- Status
Interstellar - 7/10
I was told by my friend to watch this movie, and the way he described it wasn't so much a movie as a spiritual experience. Needless to say, I don't think it was quite that good.
Let's start with the stuff that everyone already knows about the movie without seeing it - the science. Generally it was done quite well, and if you disregard the whole wormhole thing and the whole black hole thing it doesn't do too bad a job. I liked how the space scenes were silent - during the maneuvers I think it did very well in highlighting the gravity (ha ha) and splendour of what was going on. There were times when it shouldn't have been silent simply due to the density of the particles (e.g. during explosions or decompressions) but otherwise it was well done. Where there was sound, it was very well done. Not just music, but all the sound effects too, though sometimes it was painfully loud.
The only major gripes I had with the science were due to my misgivings with the plot. And what a plot it was.
If you actually do the math on the location of Miller's planet and the black hole, it's "escape velocity" would be around 0.58c, the gravity on the surface would be around 7000g, it would have been so far within the Roche limit it would have been scary, and I don't understand how if the gravity of the black hole is strong enough to cause a wave literally a mile high there's still water on the planet. I'm also perplexed by the accretion disk around the black hole, especially the part where it's not really a disk. Also the part about how there'd be enough visible light to illuminate all 3 planets around the black hole, even though the vast majority of the disk's output would be X-rays and gamma rays and would have made all 3 planets, as well as the ship, completely sterile.
In the end, it kind of felt like someone said "hey, let's write a screenplay! Let's make it the most outlandish, incredible thing in the history of the world, and then invent some deus ex machina to make it all seem plausible at the end!". Not cool.
The character development and acting was well done as well. These characters felt a lot more real, 3-dimensional, and psychologically more robust than the "scientists" in Prometheus, who were a bit thick. Though, the way they used Cooper to explain some of the science to the audience was very evident and a bit weird - they had a perfectly good person called Murphy who would have fit much better in that role. I also like the way that Cooper wasn't made to sacrifice the mission to save his family, which was nice. The one weird thing, though, was the way Brand Sr somehow "solved" the equations for quantum gravity but kept it secret? Even if it was missing information it'd be the biggest thing in the science community since sliced bread.
All in all, there were good parts, but there were also pretty horrendous parts. It wasn't a masterpiece of art and expression, I wouldn't have even classed it as excellent. But it's decent, which is good enough for some people I guess.
I was told by my friend to watch this movie, and the way he described it wasn't so much a movie as a spiritual experience. Needless to say, I don't think it was quite that good.
Let's start with the stuff that everyone already knows about the movie without seeing it - the science. Generally it was done quite well, and if you disregard the whole wormhole thing and the whole black hole thing it doesn't do too bad a job. I liked how the space scenes were silent - during the maneuvers I think it did very well in highlighting the gravity (ha ha) and splendour of what was going on. There were times when it shouldn't have been silent simply due to the density of the particles (e.g. during explosions or decompressions) but otherwise it was well done. Where there was sound, it was very well done. Not just music, but all the sound effects too, though sometimes it was painfully loud.
The only major gripes I had with the science were due to my misgivings with the plot. And what a plot it was.
So it's set in a dystopian near future - okay.
In this future it's quickly apparent that the US, at least, has abandoned the science and technological prowess that once made it a global superpower - not quite as okay with this, but not exactly improbable IMO.
We quickly discover that NASA is merely a shadow of its former self, and is reduced to clandestine exploratory missions - given the above, okay.
Cooper (do we ever learn his first name?) and his daughter Murphy (what a name for a girl) manages to find this NASA, somehow turns from extremely skeptical and distrusting to completely on-board in about 3 minutes flat, and gets recruited to fly a mission through a wormhole to seed a new colony planet. This is around about where I started having problems. The whole timing is way off, and the urgency that Cooper's compelled to go (leaving behind a heartbroken and scarred-for-life 10-year-old girl) is a bit bewildering, since everyone kind of knows we're playing a long game here.
The whole thing with the 2-year journey to Saturn kind of brings this home. It's obvious the ship has some serious problems with fuel, power, or both. All the crew are placed into suspended animation - apart from Cooper (maybe?) who stays awake, I presume, to keep re-watching his family's messages. The method of suspended animation was something else I found quite disturbing. If you've ever taken a bath or a swim, in your life, you'll realise that your fingers and toes go all pruney. If you stay in the water, after a day or two, your skin literally starts to rot and melt away. People first started realising this during the Napoleonic Wars, when people could spend days in squalid conditions in the rain, and it became real obvious on the Western Front during World War One, where people would sit for weeks or months at a time in trenches that were perpetually under several inches (or sometimes feet) of water. It's why it's vitally important when you're out in the bush to KEEP YOUR FEET DRY - because if you don't, you'll lose them. However, this doesn't seem to bother the crew members involved, who sometimes go into suspended animation for decades at a time in what is basically a tepid water bath. Not cool.
When they get to their new galaxy it gets worse. For some reason they visit Miller's planet first, even though it's obviously the worst one to go to. For some reason they didn't notice the time dilation, which would have been affecting the rate of transmission from the surface. For some reason they couldn't analyse the planet's surface, which would have been when they would have found out that a HUGE FUCKING WAVE OF WATER is circling the planet roughly once every 2 hours. For some reason they couldn't even figure out that the whole planet is covered in water. They waste some time on this planet, realise they've in fact wasted around 23 years, and go back into space with literally nothing.
The same process repeats with Mann's planet - they can't tell that the whole planet is made of ice? seriously? It'd have an albedo of 0.7-0.8. Not hard. Mann tries to kill them, having miraculously not been turned into a prune, and subsequently dies.
They want to go to Edmund's planet, but on the way TARS and Cooper have to sacrifice themselves into the black hole to get Brand there (in a poetic irony, the planet that Brand wanted to go to most because she loved Edmunds was also the planet that turned out to be most habitable. How sweet). They go through the black hole, but instead of getting torn apart they somehow go through into a higher-dimension space where they have the ability to influence Murphy's bedroom. Not only is this kind of creepy, but the amount of information that Cooper would have had to transmit through the watch to get the discovery of the quantum gravity to Earth would have taken so, so much longer than the few hours/days that it took in the movie.
In the end everyone seems miraculously okay, and it turns out that future "humans" are the ones that allowed TARS and Cooper into the tesseract, though paradoxically it couldn't have happened in the first place. Cooper gets rescued and a new age of discovery and greatness dawns, even though for the several years that Cooper was in hospital, nobody seemed to be all that keen to return to Edmund's planet.
In this future it's quickly apparent that the US, at least, has abandoned the science and technological prowess that once made it a global superpower - not quite as okay with this, but not exactly improbable IMO.
We quickly discover that NASA is merely a shadow of its former self, and is reduced to clandestine exploratory missions - given the above, okay.
Cooper (do we ever learn his first name?) and his daughter Murphy (what a name for a girl) manages to find this NASA, somehow turns from extremely skeptical and distrusting to completely on-board in about 3 minutes flat, and gets recruited to fly a mission through a wormhole to seed a new colony planet. This is around about where I started having problems. The whole timing is way off, and the urgency that Cooper's compelled to go (leaving behind a heartbroken and scarred-for-life 10-year-old girl) is a bit bewildering, since everyone kind of knows we're playing a long game here.
The whole thing with the 2-year journey to Saturn kind of brings this home. It's obvious the ship has some serious problems with fuel, power, or both. All the crew are placed into suspended animation - apart from Cooper (maybe?) who stays awake, I presume, to keep re-watching his family's messages. The method of suspended animation was something else I found quite disturbing. If you've ever taken a bath or a swim, in your life, you'll realise that your fingers and toes go all pruney. If you stay in the water, after a day or two, your skin literally starts to rot and melt away. People first started realising this during the Napoleonic Wars, when people could spend days in squalid conditions in the rain, and it became real obvious on the Western Front during World War One, where people would sit for weeks or months at a time in trenches that were perpetually under several inches (or sometimes feet) of water. It's why it's vitally important when you're out in the bush to KEEP YOUR FEET DRY - because if you don't, you'll lose them. However, this doesn't seem to bother the crew members involved, who sometimes go into suspended animation for decades at a time in what is basically a tepid water bath. Not cool.
When they get to their new galaxy it gets worse. For some reason they visit Miller's planet first, even though it's obviously the worst one to go to. For some reason they didn't notice the time dilation, which would have been affecting the rate of transmission from the surface. For some reason they couldn't analyse the planet's surface, which would have been when they would have found out that a HUGE FUCKING WAVE OF WATER is circling the planet roughly once every 2 hours. For some reason they couldn't even figure out that the whole planet is covered in water. They waste some time on this planet, realise they've in fact wasted around 23 years, and go back into space with literally nothing.
The same process repeats with Mann's planet - they can't tell that the whole planet is made of ice? seriously? It'd have an albedo of 0.7-0.8. Not hard. Mann tries to kill them, having miraculously not been turned into a prune, and subsequently dies.
They want to go to Edmund's planet, but on the way TARS and Cooper have to sacrifice themselves into the black hole to get Brand there (in a poetic irony, the planet that Brand wanted to go to most because she loved Edmunds was also the planet that turned out to be most habitable. How sweet). They go through the black hole, but instead of getting torn apart they somehow go through into a higher-dimension space where they have the ability to influence Murphy's bedroom. Not only is this kind of creepy, but the amount of information that Cooper would have had to transmit through the watch to get the discovery of the quantum gravity to Earth would have taken so, so much longer than the few hours/days that it took in the movie.
In the end everyone seems miraculously okay, and it turns out that future "humans" are the ones that allowed TARS and Cooper into the tesseract, though paradoxically it couldn't have happened in the first place. Cooper gets rescued and a new age of discovery and greatness dawns, even though for the several years that Cooper was in hospital, nobody seemed to be all that keen to return to Edmund's planet.
If you actually do the math on the location of Miller's planet and the black hole, it's "escape velocity" would be around 0.58c, the gravity on the surface would be around 7000g, it would have been so far within the Roche limit it would have been scary, and I don't understand how if the gravity of the black hole is strong enough to cause a wave literally a mile high there's still water on the planet. I'm also perplexed by the accretion disk around the black hole, especially the part where it's not really a disk. Also the part about how there'd be enough visible light to illuminate all 3 planets around the black hole, even though the vast majority of the disk's output would be X-rays and gamma rays and would have made all 3 planets, as well as the ship, completely sterile.
In the end, it kind of felt like someone said "hey, let's write a screenplay! Let's make it the most outlandish, incredible thing in the history of the world, and then invent some deus ex machina to make it all seem plausible at the end!". Not cool.
The character development and acting was well done as well. These characters felt a lot more real, 3-dimensional, and psychologically more robust than the "scientists" in Prometheus, who were a bit thick. Though, the way they used Cooper to explain some of the science to the audience was very evident and a bit weird - they had a perfectly good person called Murphy who would have fit much better in that role. I also like the way that Cooper wasn't made to sacrifice the mission to save his family, which was nice. The one weird thing, though, was the way Brand Sr somehow "solved" the equations for quantum gravity but kept it secret? Even if it was missing information it'd be the biggest thing in the science community since sliced bread.
All in all, there were good parts, but there were also pretty horrendous parts. It wasn't a masterpiece of art and expression, I wouldn't have even classed it as excellent. But it's decent, which is good enough for some people I guess.
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Ns1
No Lifer
- Jun 17, 2001
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you can feel that way all you want but that's most certainly not true. It's not like the dude didn't consult with a renowned astrophysicist or anything who gave the CGI guys the formula to render the blackhole which may or may not have led to an actual scientific discovery.
I'm good with your dissenting opinion though, not trying to change it. can't win them all
We have a pretty good discussion going on in the Interstellar thread.
John Connor
Lifer
- Nov 30, 2012
- 22,757
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you can feel that way all you want but that's most certainly not true. It's not like the dude didn't consult with a renowned astrophysicist or anything who gave the CGI guys the formula to render the blackhole which may or may not have led to an actual scientific discovery.
I'm good with your dissenting opinion though, not trying to change it. can't win them all
We have a pretty good discussion going on in the Interstellar thread.
So you're saying that Interstellar led to us discovering that in the middle of every black hole is a higher dimensional realm where people can influence the past?
I didn't think so.
The "discovery" they actually helped bring about was actually that a black hole's accretion disc is visible as a halo around the singularity because of the way it bends light, rather than as a simple disc which textbooks and artists' drawings had previously shown it. Basically they discovered what a black hole looks like.
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Ns1
No Lifer
- Jun 17, 2001
- 55,420
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No, I did not say that. it's sci-fi with
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Ns1
No Lifer
- Jun 17, 2001
- 55,420
- 1,599
- 126
MongGrel
Lifer
- Dec 3, 2013
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Spydermag68
Platinum Member
- Apr 5, 2002
- 2,616
- 99
- 91
The history of the Eagles. 8/10. The whole documentary was 3 hours long. The first 2 hours tells the history from the formation of the Eagles to the sudden end. The last was from the reunion to 2012.
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Hercules - 3/10
Meh. Not good, but I've seen worse.
Need for Speed - 9/10
I rated this for what it was ... Smokey and the Bandit meets Days of Thunder and I loved every second of it. Will probably be watching again soon.
Meh. Not good, but I've seen worse.
Need for Speed - 9/10
I rated this for what it was ... Smokey and the Bandit meets Days of Thunder and I loved every second of it. Will probably be watching again soon.
her209
No Lifer
- Oct 11, 2000
- 56,336
- 11
- 0
Fargo a 5 ?
To each his own.
Yep a 5. Some loose ends were left such as the son (Scotty), Shep, and the money that was buried in the suitcase by Carl. It wasn't evident that the wife was killed at the end after all she wasn't responsive after she fell down the stairs during the kidnapping.
CZroe
Lifer
- Jun 24, 2001
- 24,195
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Loose ends are their thing, man. Don't you know anything about The Coen Brothers?
her209
No Lifer
- Oct 11, 2000
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MongGrel
Lifer
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CZroe
Lifer
- Jun 24, 2001
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Are you kidding?
Edit: Fine. Here's a start.
Maude's pregnancy
Brother Seamus/Bunny's parents
The car theives
The fallout from the misdirected vandalism
Jackie Treehorn's money
The embezzled foundation money
The f--king rug
The rent/landlord
Cowboy's train of thought
Walter's past
Tournament standing/expulsion appeal
Prosecution of Bunny's Nihilist friends
Jackie Treehorn's strange call/message
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- Nov 30, 2005
- 50,231
- 118
- 116
Amores Perros is awesome. Not a huge fan of Babel; felt too overwrought and over the top. I do keep meaning to revisit it though.
KT
mcurphy
Diamond Member
- Feb 5, 2003
- 4,150
- 8
- 81
Big Hero 6 - 8/10 Saw this with my 8yo son last weekend, and we both loved it. It had a really nice mix of action, humor, and even drama. The story was somewhat predictable, and I feel they could have explored some of the supporting characters a little more. It had beautiful animation and the robot really steals the scenes. Very well done and I'd recommend it to anyone with kids of any age.
Olive Kitteridge - 8/10 I watched this HBO mini series on the recommendations of others in this thread. I really enjoyed it! It was a bit depressing and not necessarily a show I would have watched other than out of curiosity from the previous reviews. But overall I enjoyed it, especially Frances McDormand. She was fantastic!
Olive Kitteridge - 8/10 I watched this HBO mini series on the recommendations of others in this thread. I really enjoyed it! It was a bit depressing and not necessarily a show I would have watched other than out of curiosity from the previous reviews. But overall I enjoyed it, especially Frances McDormand. She was fantastic!
IHateMyJob2004
Lifer
- Sep 29, 2004
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I pray that comic book based movies die a fiery death soon. Here is to independent and foreign movies!
Ns1
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alkemyst
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- Feb 13, 2001
- 83,769
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Printer Bandit
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- Status
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