I'm really glad I was obsessed with space when I was younger, and that my husband is an aerospace engineering major. We kept up with the science talk in the movie really well.
I've heard from non-scientists that they didn't get the characters, but we actually liked them a lot. Maybe it's because they were all scientists?
And not brain-dead scientists like the ones in Prometheus.
The only way time travel works as I see it is more like a slinky rather than a closed loop. Or like ripples in a pond. Traveling back means skipping a rung to another identical copy/vibration/universe/level/whatever. So if I'm right then the [BLACKOUT]future people[/BLACKOUT] in the movie aren't even from the reality they are messing with but some alternate future reality.
Oh, no doubt. I just don't think I can get behind the kind of logic that Bill & Ted used to escape from the police station in their first film: "we gotta remember to go back and set all this up(keys, trash can, etc.) so we can escape to go and set all this up again......etc".
In a large scale version, that's what Interstellar is doing if the closed loop theory is correct.
This was Nolan's best film, IMO, but it really missed out on some great potential. It felt simplified at moments. The characters had to make certain leaps of logic, that work for the character, but not so much the audience, again, IMO. I most definitely liked the film, but the potential I saw during the first half of the film didn't crescendo in the end.
The robots were definitely references to the monolith. The design was one of the weirdest I've ever seen for a robot and yet the most simplistic. I think it was because they weren't anthropomorphic at all. Not humanoid in any way except for the voice. I actually took my a while to match the voice with Tars because the lack of a face. Early on I was confused as to who was speaking.
The robots were definitely references to the monolith. The design was one of the weirdest I've ever seen for a robot and yet the most simplistic. I think it was because they weren't anthropomorphic at all. Not humanoid in any way except for the voice. I actually took my a while to match the voice with Tars because the lack of a face. Early on I was confused as to who was speaking.
Yeah, the effects were remarkable with it. It never looked like CGI even when it obviously was. I think there was a lot of puppetry involved in making it move. And I think Tars was one of the best characters in the movie. I was very pleased when he was brought back at the end.
Interstellar 2: Cooper and Tars, buddy astronaut explorers.
Snow Queen gave some big ones here, and I will detail a few more that I can remember:
One thing that I kinda missed was a subplot from the ice planet they came across, the one with upside down mountains.
They found a little self-forming alien there, that could evolve at rapid speed but it never evolved past a certain age because its sun would fry it. In the early script, Cooper ended up accidentally letting it go on an icy planet without a frying sun...that ended up being a decimated Earth after the humans leave.
It read as really cute in the script, which is why I kind of missed it.
The biggest improvement was the change of agents in the second/third act.
The early script went in detail about how the "Plan A" gravity machine is made. Turns out there was a secret Chinese space station in the bulk (in the wormhole), using robots to make the machine. They took hundreds of years to develop it, but because it's in the bulk, time is of no essence. Cooper and Brand simply come across it, take its specs, put it in the probe, then send it across the black hole back to Earth, which old Cooper finds (yes, it leads him to NASA don't remember how) and Murph's son (yup, Murph's son) later figures out. The script actually shows Cooper's grandson actually performing the pivotal gravity experiments. At the end of the movie, Cooper actually meets his great-grandson or something like that. He never sees Murph again, and never meets his grandson.
Like Snow Queen said, there's no Dr. Mann, but there is a Chinese robot that impersonates one of their own robots (just following its directives to protect the space station in the bulk) and causes trouble like Dr. Mann does.
Oh, and the "they" who made the wormhole are not future humans, but gravity-bending aliens that simply want humans to live, for whatever reason. It's not explained, they just are kind of there. Amelia communicates with them by throwing BBs in the air and they communicate MOS-style via the shapes they make.
I'm REALLY glad Chris simplified those parts, there were just too many random agents coming in mid-movie for that. The script wasn't that good IMO, because of that. I was like, at the people who raved about the script, haha. Chris somehow turned it on itself like he does in all his films. The first shot really reminded me of The Prestige for that reason.
The whole bit about love is also not in the script.
Amelia's reasons for going are not spelled out. There is no Edmunds that she is in love with and wants to see again. And yes, Cooper and Brand do bone in the script and it's pretty effin' random. But like in the film, Cooper leaves with Tars to see her again.
Although in the film, the focus is more on Cooper's explorer nature than anything else.
The additional focus on Murph in the film, I actually liked a lot. Even though the big realization is kind of cheesy, but there's a lot of parental legacy that I really liked.
It's kind of incidental in the script, that the probe is found to be important by Murph and his son. Whereas in the film, Cooper chooses her to be the recipient of his messages.
IIRC, the space station in the script is named after the elder Cooper, not Murph. The fact that they named it after her in the film, I liked a lot. And not just because I'm a woman in STEM. She also doesn't continue working with the elder Brand, IIRC. I think the grandson figures most of that out in their barn. Again, kind of random.
Those are the really big differences that I recall.
All in all, it's certainly not a typical sort of blockbuster film - that's why it feels a lot like 2001 or Gravity to me, in that it's more of a journey or experience. But I really appreciate how optimistic it is. It assumes that people do find ways together to survive, and not that humans are destined to nuke each other before becoming extremely advanced.
Thanks heaps Anita and Snow Queen for the explanation of the differences between the two scripts. It's quite fascinating to read how different it was, I'm almost curious to see how the original vision would have seemed on film. But in the end I'm glad that all those changes were made, it turned out wonderfully.
Also, you're the first person I've seen to point out the similarities between the opening shots of this film and The Prestige. I thought the exact same thing, it gave me the feeling The Prestige does everytime I start it. I remember thinking "I'm in for something special right now", not to mention both of the films use the opening shot [BLACKOUT]as a major hint about a big twist surrounding the climax of the film (Clones in The Prestige and Fifth Dimension in Interstellar.[/BLACKOUT]
For good reason, he was hilarious. My favourite character of the bunch. [BLACKOUT]"Everyone ready to be slaves in my robot colony?"[/BLACKOUT] (I'm sure I'm not quite getting the line right, but something along those lines)
[BLACKOUT]where is the space station heading? Is it heading to where Anne Hathaway or is humans just going to live forever in the space station?[/BLACKOUT]
The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar, for me at least, are films where Christopher Nolan is dealing with his ambition as a filmmaker and his wanting/apologizing to his children for his ambitious nature that takes him away from them.
Interstellar's Cooper is the most like Christopher Nolan in this trilogy. It was subtext in The Prestige and Inception. It was full on text in Intestellar, hence the reason, I think, this film is his most "openly" emotional film.
The connection between the three films is easy because all of them deal with, at some point in the story, abandoned children.
I don't think it's anything new either. I think it's a well made solid to good sci fi film. It's Signs meets 2001 meets Inception meets Armageddon. And that's all well and good but I'm not going to pretend those parts added up to the most original masterpiece ever. They could have I suppose, if the script was better.
I would have removed the [BLACKOUT]Matt Damon subplot alltogether, i understand having an "antagonist" made Brand and Cooper more closer as the perils grew, but i liked how it was about this space adventure, the stakes we're already high. Didn't like how Cooper's son became a grunt too.[/BLACKOUT]
One of my friends just saw the movie too. They didn't understand parts of it, so I've been on the phone for the past hour having an in-depth conversation.
I just saw Interstellar. Even though there were only 10 people in the cinema room for hundreds, I think it was a great film.
The movie was touching, visually impressive, and boasting a clever plot that depended on time dilation and subtle closed time-like curves. In this blog post, I won't discuss the general relativistic visualization of the black hole and wormhole at all because it was talked about previously and it's a small part of my final impression, anyway.
The blog post below is full of spoilers. Do not continue if you don't want to get spoiled.
At the beginning, the Interstellar movie I would see on Thursday was getting almost entirely positive reactions. Even today, most of the professional reviewers rated it with 73%. But if you search for the reviews at generic websites, you will notice that the most typical rating of self-anointed critics is actually 2 stars. Where does the gap come from?
Well, the gap has – and the negative reviews have – numerous reasons but some of the most obvious ones are not being discussed. Many of the negative reviewers are lazy, intellectually limited, anti-science spoiled brats; and many others are pro-green, left-wing, anti-technology Luddites. There are probably many who fall into both categories.
But let me begin with some "potentially valid" criticisms.
I still haven’t seen Interstellar yet, but here’s a great interview with Kip Thorne about the movie-making process and what he thinks of the final product. (For a very different view, see Phil Plait.)
tesseract One of the things Kip talks about is that the film refers to the concept of a tesseract, which he thought was fun. A tesseract is a four-dimensional version of a cube; you can’t draw it faithfully in two dimensions, but with a little imagination you can get the idea from the picture on the right. Kip mentions that he first heard of the concept of a tesseract in George Gamow’s classic book One, Two, Three… Infinity. Which made me feel momentarily proud, because I remember reading about it there, too — and only later did I find out that many (presumably less sophisticated) people heard of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s equally classic book, A Wrinkle in Time.
I generally enjoy writing movie reviews; they’re a fun way to gather my thoughts about a movie, analyzing its plot, the production, the writing, even the science.
It’s for that very reason I dreaded writing this one. I was really looking forward to seeing Interstellar … but I thought it was awful. A total mess. So if you’re looking for a tl;dr, there it is. I really, really didn’t like it. And I really, really wanted to.
I love that a movie like this has been made. So unapologetic in its ambitions. I love science, and movies that make you think. It's a real accomplishment in my opinion, and I can understand why Nolan, Zimmer, Anne and the whole team are proud of it.
The intersection — maybe the union! — of science and sci-fi geekdom is overcome with excitement about the upcoming movie Interstellar, which opens November 7. It’s a collaboration between director Christopher Nolan and physicist Kip Thorne, both heroes within their respective communities. I haven’t seen it yet myself, nor do I know any secret scoop, but there’s good reason to believe that this film will have some of the most realistic physics of any recent blockbuster we’ve seen. If it’s a success, perhaps other filmmakers will take the hint?
Kip, who is my colleague at Caltech (and a former guest-blogger), got into the science-fiction game quite a while back. He helped Carl Sagan with some science advice for his book Contact, later turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster. In particular, Sagan wanted to have some way for his characters to traverse great distances at speeds faster than light, by taking a shortcut through spacetime. Kip recognized that a wormhole was what was called for, but also realized that any form of faster-than-light travel had the possibility of leading to travel backwards in time. Thus was the entire field of wormhole time travel born.
Something that I already saw JMC tackle and something I agree with him is that a lot of people are calling certain aspects "pseduo science"
(specifically the one pertaining to Cooper in the 5th dimension and love)
It directly deals with string theory/M-theory and in that sense like JMC mentioned is entirely plausible. As of right now General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory aren't even compatible which is why astrophysicist are still searching for the "theory of everything". The more you read up on it the more unbelievable the scenarios become but that's just a case where fact truly is much stranger than fiction.
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at the people who raved about the script, haha. Chris somehow turned it on itself like he does in all his films. 
The first shot really reminded me of The Prestige for that reason.
She also doesn't continue working with the elder Brand, IIRC. I think the grandson figures most of that out in their barn. Again, kind of random.
