Atraveller
Banned
The was very obvious, but how that happened still made my jaw dropped.
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Interstellar spoiler thread. All spoilers go in here.
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Tertullian
Member
What a great movie. The dialogue was a fucking mess half the time. But I didn't care.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
Well now, can't have our hero's way to the pretty girl's heart blocked now, can we.
I thought it was pretty stupid and didn't enjoy it at all. It felt like Nolan took a month, watched 2001, Contact, Apollo 13, Star Wars, Alien, and Prometheus, then marathoned a couple seasons of Ancient Aliens and decided to make a movie. The robots were so stupid and comical. The power of love saves humanity. That "twist" that I figured out very early on (although not how they got to the reveal). Some really stupid as shit dialogue befitting a Nolan movie. Stuff supposed to sound cool or deep but is actually dumb as shit if you think about anything for a second. I thought it aped pretty much all of the great space movies, and didn't do anything as well as any of those movies. About 90 minutes in I was getting pretty fed up with the movie. Then it lasted another 90 minutes and kept getting dumber.
Did not like it AT ALL.
Did not like it AT ALL.
Man has to get his rocks off somehow. 70+ years of glop stored up.
Just curious, do you like any Nolan films?
What exactly was so dumb? You criticize a whole lot but mention absolutely nothing in specific...
PeskyToaster
Member
Neil deGrasse Tyson bashed Gravity on its scientific aspects but he enjoyed the film overall. I'm really glad Interstellar stuck to the science because, frankly, fact much more exciting (and stranger) than fiction nearly every time.
Just saw it on IMAX today, I enjoyed it aside from two fairly minor issues that bugged me, so hopefully someone can provide reasonable answers...
1. How did Cooper get from inside a black hole to floating in space near Saturn? The black hole and the wormhole are two different things, right?
2. Was Cooper Station near Saturn because it was on its way to the wormhole, or was it orbiting Saturn? If the latter, why place a large scale colony (as opposed to a transit hub) near Saturn where there's almost no sunlight?
1. How did Cooper get from inside a black hole to floating in space near Saturn? The black hole and the wormhole are two different things, right?
2. Was Cooper Station near Saturn because it was on its way to the wormhole, or was it orbiting Saturn? If the latter, why place a large scale colony (as opposed to a transit hub) near Saturn where there's almost no sunlight?
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
Loved it, I'm sure the shine will wear off shortly but right now I'm just excited at hard science fiction in a Blockbuster. Most of my issues were with the first act and how the premise was set up, but once they got to space I thought it was great. Totally did not see Evil Matt Damon coming, but it made perfect sense. Easily my favorite part of the movie.
NYCmetsfan
Banned
'they' played a role. if you can understand and manipulate gravity and time black holes aren't that special
NYCmetsfan
Banned
the "future human" things was pure speculation on cooper's part. I wouldn't read too much into it or make the bootstrap paradox a certain thing.
Dr. Mann really wasn't "evil" or maniacal in any way. Like Brand, he was doing what he thought he needed to do to preserve the future of the human race.
Cooper symbolized raw human emotion and sentimentality. Dr. Mann symbolized rationality and pragmatism.
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
Admiral Woofington
Member
The robot design is unique and from what I gather an homage to the monolith in Space Odyssey. As an engineer and a lover of robotics in sci-fi and real life it was exhilarating to see all the cool things a rectangle could do and honestly if we start to just stick with humanoid designs to robots and mock anything that tries something different then... I don't know. I guess I'll be sad.
The movie tried to make it pretty clear that it wasn't running off an alternate timeline version of time travel. The way they tried to explain how time travel could work, looking at time as if it were a mountain range that could be transversed, and the way the tesseract was constructed as well as the revelations as to who the ghost was and who shook Brand's hand as they passed through the wormhole make it pretty clear that Nolan was going for the bootstrap paradox. The movie had Coop doing everything that set the movie in motion in the first place. Coop closed the loop in the third act of the movie.
If he was going for say a BttF version of time travel there wouldn't have been any need for the ghost subplot or the wormhole handshake.
I disagree completely (as would most who have seen the film, given the multitude of responses).
The designs for TARS and CASE were absolutely brilliantly and incredibly unique. TARS also had some of the best lines in the film.
TARS will likely become one of the most adored and well known characters in all of science fiction.
flashbandit16
Member
I think the thing Cooper was in, the tesseract, was no longer the black hole but the black hole did transport Cooper to the tesseract. So who ever created the tesseract can control time and space and sent Cooper to Saturn.
Well based on other science fiction and depending the type of space travel Saturn can be used as a fuel source so maybe that is why the space station is there. Also it is possible that Murphy believe that her father would come back and the most likely place would be Saturn so she built the space station there.
I'm wondering why exactly they placed Cooper in that year if they could really have thrown him anywhere in time that doesn't cause a paradox(for example they could have put him back right after the equation is relayed to his daughter).
It seems like he ended up at Saturn at the same time Amelia started the colony on the chosen planet. You would imagine that if they just threw Cooper away from the singularity right after he had fallen into the singularity then he would have come out hundreds and hundreds of years after Amelia had died of old age because he spent much, much longer in a deeper part of Gargantua's gravity pool. So why the hell did they place him there in that random year?
Except that he wasn't. The third act made it pretty clear that time was to be treated as a physical, spatial dimension, with all points in that dimension occurring and existing concurrently.
SwiftDeath
Member
And that shows or proves all of what? The ranger in interstellar is not a space station last I checked and was not at all subjected to only that which a space station is subjected to. Cooper pulls some dangerous maneuver earlier in the film to slow one down that likely pulled a high level of g-forces, and you want me to believe that because there exists a laptop somewhere on ISS, a space station not intended for much movement and certainly not for fast maneuvers and it does some unforeseen task that it's at all believable that a standalone laptop not at all integrated into one of these ranger ships would be tasked with controlling the airlock of all the systems aboard the ship? Hell the power cable was simply plugged in, not even locked down, what happens if in one of those fast maneuvers it comes unplugged and loses power?
I don't see how that changes things. What you're saying is how they managed to travel through time. A bootstrap paradox has nothing to do with that and everything to do with what's passed through time.
It's from wiki, but your point in no way invalidates mine. In fact I agree that this is how they managed to travel through time, I even reference that point in my explaination.
See, this is why whenever I think about the Stable Time Loop or Bootstrap Paradox, I always imagine it as some kind of spiral or spring shape, not a perfect circle. I.e., there must have been some original straight timeline where someone decided to create the self-perpetuity. The audience just never see that starting point, they only see the cycle after it's begun.
Like in Terminator, I think the original John Connor was fathered by someone else. If you put all four movies into one canon (I realize they basically aren't), or at least accept Salvation as canon (it really isn't), sending Reese and the original T-800 back in time didn't perfectly recreate the original John Connor's time. It created an altered version of it (the most notable alteration being the T-800 arriving ahead of schedule).
In Interstellar, if humans did indeed create the wormhole as Cooper merely speculates, I think it's possible they did start with another timeline. Maybe they're the descendants of the kids from Plan B who wanted to save people left behind on Earth, so they made the tesseract Cooper fell into. Maybe they're from a past where fewer people made it and they wanted to save more. Maybe they're from a past where Bran didn't lie to everyone and they immediately knew someone would have to drop into the black hole and transmit the quantum data to complete the equation, so they sent one earlier astronaut to do just that.
Atraveller
Banned
Dude, spoilers.
I love their design, looks so clunky yet super efficient at their jobs.
There doesn't need to be an alternate timeline for a bootstrap paradox to work. It doesn't need to start anywhere. It happens because it's already happened. Basically you aren't changing time, you're just doing whatever it is you already did. Just imagine it as a gif of a spinning top, each frame being a moment in time but you can't really tell where it starts or ends. We look for a starting point because we view time as a line, or a river, where as this makes time into a mountain range.
cluxdeluxe
Banned
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In this movie, pretty much everything was easy to see coming except maybe Alfred's swerve. But especially the ghost one.
I thought they were cringe-worthy, too. Like Jar-Jar levels of bad. It felt completely out of tone with the rest of the movie; its 'comic relief' felt shoehorned in, and all of its delivery was like a comedian mumbling to crickets at an empty comedy club.
I noticed that part of the "point" was that it was bad at telling jokes, I guess, but this still has nothing to do with the movie. It felt really unnecessary to any part of the story (any random, silent probe could have done its job).
I'll admit that the way the thing moved around was different and memorable, but the voice just completely killed it for me.
Admiral Woofington
Member
I find it strangely sweet and sad that Cooper and TARS are almost like the only family that each has left at the end. TARS from what I recall at the end wasn't anything special and Cooper grew attached to him throughout the movie. A boy and his robot.
edit: well TARS technically has his twin, but until then lol
edit: well TARS technically has his twin, but until then lol
Maybe I didn't understand it right, but I feel like the purpose and the details surrounding the formula were very unclear. Is it something that allows them to make their own wormholes? Is it something that makes much more effective interstellar ships? The only difference over the entire course of Murphy's life from finding the formula to her death was that there is an awesome cylinder space station next to the wormhole. If the formula is about space travel or gravity and time then why aren't the humans already gods over the 3rd/4th dimensions? Taking billions of humans from earth over to Saturn is a hefty undertaking but would you really need a space travel equation for that? Didn't we already have that technology?
I must have really missed something. Can someone explain the purpose/effect of the formula?
I must have really missed something. Can someone explain the purpose/effect of the formula?
They needed the formula to get the ships to carry everyone to the wormhole off the ground. Keep in mind that these ships had to be absolutely massive to carry the sheer number of people required to make plan A work. It takes a lot of fuel to get even a rocket for three or four people into space, I can't imagine how much fuel it would take to get a rocket filled with hundreds of thousands off the ground. Let alone the number required to completely evacuate the earth.
Yeah?
I think you're thinking too hard haha. Stop struggling to find something wrong with it and just accept it's completely plausible.
Well in the literal sense it was Coop communicating from the tesseract, but that was only possible because future humans had mastered the 5th dimension.
I'm expecting TARS to feature in both amazing and terrible cosplay.
Admiral Woofington
Member
wouldn't be hard. Just very awkward to walk around it for more than a couple of minutes lol.
Seriously I can't remember the last time I watched a sci-fi film and said "I want my own version of that robot". I want my own TARS.
With sarcastic meter up to 100%
NYCmetsfan
Banned
the bootstrap paradox would be that coop had to save the future for these future humans to succeed in helping. I think they are completely independent and thus not humans, (I think the human line was kind of like coop's equivalent of the 'daddy is gonna save us' the theme was humanities reliance on each other to overcome odds, coop believed he had his fellow humans helping him).
there was no closed loop. there is no loop, he was extra dimensional, time had no meaning and was just like we think of space. all points accessible at once
NYCmetsfan
Banned
it allowed them to understand gravity. they don't say much more. but understanding gravity and adding that to space and time would lead to much easier space travel since you don't need fuel or speed you just manipulate the space around you. it didn't allow for all understanding. I don't think it was the unified theory of everything or something.
But how did humanity survive, if its survival depended on this mission's success?
Maybe Brand's new humans?
NYCmetsfan
Banned
that's why I don't think they're humans or from the people saved from earth
other wise its the same terminator bootstrap paradox.
Fair enough, I sort of figured it had something to do with the transportation/ship aspects of moving a civilization. It's weird that the transcendent humans(future humans) actually cared enough about evacuating unnecessary people off an old dying world to meddle in the spacetime of the lower dimensions. It makes you wonder if the purpose of relaying the equation to lower/past humans is part of their own transcendence(bootstrap) OR if they merely wanted to aid the plan A humans.
It's quite possible that once beings enter the 5th dimension the paradoxes of a 3rd dimension no longer apply. Meaning once you make it to the 5th it doesn't matter what happens to the history of how you got there from the 3rd dimension so you can fuck around with it however you want. You could potentially cut the loop and exterminate 3rd dimension humans if there were any reason to and you still wouldn't be affected.
Thanks, this is more or less the answer I was looking for. It's really frustrating how ambiguous that element of the story is.
There's no reason for us to think they were anything but future humans though, the universe was conspicuously empty of other forms of life. If there had been other aliens I could buy that they were something else, but from what we saw humans were the only forms of life. If there had been an alien or something standing next to Brand, helping her out or something then I'd agree with you.
So basically our argument comes down to: do you believe that they were future humans or full-fledged aliens?
Actually my point stands anyway since Coop was the one that sent himself into space, creating a loop. He may have had help, but that doesn't erase the fact that he created a loop when he gave himself those coordinates. Without them he doesn't get into space to give himself the coordinates. Just because the beings saw time as a space to be navigated doesn't mean there's no paradox, it just means that's how they created the opportunity for one.
BeatResetsTheWorld
Banned
Ugh, I have to keep quoting my post because people don't seem to get it. Stop thinking of time as some linear line you go forward and back on, or you're going to keep trying to find "paradoxes"
Basically, like I said, the idea of a "paradox" is only applicable if you view time as a linear 1 direction line, that can be curved back on itself (making a loop) as opposed to just another dimension that can be traveled like we do through our 3 dimensions
Felt like it took 23 years for this to end amirite?
HHEYOOOOOOOHHHHH
(Sorry I had to)
Actually I did like the ending quite a bit. Didn't seem right for him just to be done and chill.
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