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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Topic: Interstellar
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-18-2014 09:07 AM
Some of the science in this movie is valid, although someone with a mere high school level of understanding of science can already point out the many deficiencies. For example, time passes more slowly compared to the outside world, if you're inside a gravity well, like they were near the black hole. You get the same problem with time dilation at extreme speeds. Time dilation as a result of the laws of relativity was quite realistically portrayed in this movie.
The way a black hole actually looks also was quite realistically portrayed.
A worm hole is still a theoretical concept, but the visual depiction was kept within the realm of the plausible.
I appreciated both the looks of the worm hole and the black hole. They really put a lot of efforts into making it look real.
* I guess most have seen it by now, but yet again, possible spoilers ahead *
There are also some big problems with the science in this movie though. Some of the most striking are:
- They needed a big rocket to get from earth to orbit. But to get from a planet with stronger gravity than earth (the water planet), a mere "lander" was apparently sufficient. Why not use this same kind of craft to get from earth to orbit? It looks a lot more practical than a conventional, massive multi-stage rocket.
- Creating a form of propulsion that's sufficiently strong to escape the gravity well of a massive black hole is quite doubtful.
- They needed about two years to get from earth to the wormhole, which, given some advanced near future propulsion technology, still feels plausible. Yet again, at the end of the movie, they fly from this icy planet into the black hole in a matter of minutes or hours (maybe some of the scenes were left out, but it was not meant to be weeks, months or even years). The distance between this planet might not be as large as between the earth and Saturn, but it should still take weeks at best.
- While there are theories about planets with stable orbits around super massive black holes, flying into a black hole, past the event horizon and telling a tale about it... I don't think so.
You could also ask yourself if a planet with knee-high water can produce waves as high as mountains, but maybe there are workable models for this and they just happened to land on some kind of plateau.
Whatever happens after Cooper and his robot enter the black hole is pure fiction, science has left the building at this point. The tesseract (multi-dimensional cube) is used to depict a place where time is another dimension, which can be as easily traversed (back and forth) like the three dimensions we're capable of perceiving. Apparently you can also manipulate gravity from inside this place, as it is one of the few things that isn't bound by other dimensions... just like love or something. Gravity is being used to send messages, by throwing books, creating dust bar codes and by manipulating hands on a watch. Personally, this was absolutely the weakest part of the movie.
Just like our laws of physics potentially collapse at the center of a black hole, the movie's plot collapsed likewise at that point...
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-19-2014 06:00 PM
quote: Joe Redifer
Also, why are the ice clouds still floating? Has the writer never heard of hail? Or gravity? Clouds don't even need to freeze before they begin falling. Or was there some explanation I missed? Judging by the ease in which the spacecraft glides through the atmosphere when landing and taking off from this world, there doesn't seem to be any mid-atmosphere gravity anomalies. The ice clouds also don't seem to be very far above the surface they're walking around on (lower than Earth clouds). Nobody else has ever mentioned anything about this that I've seen. I can't be the only one who caught it. Surely others HAD to have thought about this when watching the movie.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. Then again, the whole planet didn't make too much sense, some of those mountains look like they almost extend over their heads. It reminded me about this other movie that did not make too much sense: Upside Down. Maybe frozen clouds could work on a planet with very low gravity, but they mention something about this planet having about 80% of the gravity of Earth...
quote:
Get a life!
Sounds great. Can I you tell us where to get one? And are they expensive? ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
quote:
A dozend Picassos drowned with the Titanic in 'Titanic'.
How did they all reappear in museums and galleries around the world later in the 20th century? 'Well baby, I went down and got them for you'.'Oh, you shouldn't have!'
What are you trying to prove here? Cameron made a mistake?! Those paintings in those museums are obviously fake!
And Celine Dion didn't really sing during the movie, that was reserved for the credits
quote: Carsten Kurz
Guys, it's still just a movie! When you start picking, you will never stop.
We also picked on Gravity. I really like that movie, although a lot of the plot relies on flaky science.
I agree with Bobby and Joe here. This is no Star Wars. This movie was dead serious. They hired a bunch of scientists and also bragged about their realistic depiction of science. During an intermission, I even had a discussion with somebody who claimed everything that happens in the movie was scientifically proven...
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 11-19-2014 09:48 PM
quote: Jim Bedford
I give it about 42% on the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY scale.
Christopher Nolan clearly has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey many times, but has never figured out what makes it the greatest science fiction movie ever made. 2001 runs 148 minutes, but there is barely 10 minutes worth of dialog in the whole picture. In Interstellar, people never ever shut the f*ck up ever, with all their explanations, exposition, overused Dylan Thomas quotes and wooden acting. The difference is that Kubrick had enough faith in his audience that by not explaining everything he could leave them with both a sense of wonder and something to rattle around in their heads besides their eyeballs. Nolan does not have this faith, he feels that everything has to be explained down to the tiniest degree, and it’s ultimately a drag on the picture.
Take the penultimate scene where Cooper travels through the black hole and winds up in the space/time room, a scene OBVIOUSLY based on the part of 2001 where Bowman goes through the stargate and winds up in the drawing room. In 2001, there is no dialog whatever, the audience is left to piece it out by themselves. In this picture, Nolan has so little respect for his audience’s intelligence that they wind up resurrecting a should-be-trashed robot for him to blather the explanation for what is happening, he is literally acting as his own narrator and it is totally unnecessary. The scene would have worked as well with no dialog at all. How would the aforementioned scene in 2001 have played if HAL had somehow shown up and was all “So, Dave, the aliens made this room so you would feel comfortable, because you are going to live out the rest of your life here, after which the monolith you saw will appear again to transmogrify you into a giant fetus thing and send you back to Earth as their representative, because they were just waiting for humans to become advanced enough to . . . “. Just show me what’s going on and let me work it out for myself, for chrissake. It’s fine to want a scientifically accurate picture, but if the science that is integral to the story is so dense that it requires a de-facto physics lecture, then perhaps you’ve overthought things.
*****
There’s something else to be said about Interstellar. For all of Nolan’s furious “I shoot FILM” chest-pounding, it’s not that good looking a picture. Some of the IMAX footage is very well done, but frankly the 35mm photography ranges from OK to horrible. I saw the 70mm print that is playing the Ziegfeld in New York City, and I saw most of the film again in a pristine 4K DCP at a suburban multiplex. Both times I noticed very dense blacks with little to no shadow detail in some scenes, optical enlargements with huge grain, considerable scene-to-scene variations in sharpness, and a couple of shots that were demonstrably out of focus (the reverse shot of Ellen Burstyn on the hospital bed being one of them). THIS is what he considers so superior to digital?
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