Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I think there's a lot of cynicism and sarcasm in the movie-going community today, and for a lot of people anything remotely broad or sentimental just instantly gets rejected with an eye-roll which is unfortunate. Movies are either expected to be grim-dark cynical, or they have to do the Marvel thing and constantly wink at the audience and make fun of themselves.

For me, the sentimentality works in an optimistic sci-fi story like this, because it just harkens back to classic sci-fi literature and Twilight Zone stuff, which is full of those kind of broad emotional beats.

I'm just so glad Nolan's making a movie about real ideas and emotions here.

Inception, once you've rewatched it a few times, is such a cynical construction. It's elaborate plot mechanics around boring people doing something that doesn't matter and has no thematic relevance, all to justify action scenes that aren't even particularly exciting to watch.

Interstellar feels deeply passionate and human by comparison, and if it's occasionally awkward and blubbery about it, at least it's doing it for a good reason and out of a desire to inspire and motivate. I'll take that any day over cold, calculating nihilism.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

bullet3 wrote:

I think there's a lot of cynicism and sarcasm in the movie-going community today, and for a lot of people anything remotely broad or sentimental just instantly gets rejected with an eye-roll which is unfortunate. Movies are either expected to be grim-dark cynical, or they have to do the Marvel thing and constantly wink at the audience and make fun of themselves.

For me, the sentimentality works in an optimistic sci-fi story like this, because it just harkens back to classic sci-fi literature and Twilight Zone stuff, which is full of those kind of broad emotional beats.

I'm just so glad Nolan's making a movie about real ideas and emotions here.

Inception, once you've rewatched it a few times, is such a cynical construction. It's elaborate plot mechanics around boring people doing something that doesn't matter and has no thematic relevance, all to justify action scenes that aren't even particularly exciting to watch.

Interstellar feels deeply passionate and human by comparison, and if it's occasionally awkward and blubbery about it, at least it's doing it for a good reason and out of a desire to inspire and motivate. I'll take that any day over cold, calculating nihilism.

YES to all of this.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Squiggly_P wrote:

The other thing I didn't like had to do with the physics of black holes. One of the characters says that you might be able to escape a black hole's event horizon if you were to go fast enough, and that they should try to send a probe and see if they can get it back. Now it's very true that you could escape a black hole if you were going fast enough. The problem is that you'd have to be going faster than light, because light can't get past the event horizon. Theoretically, anything going fast enough to escape a black hole would have infinite mass and energy. At least, that's what my feeble mind has been able to comprehend from reading about such things on the interwebs. I may be wrong about that science part. But it bugged me. The going faster than light thing bugged me.

From the little reading I did, the fact that the black hole is supermassive (and I'm not sure they ever say that in the film, but whatever) means that it's possible to escape the event horizon. Dunno why, but I'm okay with this explanation.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I loved it. It's a beautiful movie.

There are plenty of nits to pick, if you want. Cooper showing up and NASA and immediately being asked to save the world and like RIGHT NOW. The very idea of wasting time on the first planet, where every hour costs 7 years on Earth AND on the ship they leave in orbit. Some of the 5-dimensional being stuff, particularly the random trapped-behind-the-endless-bookshelf sequence.

But my only real complaint is that way too much of it echoes Contact and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I'm not saying that the stories are the same or even that a lot of beats are the same or that no movie can ever do any of these things again, but there were just a lot of moments that were really reminiscent of those films for no particular reason.

2001

  • There's a mysterious thing in space apparently put there by aliens for us to visit

  • Scientists have been studying this for years in secret before the Big Mission

  • Video messages from home that take a long time to arrive

  • Silence in space is covered by orchestral music

  • Rotating the ship to make artificial gravity

  • The scientists back home haven't given the astronauts the full story

  • The Big Mission is sabotaged by a crazy guy popping airlocks and whatnot

  • Travel thru a worm/black hole to an otherwise unreachable planet the aliens want us to get to

  • Creation of a new stage of human life on that planet

  • A character ages many years over the course of the story and ends up in a hospital in space

Contact

  • Aliens send us a mysterious message

  • A female scientist is obsessed with the alien communication

  • NASA sends the Big Mission to meet the aliens without any real idea of what will happen

  • A crazy guy sabotages the Big Mission with a bomb

  • The ship rattles apart until the astronaut separates him/herself from it to float freely

  • The aliens turn out to be the female scientist's dad (sort of), and they meet in a surprisingly earth-like setting despite some crazy inter-dimensional travel

  • MM

And then there are even a couple of things that are really reminiscent of Red Planet: using a somewhat untrustworthy military robot with weird, non-organic body movement on a scientific mission and ending up scavenging parts from it; and a fistfight in spacesuits on a cliff.

Last edited by Zarban (2014-11-12 08:32:48)

Warning: I'm probably rewriting this post as you read it.

Zarban's House of Commentaries

Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I also got a strong The Abyss vibe from the movie, with the focus on love, a human villain who is defeated before the 3rd act, and Cooper going into the black hole and sending back messages being reminiscent of the ending of that film.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Cinemagoers watching sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar have staggered out of the film after almost a quarter of a century to find that only a few hours had passed outside...

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts … 4111492780

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Just saw it in IMAX at the National Air and Space Museum in DC. What an experience. It made Gravity feel like a like a bottle episode. There are plenty of valid quibbles about the science and the story that have been discussed, but it was so well-told none of them bothered me too much.

It didn't feel long to me at all. It could have been an hour longer and I would have been on board. That Dailymash article may be a joke, but my clock was seriously messed up by this movie. I walked out not knowing where or when I was. I also left with a surreal sense of greater purpose and importance, until I was reminded I have to wake up tomorrow morning to go serve food at a football game. It was weird.

The dialogue was easy to understand in my theater, with the exception of Michael Caine's dying words. Didn't get any of that last sentence. Were we supposed to?

As for the score, I was digging it the whole time and didn't know it was Zimmer till the credits rolled. That's right, I went the whole movie without making the Nolan-Zimmer connection. I was sorta wrapped up on a journey through space and time (and... love?), and it didn't cross my mind.

Last edited by Sam F (2014-11-15 06:19:57)

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Loved it to death, want to start ranting about space to people now.

The sound mix wasn't at all bad in my theatre, so that was good. I had mixed feelings about the first act--too much coincidence and rushing IMO--and I agree that Damon ' s stunt casting wasn't a good idea. Actually, I wish Caine had been left out for this one too. His performance is curiously flat in a lot of scenes, though his reading of "Do Not Go Gentle..." made up for a lot of that.

And as has been noted, holy shit Hans Zimmer did a good score again. I'm not usually a fan of synthesizer unless it's used extremely minimally, but this was fantaatic. The eeriness and the grandeur of it were just perfect.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Sam, Michael Caine's last words were just the "Do not go gentle into that good night" poem.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I'm kind of partial to And Death Shall Have No Dominion if he's going to do a Thomas thing:

Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Last edited by paulou (2014-11-15 23:44:34)

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36

Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I can't be the only poetry lover who's mentioned on Twitter that screenwriters need to discover that there's other (and better) poems about death than "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." I've seen oodles of movies do the same Dylan Thomas thing. I've yet to see someone use Emily Dickinson.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Understanding dialogue is so last decade...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2QO1q2IIAA4Yhp.jpg:large

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/no … pher-nolan

If Nolan wants to direct music videos for Zimmer, I've no problem with that.  yikes

Here's the final crescendo...

Last edited by avatar (2014-11-17 14:03:43)

not long to go now...

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38

Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I'm certainly not one for spoon-feeding, but if you literally need a disclaimer to inform your audience that the equipment isn't broken...that's a shortcoming, not a feature.

That said, I had no issue making out the dialog, so I'm not sure what the hoopla is about.

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39

Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I saw the movie twice in two different theaters, an independent neighborhood theater in Chicago with digital projection and a big-ass multiplex with IMAX. Both times it wasn't that the music was too loud or too out in front but that much of the dialogue, particularly toward the beginning of the film, was simply inaudible. People in both theaters were frequently leaning over to each other asking "What'd he say?" I had problems making out what characters were saying. In the theaters I was in, you didn't have to be a pro audio engineer to know something was seriously wrong with the sound.

Last edited by Rob (2014-11-17 19:50:47)

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I've only seen it once on a normal screen, and I heard the dialogue just fine for pretty much the entire thing. *shrugs*

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Rob wrote:

I saw the movie twice in two different theaters, an independent neighborhood theater in Chicago with digital projection and a big-ass multiplex with IMAX. Both times it wasn't that the music was too loud or too out in front but that much of the dialogue, particularly toward the beginning of the film, was simply inaudible. People in both theaters were frequently leaning over to each other asking "What'd he say?" I had problems making out what characters were saying. In the theaters I was in, you didn't have to be a pro audio engineer to know something was seriously wrong with the sound.

Likewise. I couldn't hear shit the first hour, music or not. And I was in the prime central position. The second hour was slightly better during the quieter moments. That was a 70MM presentation. Tomorrow I'm seeing it again in IMAX, but I guess I'll only know what they're saying once I get the blu-ray and put the frigg'n subtitles on.

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I saw it in 70mm IMAX and I had almost no issues with dialogue. I couldn't make out the exchange with TARS during the take-off, but I think that's forgivable. None of the people I went with had a problem either. Maybe the theater did something to fix it? I doubt that hundreds of other people are imagining a problem with the film. My theater probably just didn't care about Nolan's artistic vision.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Saw it at Universal Citywalk and didn't notice any particular issues with sound.  I did notice a couple spots where the music was mixed much louder over dialog than usual but I assumed that was a choice, not a mistake.

Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

I saw it in imax this past weekend. Honestly the visuals were nice, but weren't anything jaw-breaking, although I did spend a lot of time comparing it to Gravity. I thought the movie was great up until he goes into the black hole. I can see why he went for the happy ending, and listening to Cooper's voice get shaky as he went further and further in made me wish for a happy ending. But the stuff after the black hole just doesn't hold up, I don't think there's any possible way for it to be future humans who set up the tesseract. I think the theory that whoever sent them there just wanted them to go into the black hole is a nice one though. Also they knew about the time dilation on the water planet, they should've realized that the astronaut had been on that planet for about half an hour compared to other astronauts who had been on for a lot longer.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

MrDudeMan wrote:

But the stuff after the black hole just doesn't hold up, I don't think there's any possible way for it to be future humans who set up the tesseract. I think the theory that whoever sent them there just wanted them to go into the black hole is a nice one though.

How can you say with certainty what is possible and impossible for humans thousands of years from now?

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2014-11-19 01:29:32)

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Doctor Submarine wrote:
MrDudeMan wrote:

But the stuff after the black hole just doesn't hold up, I don't think there's any possible way for it to be future humans who set up the tesseract. I think the theory that whoever sent them there just wanted them to go into the black hole is a nice one though.

How can you say with certainty what is possible and impossible for humans thousands of years from now?

I can't say with certainty, but it's no more likely than any other scenario out there. The wormhole would never have existed, so Anne Hathaway never would have made it to start the foreign colony. Sure maybe in a timeline without the wormhole they're able to come up with a solution that lets them stay on earth longer, and they eventually come up with the same technology. But if that's true, why even bother altering the past? I just think they ignored too many points to make a somewhat unsatisfying reunion happen.

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

So many questions:

1. Why did MM, from behind the bookshelf, beg "STAY" and then minutes later in an earlier time window, transmit the NASA coordinates that set up the events that lead to him leaving?
2. Why does the inside of the black hole look like a car wash?
3. So the black hole was just another worm hole? Is there a Hollywood black hole that is NOT a portal somewhere?
4. If it was humans from the future, why go back and alter the past when they've clearly overcome their predicament, otherwise there wouldn't be humans in the future?
5. If it was aliens, why help out in such an ambiguous way? 12 candidate systems, most not suitable.
6. Why are aliens spying on a young girl's bedroom from behind the books? Kinda creepy.
7. How can the watch Morse Code system work away from the bedroom?
8. Why does the gravitational anomaly only affect dust, drones, combine harvesters, watches, coins, etc but not life?Gravity affects ALL matter.
9.  MM wants to fling around a neutron star! What neutron star? We never see it again. And what sun is lighting this system?
10. MM is a pilot who claims he's never left that stratosphere. By the end, he's JJ Abrams-ing around a frigg'n black hole.
11. Why do the Rangers need a Saturn V to take off from Earth, but have no trouble getting off the tidal planet which is 130% of the gravity of Earth? And then it lands on another planet. And takes off again.
12. Why are all the instrument panels and controls so retro? Analogue dials, etc. Looks like 1950s technology. Yet they have AI robots, suspended animation, and are building Rama cylinders?
13. Didn't anyone think to check on Brande before Murph told MM to? Murph the old crone seemed to know Edmonds was dead. How? And why was Edmonds dead? Shouldn't he just be asleep waiting for everyone to rock up?
14. Why is the bandwidth so restricted back to earth? Does the alien ISP throttle upload?
15. Why is there a dramatic organ crescendo at the beginning when MM just looks out the window?
16. Would robots talk to each other with speech rather than a direct link? That's so Phantom Menace.
17. Almost all shots of the Ranger are from cameras seemingly attached to the fuselage, like this is a Found Footage movie. But the movie breaks this convention when it lands on the tidal planet. It's the only 'beauty shot' of the Ranger that you see.
18. Why is MM resigned that he has to wait for the engines to drain, allowing years to pass on Earth, but when the second wave comes, he suddenly remembers he can flush the engines with the cabin air?
19. So there's no other suitable planet in this galaxy? The Kepler mission found hundreds of exoplanets just in our local region of the galaxy. So our new home is in ANOTHER galaxy in a system with no sun, wedged between a neutron star and a black hole? If we don't get fried by radiation from the pulsar or burnt by the x-rays off the accretion disc, we'll be spaghettified by the tidal forces from the black hole. Real homely. What next on the new planet? They mostly come at night. Mostly.
20. Earth was a little dusty every now and then. But the brief glimpse we get of our new home is of a rocky desert planet. Does Cooper Station have a reverse gear?

Last edited by avatar (2014-11-19 14:01:19)

not long to go now...

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

avatar wrote:

So many questions:

1. Why did MM, from behind the bookshelf, beg "STAY" and then minutes later in an earlier time window, transmit the NASA coordinates that set up the events that lead to him leaving?
2. Why does the inside of the black hole look like a car wash?
3. So the black hole was just another worm hole? Is there a Hollywood black hole that is NOT a portal somewhere?
4. If it was humans from the future, why go back and alter the past when they've clearly overcome their predicament, otherwise there wouldn't be humans in the future?
5. If it was aliens, why help out in such an ambiguous way? 12 candidate systems, most not suitable.
6. Why are aliens spying on a young girl's bedroom from behind the books? Kinda creepy.
7. How can the watch Morse Code system work away from the bedroom?
8. Why does the gravitational anomaly only affect dust, drones, combine harvesters, watches, coins, etc but not life?Gravity affects ALL matter.
9.  MM wants to fling around a neutron star! What neutron star? We never see it again. And what sun is lighting this system?
10. MM is a pilot who claims he's never left that stratosphere. By the end, he's JJ Abrams-ing around a frigg'n black hole.
11. Why do the Rangers need a Saturn V to take off from Earth, but have no trouble getting off the tidal planet which is 130% of the gravity of Earth? And then it lands on another planet. And takes off again.
12. Why are all the instrument panels and controls so retro? Analogue dials, etc. Looks like 1950s technology. Yet they have AI robots, suspended animation, and are building Rama cylinders?
13. Didn't anyone think to check on Brande before Murph told MM to? Murph the old crone seemed to know Edmonds was dead. How? And why was Edmonds dead? Shouldn't he just be asleep waiting for everyone to rock up?
14. Why is the bandwidth so restricted back to earth? Does the alien ISP throttle upload?
15. Why is there a dramatic organ crescendo at the beginning when MM just looks out the window?
16. Would robots talk to each other with speech rather than a direct link? That's so Phantom Menace.
17. Almost all shots of the Ranger are from cameras seemingly attached to the fuselage, like this is a Found Footage movie. But the movie breaks this convention when it lands on the tidal planet. It's the only 'beauty shot' of the Ranger that you see.
18. Why is MM resigned that he has to wait for the engines to drain, allowing years to pass on Earth, but when the second wave comes, he suddenly remembers he can flush the engines with the cabin air?
19. So there's no other suitable planet in this galaxy? The Kepler mission found hundreds of exoplanets just in our local region of the galaxy. So our new home is in ANOTHER galaxy in a system with no sun, wedged between a neutron star and a black hole? If we don't get fried by radiation from the pulsar or burnt by the x-rays off the accretion disc, we'll be spaghettified by the tidal forces from the black hole. Real homely. What next on the new planet? They mostly come at night. Mostly.
20. Earth was a little dusty every now and then. But the brief glimpse we get of our new home is of a rocky desert planet. Does Cooper Station have a reverse gear?

Hoo boy. I'm gonna do my best here.

1) He impulsively begs "STAY" because he wants to see his daughter again. It's only once TARS shows up that he realizes he can send the data back.

2) Reminded me of like a big NYC library, lol.

3) The black hole didn't transmit him somewhere, though. Not in the same way as a wormhole, anyway. Inside, there was a pocket dimension where he could interact physically with time.

4) They put the wormhole and the black hole there because they knew that, at some point in the past, those two things were required to save humanity. It's closed-loop time.

5) I don't think it was aliens.

6) Future humans doing this is equally creepy.

7) Hmm, I hadn't considered this. Well, Cooper seemed to be able to move gravity and have it stay in place, like he did with the dust particles, so maybe he could make the sequence permanently repeat?

8) It only affected the things that Cooper specifically affected. We don't see him mess with the combine harvesters, but I think we can assume that either he had something to do with it or it was unrelated to the gravity.

9) I don't remember this bit, but the light swirling around the black hole indicates a nearby star maybe?

10) That's the POWER OF LOVE *guitar shred*

11) ...I honestly have no clue. Maybe the atmosphere was thinner??? I don't know if that would even make a difference.

12) Well, the whole theme on Earth is regression. Everyone's regressed to as much of a pre-technological existence as possible. If NASA had the budget, they probably wouldn't have had to resort to retro designs.

13) I think everyone just assumed that all the pilots were dead. And Edmonds probably crashed just like the woman on the water planet.

14) That's why we need space net neutrality, man.

15) Because HE'S THE HEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

16) So the audience can hear them.

17) It breaks so that you can more easily see what the Ranger is doing during the landing. Most of the time, the visceral experience is more important.

18) Surely he doesn't want to get rid of the cabin air unless he has to.

19) Well, the mission was just to explore what's on the other side of the wormhole, with the assumption that it was put there in order to facilitate human migration.

20) Cooper Station would have to contact Elysium to get the OK first.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

Loved. Saw it at 9am (and Nightcrawler at 9pm the same day!) and staggered out into the sunlight somewhat like that Daily Mash article :)

The only thing that has stayed with me was the Damon casting. I liked it in theory, as Mr Nice, Reliable & Dependable played the astronaut they'd set up as all those things, but he seemed too batshit crazy from scene one that I'm not sure it worked. But a small quibble.

I saw it at the Waterloo IMAX London, the sound was awesome, didn't have any dialogue issues but the projection looked like someone had wiped a cat over the lens before the showing. Awful dust & hair issues -- very distracting. Bring on 5.6k digital projection :)

Last edited by Malak (2014-11-21 15:15:54)

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Re: Interstellar (with spoilers)

For anyone who wanted the score and was disappointed that the docking scene wasn't part of it, there's good news and bad news and good news again. a.) The first good news is that Zimmer convinced his higher-ups to let him upload a version of that bit of the score to iTunes. b.) The bad news is that it's an alternate mix without organ, strings, etc. c.) The second good news is that a brave soul on Reddit managed to painstakingly piece together the correct mix and made it available as an mp3. Sound quality is quite good.

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