Opinion of Interstellar

[anvi]

For those of you who haven't seen it but intend to, please skip this thread until you have.

I thought a lot of the visuals were spectacular, especially the depictions of motion in space, the scale size of Saturn, ect.  I can understand why some people like NdGT would like it, as it illustrates time dilation and at least gets (to some degree) the soundlessness of space right.

The plot that compels us to search for other planets to live on could have been kinda sorta plausible.  But instead of using wormholes to travel to other galaxies (blah), I thought for some reason that the film was going to represent space travel through the old models of Orien spacecraft and such.  And at the end, the idea of some dude dropping through a black hole to end up in a shrunken dimension inside a bookshelf in his house just completely ruined the thing for me.  When you're writing a film and reach that point, you really need to take a time-out and consider a rewrite. 

I had to spend extra money to see this movie in an IMAX theater, where they cranked the sound up so high you could discern an intent to render the audience deaf.  At least the film could have been redeeming, but in the end, apart from some of the visuals, I thought it was a real dud.

[King]

Don't get me started.

[Lief 🗽]

Very bad. The more I think about it, the fewer redeeming qualities I find.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I like it but I can see why others would not.

[RI]

I loved it; it's probably my favorite Nolan film. Seen it twice in theaters so far, including once at the Imax at the Pacific Science Center. It was much louder at the AMC than the Imax; your seat literally shook during the launch scene at the AMC, but it was difficult to hear sometimes. I had much less trouble hearing the dialogue at the Imax showing.

[Citizen (The) Doctor]

I loved it too. It wasn't subtle but I don't think it was ever supposed to be. And space fiction always gets me.

[ingemann]

I liked it, but it suffered under, that when I saw it, I saw two different much better films which it could have been, instead of this beautiful but somewhat inferior hybrid.

[DemPGH]

Well, I have not seen it, but I probably will. I did, however watch a documentary on the Science Channel regarding the science behind the movie, and I am pleased that a definite effort was made to follow current scientific thinking. Kip Thorne had a LOT to do with the movie, which is good. So it's based on math and not imagination. That's good. I'm very skeptical that wormholes and the like exist, let alone are stable enough to be actually used, but I'm intrigued and will watch it.

For those of you who haven't seen it but intend to, please skip this thread until you have.

The plot that compels us to search for other planets to live on could have been kinda sorta plausible.  But instead of using wormholes to travel to other galaxies (blah), I thought for some reason that the film was going to represent space travel through the old models of Orien spacecraft and such.  And at the end, the idea of some dude dropping through a black hole to end up in a shrunken dimension inside a bookshelf in his house just completely ruined the thing for me.  When you're writing a film and reach that point, you really need to take a time-out and consider a rewrite. 

That's interesting. There are working ideas on "warp" travel, which are probably more believable at this point than finding a wormhole to shoot through, but that's helpful. I like to know what to expect with a movie before I watch it, so this is enough but not too much to make me want to see it.

[ingemann]

Spoiler: A world where 1 hour takes 7 years in Earth time, that's not real science neither is clouds which is frozen into flying ice blocks. It's a beautiful film, but much of the science are clearly bullsh**t (not that I have a big problem with that).

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Yeah the time dilation was far too extreme. That didn't bug me as much as the ending though.

Still an impressive film.

[Gass3268]

I liked it, its one of those films people are gonna love in like 10-20 years.

[justfollowingtheelections]

It was a fun 3 hours at the movies, but other than that it wasn't very good.  Just another average pop corn flick (which sucks because it could have amounted to so much more).

[RI]

Spoiler: A world where 1 hour takes 7 years in Earth time, that's not real science

That's not true; such a world could exist. However, such a world would not be like they portrayed in the film.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Spoiler: A world where 1 hour takes 7 years in Earth time, that's not real science

That's not true; such a world could exist. However, such a world would not be like they portrayed in the film.

1 hour = 7 years is a time dilation rate of over 60,000. That couldn't happen without the world being sucked into the black hole.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Spoiler: A world where 1 hour takes 7 years in Earth time, that's not real science

That's not true; such a world could exist. However, such a world would not be like they portrayed in the film.

I was just about to say...

Look, this was a science-fiction movie.  Science fiction is meant to use modern science and consider modern science but ultimately there to stretch modern science.  It's not a psuedo-documentary about traveling to another galaxy... it has a story to tell.  The way it used Einstein's theories to further that story?  Brilliant.  I don't believe we've ever seen a theoretical wormhole depicted so elegantly.  And what of the black hole?  All time and space breaks down at the singularity.  Not one scientist has the faintest idea of what happens when you enter it.  Is it a stretch to think you will end up in a five-dimensional realm behind the bookshelf in your daughter's room?  Uhhh... yea... just a bit.  But ANYTHING you depict in that scene would technically be a stretch.  It was just trippy at the end of the day... and I've never knocked a movie for being trippy before, so why should I start now? 

[Mr. Morden]

And what of the black hole?  All time and space breaks down at the singularity.  Not one scientist has the faintest idea of what happens when you enter it.  Is it a stretch to think you will end up in a five-dimensional realm behind the bookshelf in your daughter's room?  Uhhh... yea... just a bit.  But ANYTHING you depict in that scene would technically be a stretch.  It was just trippy at the end of the day... and I've never knocked a movie for being trippy before, so why should I start now? 

Things break down *at* the singularity, but you're not yet at the singularity when you cross the event horizon.  And we *do* have a pretty good idea of what happens when you cross the event horizon.  As I interpreted things in the movie, Cooper crosses the event horizon, and is presumably on a path towards spiraling in towards the center (the singularity), but is stopped by the tesseract.

Does our current understanding of physics allow a way to communicate with the outside world once you're inside the event horizon of a black hole?  Does it then allow you to escape the black hole, to make your way back to Saturn?  No, of course not.  But this is a sci-fi movie with "higher dimensional  beings", so it's positing some made-up technology, and that's fine, as you said.  They get the basics of relativity right, even if there are some parts of the story where they have to stretch the credibility of the science quite a bit to make the plot work.

[anvi]

On top of what Mr. Morden said, unless you deflect off somehow before getting pulled past the event horizon, the gravity of a small black hole would rip a human being into subatomic pieces before they hit that horizon, and a massive one would do the same right after they hit it.  I know, I know, it's sic-fi and I should just enjoy it.  But I'm sad Kip Thorne let that one slide.  Maybe winning his big bet with Hawking over Cygnus X-1 has convinced Thorne he can get away with a few. 

[anvi]

There is one thing about this film, though, that really amazed me in a positive way.  Actually, it was just a very short scene toward the beginning.  When the mission starts and first reaches Saturn, there is about a ten-second sequence of this pixel-sized spacecraft slowly drifting around the bottom half of the massive, eerily green-hued gass-ball Saturn in the background, no sound.  It was even more dramatic seeing it on an IMAX screen.  I actually found it easily one of the most breathtaking scenes I've ever looked at in a motion picture--really sublime.

[Beet]

I thought it was horrible, and I don't even pretend to understand the science. And yes the visuals were great, but Hollywood has been riding off visuals for years, if not decades.

[Gustaf]

Too much of using pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo as a deus ex machina plot device. And too much preachy sentimentality. Probably my least favourite Nolan movie.