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    Default Re: Interstellar-It's out of this World!

    Wait, did they really say Oxygen was vanishing? I thought all the coughing was just from the dust.
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