I didn’t like the pacing, but whatever, that’s a style decision.
But the whole twist at the end that justified anything that happened before just ruined it for me. It’s heavily suggested that it’s actually the humans from the future who try to save their own kind by opening the wormhole and giving humans a way off their doomed world. But the whole idea that there are ethereal beings from the future that can open multidimensional wormholes in the past but lack any way of then communicating with that past is just dumb. If you can send an interstellar superhighway through space and time, I’m sure you can send information.
Adding insult to injury at the end they can send information. But the best thing those hyperbeings can come up with is to just take a dude into their multidimensional superphone and let him throw books and wiggle some clock hands in his daughter’s room? Like… what? That’s their plan to save humanity? “Hey, man, now that you’ve entered the black hole, nice to have you here… you can now be a haunted spirit in your daughter’s past. For a few minutes. Do something to save your people’s future. Your time starts now.” The only explanation I have come up with so far is that future humans are sadistic fucks and that this was their equivalent of taskmaster style reality TV, with them throwing popcorn at the screen where the nasa farmer struggles to somehow try to send three words that could save all humans but has to do that with the dumbest means some asshole producer could come up with. “Aaaand he wiggles the clock!! I can’t believe it!” and the audience goes wild.
It just destroyed the movie for me. It felt like I was sitting through the last hour of that movie in utter disbelief that this was really the great explanation, the great twist the movie was gearing towards. It’s not often that I get angry at movies while I’m in the theater, but this movie started quite well imho, just to then take turns that made me so mad about having wasted all that time on a story that was so utterly nonsensical that I was in the end no longer wondering about what was going on but only why I hadn’t picked a career in writing just to prevent that kind of crap from happening.
Huh it made total sense to me. It’s like love is an attracting force, a sort of fifth element if you will, that humans have some dim like nascent control over. That’s all I needed to buy it.
But if you don’t buy that woo premise then it all falls apart. I can see how it’s a sort of rug pull given the science babble earlier in the movie.
Obviously your opinion is correct for you. I thought it was perfect for the themes on display the rest of the movie. It’s absolutely on the softer lofi end of sci-fi, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Reading what I wrote, I guess it sounds a bit condescending. No intent to insult here, sorry if I was too harsh.
Of course I can see the appeal of the movie and I understand that of course people are free to like whatever they choose. Interstellar is still a bit special because it really has everything I usually like. I went in there with high hopes and was really happy with how much my desire to like that movie had no problems being fulfilled at all. Until that last hour. With bad movies, it’s just a bad movie for me, but this one felt like I got betrayed after having already decided to love it.
But yeah, it’s just a movie and I shouldn’t be too invested. Great for you if you like it, I really wish I did, too.
I went in there with high hopes and was really happy with how much my desire to like that movie had no problems being fulfilled at all. Until that last hour.
I’ve definitely experienced this with other movies, so I understand the disappointment.
You’re good. I don’t think you came off as condescending. It’s clear you were having a rant. And if you can’t have a good rant on the internet where is there left!
Not OP, but my wife and I were incredibly disappointed by Interstellar after seeing how much praise it got.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!
First off, the pacing was waaay too fast. I felt like I was getting whiplash from how they spent like five minutes in each location. I hear people complaining about the long runtime (like the other comment that was just posted, lol), but I have exactly the opposite problem - I think this movie really needed like four hours to do everything they tried to do right.
The biggest failing for us, though, was how ridiculously terrible and inaccurate the science was, from start to finish. From little things like needing a full multi-stage booster system to break earth’s gravity, but being able to effortlessly jet off the ocean planet with no help, to absolutely bonkers ridiculous stuff like just casually going beyond an event horizon without getting spaghettified in the process.
So yeah, valiant attempt, a couple of really cool story ideas, and some good (but overrated) cinematography, but, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated Interstellar, I would absolutely say that I didn’t like it, and that it was actively painful to watch.
Physicist Kip Thorne consulted on the movie. The physics are accurate.
Miller’s planet (the ocean world) was spinning extremely rapidly and it was located just above the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, Gargantua. The rapid spin of the planet provides a slingshot effect when you take off in the direction of the spin. This is true on earth as well, and is most pronounced near the equator, but the extreme spin of Miller’s planet makes it much easier to achieve orbit.
The proximity of the black hole is the cause of the extreme tidal forces which create the tidal waves on the planet, but would also help them take off for the same reason (tidal forces affect all masses moving in the gravitational field).
The lack of spaghettification is a known and established fact with supermassive black holes. What you were expecting is what happens with stellar black holes (10x mass of the sun to 100x), not with supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun) whose event horizons are much larger and therefore have less extreme gravitational gradients (the source of spaghettification).
They’re not space ghosts, they’re literally the main character interacting with the past from within a black hole, where the whole of spacetime has collapsed into a single point. As the other commenter said, this is the science fiction part.
Physicists have said that physics as we know it break down in the singularity of a black hole. Kip Thorne signed off on their artistic license plot device of having spacetime collapse into the “tesseract.”
Anyway, that isn’t what I was referring to when I said “the physics are accurate.” I was only referring to the parts involving the black hole and planets and tidal forces and time dilation, which were what they worked very hard on to get right.
It’s a little known fact of physics, but yes, at the center of every supermassive blackhole is a hypercube that lets you manipulate time and space. It’s just not commonly accepted since so far very few people have made it there and back.
Then the spin should have reduced gravitational effect, created a “lean” toward the equator of the spin, created a bulge at the equator where the water would be slung outward due to the spin…
There’s all kinds of problems with this planet assuming a slingshot effect to help reach escape velocity based on the fuel requirement differential in this hypothetical.
My reason is I can’t stand the reluctant hero trope. Where, for example, a grouchy misanthropic isolated farmer is the ONLY person who can pilot this spaceship and save humanity, so he does it but grumbles the whole time. I don’t remember exactly what interstellar’s version of this was, but that’s where I bailed. No disrespect to anyone who likes it. I’m pretty picky. There are a lot of really common tropes that I avoid and I abandon movies all the time.
Where, for example, a grouchy misanthropic isolated farmer is the ONLY person who can pilot this spaceship and save humanity, so he does it but grumbles the whole time.
In fairness, the enthusiastic astronauts were all reckless, foolhardy, narcissists who nearly flub the whole mission.
Yes, though to be fair those are much more in line with a typical Lemmy user. People around here seem to despise anyone who appears to be actually competent.
Dude was not “a farmer who is the only one who can fly the ship”, he was a retired NASA pilot (forced into retirement after the government shut down NASA) who became a farmer at a time when a global food crisis was threatening extinction. He was grouchy because farming isn’t his expertise.
It’s fine if you don’t like the type of character though. I love these types of characters played by Matthew McConaughey. His character Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective is one of my all time favourite characters.
Woody Harrelson is amazing, but the reason he’s so good is that he’s a foil for Matthew’s Rust. It’s a 2 person play. Neither character works without the other.
Not OP but I thought it kinda sucked, and I love most Nolan movies.
Interstellar is really episodic, and has this really weird tone problem between fun space adventure and daddy/daughter basic communication breakdowns. The core of the story felt like “instead of therapy together I’ll just go save the world via spaceship and talk to you from beyond the pale”
Idk, I don’t hate it or anything, it just didn’t seem as good as the hype to me. Some cool visuals for sure.
“instead of therapy together I’ll just go save the world via spaceship and talk to you from beyond the pale”
That’s such an odd take to me.
Most hero stories try to depict some kind of heroic sacrifice, with the most common one being the sacrifice of their own life to save the lives of others. One of the major gaps in those stories is that they completely ignore the effects of the sacrifice on their loved ones, if they’re even depicted in the story.
In light of that, I really liked the way Interstellar showed the effects of his decision on his daughter. He wasn’t only potentially sacrificing his life, he was sacrificing his relationship with his daughter. It’s an extremely raw and painful thing to go through.
I have to say, I find it pretty offensive that you’d bring up therapy when talking about a situation where societal institutions have almost entirely collapsed due to a progressing environmental disaster. It’s really tone-deaf!
Fair enough! I definitely don’t remember that it was societal collapse, I saw the movie when it came out and hadn’t thought about it much since. I must’ve not given it the attention it deserves.
I also don’t love hero stories for the most part? I find it a little forced and cliche usually, including Nolan’s hero movies
Essentially all major crops in the world were failing due to an untreatable disease called the blight, similar to what’s happening right now (in the real world) with bananas. Society in the movie was still somewhat functioning but it was beginning to break down, and mass starvation, power outages, and dust storms (likely inspired by the dust bowl of the 1930s) were the norm. A plot element early in the movie focused on his feud with his children’s school for refusing to teach science correctly. There were strong signals that schools were close to giving up on teaching altogether due to a lack of belief in the future.
Hero stories are not everyone’s cup of tea and many hero stories are done very badly. Interstellar isn’t the best hero story (for me that’s Lord of the Rings) but it’s a pretty good one, as hero stories go. What I try to take away from them are lessons for my own life, and so I’m most drawn to flawed heroes and repulsed by super heroes.
That’s interesting. Why do you hate it?
I love that movie. I also love weird German movies from the 1920s as well.
Spoilers ahead.
I didn’t like the pacing, but whatever, that’s a style decision.
But the whole twist at the end that justified anything that happened before just ruined it for me. It’s heavily suggested that it’s actually the humans from the future who try to save their own kind by opening the wormhole and giving humans a way off their doomed world. But the whole idea that there are ethereal beings from the future that can open multidimensional wormholes in the past but lack any way of then communicating with that past is just dumb. If you can send an interstellar superhighway through space and time, I’m sure you can send information.
Adding insult to injury at the end they can send information. But the best thing those hyperbeings can come up with is to just take a dude into their multidimensional superphone and let him throw books and wiggle some clock hands in his daughter’s room? Like… what? That’s their plan to save humanity? “Hey, man, now that you’ve entered the black hole, nice to have you here… you can now be a haunted spirit in your daughter’s past. For a few minutes. Do something to save your people’s future. Your time starts now.” The only explanation I have come up with so far is that future humans are sadistic fucks and that this was their equivalent of taskmaster style reality TV, with them throwing popcorn at the screen where the nasa farmer struggles to somehow try to send three words that could save all humans but has to do that with the dumbest means some asshole producer could come up with. “Aaaand he wiggles the clock!! I can’t believe it!” and the audience goes wild.
It just destroyed the movie for me. It felt like I was sitting through the last hour of that movie in utter disbelief that this was really the great explanation, the great twist the movie was gearing towards. It’s not often that I get angry at movies while I’m in the theater, but this movie started quite well imho, just to then take turns that made me so mad about having wasted all that time on a story that was so utterly nonsensical that I was in the end no longer wondering about what was going on but only why I hadn’t picked a career in writing just to prevent that kind of crap from happening.
Huh it made total sense to me. It’s like love is an attracting force, a sort of fifth element if you will, that humans have some dim like nascent control over. That’s all I needed to buy it.
But if you don’t buy that woo premise then it all falls apart. I can see how it’s a sort of rug pull given the science babble earlier in the movie.
Obviously your opinion is correct for you. I thought it was perfect for the themes on display the rest of the movie. It’s absolutely on the softer lofi end of sci-fi, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Reading what I wrote, I guess it sounds a bit condescending. No intent to insult here, sorry if I was too harsh.
Of course I can see the appeal of the movie and I understand that of course people are free to like whatever they choose. Interstellar is still a bit special because it really has everything I usually like. I went in there with high hopes and was really happy with how much my desire to like that movie had no problems being fulfilled at all. Until that last hour. With bad movies, it’s just a bad movie for me, but this one felt like I got betrayed after having already decided to love it.
But yeah, it’s just a movie and I shouldn’t be too invested. Great for you if you like it, I really wish I did, too.
I’ve definitely experienced this with other movies, so I understand the disappointment.
You’re good. I don’t think you came off as condescending. It’s clear you were having a rant. And if you can’t have a good rant on the internet where is there left!
Not OP, but my wife and I were incredibly disappointed by Interstellar after seeing how much praise it got.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!
First off, the pacing was waaay too fast. I felt like I was getting whiplash from how they spent like five minutes in each location. I hear people complaining about the long runtime (like the other comment that was just posted, lol), but I have exactly the opposite problem - I think this movie really needed like four hours to do everything they tried to do right.
The biggest failing for us, though, was how ridiculously terrible and inaccurate the science was, from start to finish. From little things like needing a full multi-stage booster system to break earth’s gravity, but being able to effortlessly jet off the ocean planet with no help, to absolutely bonkers ridiculous stuff like just casually going beyond an event horizon without getting spaghettified in the process.
So yeah, valiant attempt, a couple of really cool story ideas, and some good (but overrated) cinematography, but, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated Interstellar, I would absolutely say that I didn’t like it, and that it was actively painful to watch.
Physicist Kip Thorne consulted on the movie. The physics are accurate.
Miller’s planet (the ocean world) was spinning extremely rapidly and it was located just above the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, Gargantua. The rapid spin of the planet provides a slingshot effect when you take off in the direction of the spin. This is true on earth as well, and is most pronounced near the equator, but the extreme spin of Miller’s planet makes it much easier to achieve orbit.
The proximity of the black hole is the cause of the extreme tidal forces which create the tidal waves on the planet, but would also help them take off for the same reason (tidal forces affect all masses moving in the gravitational field).
The lack of spaghettification is a known and established fact with supermassive black holes. What you were expecting is what happens with stellar black holes (10x mass of the sun to 100x), not with supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun) whose event horizons are much larger and therefore have less extreme gravitational gradients (the source of spaghettification).
Space ghosts from the fourth dimension can give you physics advice by wiggling your books?
They’re not space ghosts, they’re literally the main character interacting with the past from within a black hole, where the whole of spacetime has collapsed into a single point. As the other commenter said, this is the science fiction part.
Physicists have said that physics as we know it break down in the singularity of a black hole. Kip Thorne signed off on their artistic license plot device of having spacetime collapse into the “tesseract.”
Anyway, that isn’t what I was referring to when I said “the physics are accurate.” I was only referring to the parts involving the black hole and planets and tidal forces and time dilation, which were what they worked very hard on to get right.
Well, then, I guess it’s all perfectly real and believable. Next time I see a clock rattle or a bookshelf shake, I’ll know what’s up.
You have to work very hard to be as purposely obtuse as you’re being. Maybe take a break, champ.
Or you could just educate yourself on what artistic license means.
Well that’s the science fiction part lol and it’s pretty out-there
For me it was the part about how at the center of a supermassive black hole is a hypercube that let’s you see and manipulate all time and space…
It’s a little known fact of physics, but yes, at the center of every supermassive blackhole is a hypercube that lets you manipulate time and space. It’s just not commonly accepted since so far very few people have made it there and back.
it’s not always a hypercube tho! It can be other shapes too!
Mine was a form of a hyper-dyno-shaped nuggie!:D
Not all time and space, just those moments and places that you have a strong connection to via power of love, duh
Then the spin should have reduced gravitational effect, created a “lean” toward the equator of the spin, created a bulge at the equator where the water would be slung outward due to the spin…
There’s all kinds of problems with this planet assuming a slingshot effect to help reach escape velocity based on the fuel requirement differential in this hypothetical.
Just curious: what’s your physics background?
My reason is I can’t stand the reluctant hero trope. Where, for example, a grouchy misanthropic isolated farmer is the ONLY person who can pilot this spaceship and save humanity, so he does it but grumbles the whole time. I don’t remember exactly what interstellar’s version of this was, but that’s where I bailed. No disrespect to anyone who likes it. I’m pretty picky. There are a lot of really common tropes that I avoid and I abandon movies all the time.
In fairness, the enthusiastic astronauts were all reckless, foolhardy, narcissists who nearly flub the whole mission.
Yes, though to be fair those are much more in line with a typical Lemmy user. People around here seem to despise anyone who appears to be actually competent.
Dude was not “a farmer who is the only one who can fly the ship”, he was a retired NASA pilot (forced into retirement after the government shut down NASA) who became a farmer at a time when a global food crisis was threatening extinction. He was grouchy because farming isn’t his expertise.
To each their own I guess.
It’s fine if you don’t like the type of character though. I love these types of characters played by Matthew McConaughey. His character Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective is one of my all time favourite characters.
Well, there’s your problem. Woody Harlson was the one that delivered on TD.
Woody Harrelson is amazing, but the reason he’s so good is that he’s a foil for Matthew’s Rust. It’s a 2 person play. Neither character works without the other.
Hard agree, McConaughey was the perfect cast for both.
Not OP but I thought it kinda sucked, and I love most Nolan movies.
Interstellar is really episodic, and has this really weird tone problem between fun space adventure and daddy/daughter basic communication breakdowns. The core of the story felt like “instead of therapy together I’ll just go save the world via spaceship and talk to you from beyond the pale”
Idk, I don’t hate it or anything, it just didn’t seem as good as the hype to me. Some cool visuals for sure.
That’s such an odd take to me.
Most hero stories try to depict some kind of heroic sacrifice, with the most common one being the sacrifice of their own life to save the lives of others. One of the major gaps in those stories is that they completely ignore the effects of the sacrifice on their loved ones, if they’re even depicted in the story.
In light of that, I really liked the way Interstellar showed the effects of his decision on his daughter. He wasn’t only potentially sacrificing his life, he was sacrificing his relationship with his daughter. It’s an extremely raw and painful thing to go through.
I have to say, I find it pretty offensive that you’d bring up therapy when talking about a situation where societal institutions have almost entirely collapsed due to a progressing environmental disaster. It’s really tone-deaf!
Fair enough! I definitely don’t remember that it was societal collapse, I saw the movie when it came out and hadn’t thought about it much since. I must’ve not given it the attention it deserves.
I also don’t love hero stories for the most part? I find it a little forced and cliche usually, including Nolan’s hero movies
Essentially all major crops in the world were failing due to an untreatable disease called the blight, similar to what’s happening right now (in the real world) with bananas. Society in the movie was still somewhat functioning but it was beginning to break down, and mass starvation, power outages, and dust storms (likely inspired by the dust bowl of the 1930s) were the norm. A plot element early in the movie focused on his feud with his children’s school for refusing to teach science correctly. There were strong signals that schools were close to giving up on teaching altogether due to a lack of belief in the future.
Hero stories are not everyone’s cup of tea and many hero stories are done very badly. Interstellar isn’t the best hero story (for me that’s Lord of the Rings) but it’s a pretty good one, as hero stories go. What I try to take away from them are lessons for my own life, and so I’m most drawn to flawed heroes and repulsed by super heroes.