Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" (2014) - Scifi film about time travel and worm holes - General

[QUOTE=Saxon;46429368][sp]I don't think you can still get that close in a space craft like the Endurance, at least from what I saw in Cosmos and that was much larger. I'm not a physicists though so go ahead and tell me why I'm wrong :3[/sp][/QUOTE] [sp]You might be right, but again, if you're okay with it travelling through a wormhole then you should be okay with it travelling by a blackhole (which is apparently much larger, too (which again, while it may seem paradoxial, is actually a good thing)). I'd imagine in reality you'd probably want a small(ish) space craft to travel through a wormhole because a larger craft would experience a bigger difference in force between its extreme ends due to the gravitational gradients present, however what exactly constitutes 'small'... I don't know.[/sp]

[sp]yeah I was just reading some stuff and its pretty iffy, its pretty typical for a Hollywood flick to alter the laws of physics to make it more convenient. I guess the wormhole is more believable because its not as well known. The thing that bugs me is how does a species that has trouble with linear time perceive time linear yet can't. Would of been a better movie if they stuck to rocket science and have the wormhole be a mystery and left it up to the imagination or a vague imply. That seems to be a thing with Nolan though[/sp] I'm gonna have to watch it again when it comes out on home video to get a better grasp I think

Just saw it in IMAX. It's the only way to see it. Definitely movie of the summer for me. Almost no movies elicit suspense, but there were several scenes that had me nervous as shit. [sp]The film obviously takes place in the future, having almost perfect robots and all that. I think advanced materials developed in the future could explain how the ship wasn't ripped apart by gravitational forces.[/sp]

[QUOTE=Rusty100;46423543] [sp]also what exactly was the data that saved them? why did going through a black hole yield the data to save humanity?[/sp] i like sci-fi but this wasn't sci-fi. this was straight up magic.[/QUOTE] I can't answer all of them but I can answer this one. [sp]They determined they could only get so far with mathematical equations, and that they actually needed to see inside the black hole (something that couldn't be done from the outside). Without it Murphy would never have been able to invent the gravity drive.[/sp]

yeah but what kind of information could they learn from that that they could actually implement into a mathematical equation that would have helped them?

[QUOTE=Rusty100;46429688]yeah but what kind of information could they learn from that that they could actually implement into a mathematical equation that would have helped them?[/QUOTE] I'm sure there's something that they would have wanted to observe... Why are we building Hadron colliders if we could just solve everything on paper?

[QUOTE=Rusty100;46429688]yeah but what kind of information could they learn from that that they could actually implement into a mathematical equation that would have helped them?[/QUOTE] [sp]What happens to space time at the singularity? I mean that's not 'science-fiction' as such. Physicists for a long time have pondered on the irony that the only real way to understand a blackhole as far as we can tell (and hence develop a theory of quantum gravity) is to venture in to one, and in doing so you're never able to share the information with anyone else![/sp]

That's probably one of the more believable things to be honest. [sp]Just observing other planets up close in our own system has radically changed the way we thought about the universe, I can't imagine what a black hole would do.[/sp]

[sp]Seeing how giant the Garguantua is it's probably safe to assume they weren't even that close to it as depicted, perspective and all that.[/sp]

It's fun seeing all the film reviewers get half the shit wrong. I read one where [sp]he said every hour on the other side of the wormhole is 7 years on Earth, which is wrong. Only on the 1st planet did that happen.[/sp] Edit: [img]http://i.imgur.com/LbvZsJb.png[/img]

I have no idea what to feel after watching it. One thing is for certain, [sp]Fuck Dr.Mann. Fucking coward asshole.[/sp]

Glad to see you guys like the movie.

[sp]Why did they go to the first planet that had the time dilation? Wouldn't it have been smarter to simply travel to the other planets first to avoid the loss of time? And why would it even be considered a probable planet to colonize considering it was right next to a massive black hole???[/sp]

[QUOTE=Adius Shadow;46433179][sp]Why did they go to the first planet that had the time dilation? Wouldn't it have been smarter to simply travel to the other planets first to avoid the loss of time? And why would it even be considered a probable planet to colonize considering it was right next to a massive black hole???[/sp][/QUOTE] [sp]I think they explain it during that one scene while they are deciding where to go first. I still think it was a poor decision, why even bother with the time dilation other than to further the story.[/sp]

Just saw it. Great movie although you have to be open minded to enjoy it I guess.

It was great, but I need some time to digest whether it was Nolan's best. My biggest issue (except sound editing, I had closed captions so there was no problem with understanding certain phrases, but I heard many have encountered the problem) was traditional for Nolan overexpositional dialogue - he still has a problem with a rule "show, not tell" and everything has to be explained over and over leaving none to interpretation. It bothered me the most at the beginning but later not so much. [editline]7th November 2014[/editline] Oh, and I loved that piece of foreshadowing that made the click afterwards - [sp]When they go interstellar, one of the characters said they are going into the heart of darkness. What happens with Dr. Mann is an analogy of Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.[/sp]

I was not emotionally prepared for this

Just came back after watching this and holy shit that was great.

Very good movie, but as said before here you gotta be a little open minded to fully grasp it. It's a very big cookie to chew. [sp]What I absolutely loved about this movie is that it explored the mysteries of wormholes and black holes very well. They are definitely one of the big "real mysteries" out there, and the movie handled the plot around them in a very neat way IMO. The "where did the loop begin?" loophole is kinda bugging me though, but I suppose there will be tons of interesting theories about it.[/sp]

[sp]"One step closer to my Human slave colony" - Best Robot of all time.[/sp]

I thought the movie was really fucking great even if some people seem to have a problem with "space magic". [editline]8th November 2014[/editline] Though I did think that pretty much the entire sequence with Matt Damon should have been cut or changed. It was a shitty cliché method of creating peril. [editline]8th November 2014[/editline] Also the first act was rushed as fuck. Almost the entire thing felt like a montage.

[sp]The time dilation/distortion on the first planet they visited was really cool. When they arrived mere minutes after the first pilot, and all the signals coming from the planet were like echoes.[/sp]

Just saw it, going to offer my thoughts on it. To sum it up, it stretched everything from time, to space, and my suspension of belief. [sp]Honestly, a good portion of the film was utterly unnecessary. The drone hunting in the start. Half of the stuff on earth from the school to old farts musing about agriculture. It took an age for them to go into space, it then took another age for them to get the plot moving again. For instance, take when they went to the planet of the big waves. What did they gain from that? That scene gave neither the audience nor the characters anything useful or interesting. The impression I got from it was that Christopher Nolan said "Big waves are cool, so lets try working that in". That scene existed to both kill off a character who I couldn't give half a shit about and to show a vaguely novel thing. The crew proceeds to cry about it for a total of 30 seconds before they go back up to the black science man, who has spent over 20 years waiting and is of sound mental health. He doesn't even question where the dead crewmember went. He just goes "k" before exploding in the next scene. The planet where they go to Dr Mann was strange too. Like the previous planet, it was exceedingly obvious that it couldn't support life from a cursory glance at it. They rescue Mann and they arse around on the planet until Dr Mann suddenly decides "now is the time to kill", where he gives a strange speech before he ends up killing himself in a cool way. Black science man conveniently explodes around the same time too, largely because the plot realized that it didn't need him. The "action" scenes dragged on for fucking ages. The music was good, but it lasted so long you were wondering if special relativity was acting on the audience. You sat on the edge of your seat as the spaceship spun or the farm burned, but then after five minutes you think "jesus christ it's still going?" You can barely hear the characters during these scenes too, probably to cover up the fact that neither they or the audience understands a single thing they are saying. NASA guy ends up spilling his guts on his deathbed while also being impossible to understand. Maybe that is realistic, but you want your audience to also understand what he is saying. He doesn't even really give a proper rationale for lying, and like many other characters, their decisions are fucking bizarre. When the doctor comes to help the children on the farm, he gets knocked clean out, for some unspecified bullshit reason. He's just some random redneck who is the diametric opposite of his sister. Even after having his farm set ablaze and being threatened by a guy with a tire iron, his sister overwhelms his puny redneck mind with a simple hug before he goes "GRRR, my flimsy character has been overwhelmed." It has an impressive premise, it has nice visuals, good shots, good music, and if you don't think then it's enjoyable. But when you're leaving the theatre you go "hold on, what?". Most of the characters are uninteresting, easily disposable, or both. They exist solely as things to slot famous actors into. Many of them are unnecessary and just drag it out longer than it needs to be. Why hire Matt Damon when you don't know how to use him? What's worse is that is isn't timed right either. It feels both rushed in that scenes will quickly cut from one to another with little or no connection, but also dragged out with so much filler too. The ending is largely Nolan going "I'm going to pull a Kubrik hehehe". Nolan tried to do so much shit with this movie, but he couldn't do it all, and his own incompetence at pacing made it worse. The plot is disorganized, he uses cheap tricks to generate "muh feels", and while I can admire what he wanted to do, he ultimately can't pull it off. Nolan is a mediocre filmmaker, but at least shit looked cool and the music was nice.[/sp]

i have never seen you say anything positive about a movie

[QUOTE=Scot;46435776]i have never seen you say anything positive about a movie[/QUOTE] It's not a great movie, but at least I had an enjoyable evening.

[QUOTE=booster;46435207]Very good movie, but as said before here you gotta be a little open minded to fully grasp it. It's a very big cookie to chew. [sp]What I absolutely loved about this movie is that it explored the mysteries of wormholes and black holes very well. They are definitely one of the big "real mysteries" out there, and the movie handled the plot around them in a very neat way IMO. The "where did the loop begin?" loophole is kinda bugging me though, but I suppose there will be tons of interesting theories about it.[/sp][/QUOTE] [sp]People have a very hard time grasping the notion of a time loop. There would be no 'start' or 'end'. It's self contained, and there's only ever 'one' instance of it. The Coop that we followed was the first and only Coop to ever exist. This is the baggage you have to accept when time travel crops up (this exact type of baggage might also prohibit time travel from ever occurring in the first place in reality). It's not a loophole, it's not a plot oversight, it's a fundamental result of the notion of time travel within a self-consistent universe; an alternative type of time travel/universe is the one in Back To The Future whereby you can travel back and anything you do alters history and creates a new timeline; Back To The Future therefore isn't set within a self-consistent universe (which itself raises a hell of a lot of problems).[/sp]

[QUOTE=sltungle;46436184][sp]People have a very hard time grasping the notion of a time loop. There would be no 'start' or 'end'. It's self contained, and there's only ever 'one' instance of it. The Coop that we followed was the first and only Coop to ever exist. This is the baggage you have to accept when time travel crops up (this exact type of baggage might also prohibit time travel from ever occurring in the first place in reality). It's not a loophole, it's not a plot oversight, it's a fundamental result of the notion of time travel within a self-consistent universe; an alternative type of time travel/universe is the one in Back To The Future whereby you can travel back and anything you do alters history and creates a new timeline; Back To The Future therefore isn't set within a self-consistent universe (which itself raises a hell of a lot of problems).[/sp][/QUOTE] What is [sp]self-consistency[/sp]? Is it really necessary? Why is it equivalent to that?

[QUOTE=Krinkels;46436244]What is [sp]self-consistency[/sp]? Is it really necessary? Why is it equivalent to that?[/QUOTE] [sp]The universe that interstellar is set in is a self-consistent one. Any actions resultant from time travel don't change the events that are yet to happen (and, in fact, would lead directly to them); there is only a single timeline and it stays constant. Self-consistency is meant to remove the possibility of paradoxes, but it does wind up creating some of itself, for example information which has no real origin; in Interstellar the knowledge of quantum gravity comes under this category if you choose to subscribe to Coop's theory of the higher dimensional beings being humans in the future, and this is the ontological paradox I was mentioning earlier. Who knows if it's necessary? We've never time traveled (and none of that bullshit, "lel we're travelling forward in time now," because you all know what I mean), we don't know if it's even possible. The Interstellar universe does have time travel, though, and the universe it's set in is self-consistent.[/sp]

Solar panels couldn't power a predator drone 0/10

Just got back from this, and I was blown away. Yes, the [sp]5th dimension[/sp] thing was a little hokey and predictable, but I can reconcile it because of the emotional level it was going for.