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Interstellar spoiler thread. All spoilers go in here.

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It's more than that scene, it the whole of Coop's character. He's got strong feelings about just about everything that drive him and they make him one of the most alive characters in any Nolan film. Most of his characters seem emotionally impacted (often for good reasons, but still). Memento (as I recall) is actually an exception to this, as Pearce's character seems to be a walking wound.

We are told Cooper feels things, but outside of the Earth scenes those attributes aren't reflected by his behavior.
 
Love monologue is actually pretty much explained. Think of us as 3D beings, to 2D beings, we will only appear as a flat line if the 2D world is absolutely flat. if we as 3D beings stepped into a 2D world we would see them as flat and only being able to move left right forward back but never up and down, that is the 3D plane we are used to. we as 3D beings see things that a 2D being could not. Similarly that which is 5D would see things totally different than us and like 2D cannot comprehend the 3D environment, we cannot comprehend the 5D environment. This means that emotions in 5D can be quantified physically. anger, love, happiness could have a physical representation in 5D universe. The fact that the last moment for Cooper was his thought of dying and love for his daughter, in the tesseract, built by 5D was able to extract that representation of love for his daughter to populate the past to affect the future
At first I thought you were joking. After reading that a few times it started making sense.

But still.. wat

To counter the disliked scenes, here are some of my favorites:

- The initial part where they warp through the wormhole looked amazing and scary
- The water planet was awesome
- The 23 year jump was crazy. Seeing their third crew member all old and the archived footage
- The evil Matt Damon fight was cool
- The airlock scene was intense
- Falling through the black hole was awesome and even scarier than the wormhole
 
Interesting article from Scientific American on their issue with Interstellar's science

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-interstellar-travel/?WT.mc_id=SA_NightTweets

At first I was like OK
The hard part is that outside of decidedly speculative equations there is no evidence whatsoever that wormholes actually exist, let alone that we could ever manipulate or traverse them if they did.


Then I was like what?
Suffice to say that the task of traveling faster than light is in all likelihood even harder than making an interstellar voyage within the firm constraints of well-understood physical laws. If you put your faith in wormholes and warp drives to take us to the stars, you might as well rely on the intercessions of gods, ghosts, and demons as well—they’ll probably help just as much, which is not at all. Wormholes and other faster-than-light travel schemes won’t take us to the stars anytime soon, if ever.
 
Interesting article from Scientific American on their issue with Interstellar's science

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-interstellar-travel/?WT.mc_id=SA_NightTweets

At first I was like OK

Then I was like what?

I think they missed the part where the movie describes how advanced beings from a higher plane of existence create the wormhole. You need to suspend your disbelief a little bit. There are some harder science concepts in the movie but it's not meant to portray a realistic situation by any means I don't think.
 
Interesting article from Scientific American on their issue with Interstellar's science

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-interstellar-travel/?WT.mc_id=SA_NightTweets

At first I was like OK

Then I was like what?

They're kind of right though, wormholes and FTL travel are so far fetched that praying to be teleported to another planet is about as likely to work.

I think they missed the part where the movie describes how advanced beings from a higher plane of existence create the wormhole. You need to suspend your disbelief a little bit. There are some harder science concepts in the movie but it's not meant to portray a realistic situation by any means I don't think.

I don't think the quote is about the movie, they're talking about how realistic it would be to expect a real life situation to play out like it did in the movie.

Maybe there is nothing beyond the 4th. What right do we even have to call it a dimension.

"Time as the fourth dimension" theories kind of annoy me because dimensions are usually referred to as spatial. You can have as many spatial dimensions as you want.

Check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqeqW3g8N2Q

It also contains an analogy similar to the pen through paper presented in the movie.
 
Yeah interstellar travel itself is science fantasy. It always has been. We might get there some day, but I don't think it'll be in our lifetimes, our children's lifetimes, or our children's children's lifetimes. I don't see a point in arguing that it isn't realistic now, because obviously it isn't, and it might never be, but... that's what the story is about. :P
 
Nevermind a director's cut, I just want to know if Nolan ever actually filmed a scene with Cooper visiting a grave or some sort of memorial for his son before he flew off for further adventures with TARS. It just cracks me up to think that his first born son was pretty much treated as a sock puppet character. It's just so hilarious given the larger theme of love and family the show embraced.

Yeah, that bothered me a lot too.

I hope we do get a directors cut that adds a few scenes to flesh things out, like some longer space shots, some confirmation in the end on whether the wormhole is there or not, and yes some information about Coop's son. But what I really want from the blu ray is a corrected audio mix. Honestly if they don't fix the sound levels I might not even buy it.
 
Listening to the /Filmcast and they noted that Anne Hathaway, in an interview with The Guardian, said she was having a lot of trouble figuring out the tone/delivery of the now infamous love monologue. Nolan told her to say it like it was something she'd always known to be true.

I think she did as good a job as anyone with it, but yeah, sounds like she had some issues with it, as well.
 
My interpretation is this: The wormhole's location wasn't a test of technological advancement, it's the proof that future humans are just not very good at pinpointing an exact time and space (like all the wormholes and gravitational messages started many many years ago). They needed a conduit to reach Murph, so they built a tesseract, and Cooper was the key that starts the engine. Cooper entered the black hole, convinced that plan A would never work, and he left his daughter to die, the tesseract then enabled Cooper to access the time and place he wanted to go back to, thus fulfilling his purpose.
 
My interpretation is this: The wormhole's location wasn't a test of technological advancement, it's the proof that future humans are just not very good at pinpointing an exact time and space (like all the wormholes and gravitational messages started many many years ago). They needed a conduit to reach Murph, so they built a tesseract, and Cooper was the key that starts the engine. Cooper entered the black hole, convinced that plan A would never work, and he left his daughter to die, the tesseract then enabled Cooper to access the time and place he wanted to go back to, thus fulfilling his purpose.

They were able to create all of the other phenomena around Earth though.
 
Still, the gravity impacting the planet was so powerful it affected the relative time stream where 7 minutes on the surface was equivalent of 17 years on earth. That is like a 1,200,000x difference. To lift off from the water planet's surface would require massive amount of energy and fuel, because the mass of the shuttle would be in very high numbers, hell it should be crushed. Every person on that planet should have been crushed, but let's pretend they weren't and could walk on it. Let's pretend the shuttle sustained the pressure well.
That still leaves us a shuttle which needs to spend an enormous amount of energy just to hover in the air as it's mass on this planet is equivalent propably to ten fuel rockets. They even build a super massive space station that needed a gravity algorithm to lift off the earth.
Not to mention that when the wormhole appeared, they said that it affected the physics around the earth, leaving a lot of phenomena which allowed such massive super space stations be build and that was 40 years ago from the present of the film's timeline. The question still stands, because they could have easily have made an oversized shuttle to do the tasks a rocket does and still outperform it's requirements. Because it was very clearly capable to sustain overload.

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the gravity on the planet and the time dilation two different things ? We have on one hand a planet where the gravity is 3x greater than the one on Earth but that's only due to the planet itself, it's mass, atmosphere... And then on the other hand it happens that this planet is located in a region of space that's been bent by the proximity of a super heavy object.

To them the effects of Gargantua aren't really noticeable because they are subjected to the gravity of the water planet (being closer to it and Gravity being a weak force, which is why the moon is attracted by the earth and not the sun per example).

That or I'm full of shit. Anyone with some sort of scientific knowledge here ?
 
We are told Cooper feels things, but outside of the Earth scenes those attributes aren't reflected by his behavior.

Well, the Earth scenes are 1/3 of the movie.

And his desire to see his daughter drives his decisions on the mission.

And he clearly has all sorts of feelings that drive his actions from the imperfect dock onward.

I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement except to be contrary.
 
Right. But if they could create phenomena around Earth, they could place a wormhole around Earth. They chose not to.
Maybe it's harder focus on one point when they are interfering with our plane of existence in such a large scale. It's just speculation, just like "testing humans' capabilities". And why are they testing humans anyway? If mankind does fail the test, are they going to just give up on humans?
 
Well, the Earth scenes are 1/3 of the movie.

And his desire to see his daughter drives his decisions on the mission.

And he clearly has all sorts of feelings that drive his actions from the imperfect dock onward.

I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement except to be contrary.

Yea the dude literally ran to the video monitor the second he returned from the Water planet mission. And then started crying ....
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the gravity on the planet and the time dilation two different things ? We have on one hand a planet where the gravity is 3x greater than the one on Earth but that's only due to the planet itself, it's mass, atmosphere... And then on the other hand it happens that this planet is located in a region of space that's been bent by the proximity of a super heavy object.

To them the effects of Gargantua aren't really noticeable because they are subjected to the gravity of the water planet (being closer to it and Gravity being a weak force, which is why the moon is attracted by the earth and not the sun per example).

That or I'm full of shit. Anyone with some sort of scientific knowledge here ?
raphier thought it was the planet's own gravitational field that was causing time dilation (which is actually from the black hole btw), and they should been crushed on the surface.
 
Maybe it's harder focus on one point when they are interfering with our plane of existence in such a large scale. It's just speculation, just like "testing humans' capabilities". And why are they testing humans anyway? If the mankind does fail the test, are they going to just give up on humans?

No, the wormhole would just sit there until they can reach it.
 
Regarding that Scientific American article-- the Wormhole premise is the leap, and the justifications for it. I read somewhere that the idea was to have a movie that would allow for interaction with some of the most exotic things in the universe. Crazy planets, black holes, and time dilation. So accept one fantastic leap to get to the more hard-sciency stuff.

I wouldn't call this science fantasy. Star Wars and Star Trek and Doctor Who are science fantasy. This is sci-fi with a couple of gimmes to get you there.
 
Well, the Earth scenes are 1/3 of the movie.

And his desire to see his daughter drives his decisions on the mission.

And he clearly has all sorts of feelings that drive his actions from the imperfect dock onward.

I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement except to be contrary.

Nevermind a director's cut, I just want to know if Nolan ever actually filmed a scene with Cooper visiting a grave or some sort of memorial for his son before he flew off for further adventures with TARS. It just cracks me up to think that his first born son was pretty much treated as a sock puppet character. It's just so hilarious given the larger theme of love and family the show embraced.

It's not just his apathy toward his son that's ridiculous. He spends the entire movie trying to get back to his children, and we're continually beaten over the head by how important family is (to the point where the love between parent and child is a legitimate threat to the entire future of the human race), but when Cooper succeeds over all his trials and tribulations, after he travels across a galaxy and across decades of lost time, after he is reunited with his family, which has blossomed into something much larger than last he saw, he completely ignores them, spends about two minutes talking calmly to his daughter, and immediately heads back into space. It's as if once he gets back, he can't wait to get away.


.
 
Was Cooper his first name or his surname? At the end of the film they refered to him at Dr. Cooper and also the station was named Cooper but after his daughter? Does that mean his grandson was called Coop Cooper? And why did Topher Grace just randomly appear about halfway through with zero introduction? Did I miss something?
 
Best quality "Docking" audio I've found so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYa5luHb2DA

763.gif


Damn, thanks for sharing! The dialogue made it even better. BLURAY PLS.
 
raphier thought it was the planet's own gravitational field that was causing time dilation (which is actually from the black hole btw), and they should been crushed on the surface.

Yes I got that ^^
"Aren't the gravity on the planet and the time dilation two different things ?".
"This planet is located in a region of space that's been bent by the proximity of a super heavy object"
 
How would they even be able to survive on the other side of the wormhole if they can't make it to Saturn in two years on minimal resources?
The traveling sequence through the wormhole only took minutes, so not hard at all. Shipping stuff becomes much easier if the wormhole is near Earth, heck, they probably don't need that gravity equation to save a bunch of people.

Besides, if the time loop theory is correct, then they knew the humans did pass and will pass the test, so why bother testing at all?
Yes I got that ^^
"Aren't the gravity on the planet and the time dilation two different things ?".
"This planet is located in a region of space that's been bent by the proximity of a super heavy object"
No? They're in relative free-fall compared to the black hole so they feel no gravity, and it's a time-dragging frame anyway.
You're making the same argument as the people who said the earth couldn't move because else the winds would have destroyed everything. Frame of references how do they work?
sleeping.gif
^this, they were orbiting around it.
 
At first I thought you were joking. After reading that a few times it started making sense.

But still.. wat

To counter the disliked scenes, here are some of my favorites:

- The initial part where they warp through the wormhole looked amazing and scary
- The water planet was awesome
- The 23 year jump was crazy. Seeing their third crew member all old and the archived footage
- The evil Matt Damon fight was cool
- The airlock scene was intense
- Falling through the black hole was awesome and even scarier than the wormhole

You forgot one more scene, DAT LAUNCH SCENE. Pretty much the best launch sequence on film and the way it ends in total absolute silence when they reach space just blows my mind everytime.
 
Planning to see this again in IMAX, as this movie begs to be seen on the largest screen possible. I only regret not seeing it in IMAX the first time, and I only hope I won't have to be subjected to the FURIOUS 7 trailer again.

I really need to check out Nolan's other films.
 

So your beef with my comment is that the denouement doesn't fit my comment, even though the rest of the movie did?

Nitpicking 101.

That ending scene with him taking off was a weird note, to be sure, but on the whole Coop is an emotional, alive, feeling guy much moreso than anyone else in Nolan's films. And it's done by showing, not by telling.
 
Went and saw it yesterday... and I love it. When I walked out of the theatre I was kinda like "Ok, well that was good, a bit strange, but good." It has grown on me since then though and now I wanna see it again.

I absolutely love Nolan for using as little CGI as possible. One of my favorite film makers for sure.
You forgot one more scene, DAT LAUNCH SCENE. Pretty much the best launch sequence on film and the way it ends in total absolute silence when they reach space just blows my mind everytime.
This! OMG dem goose bumps, dat sound!
 
So your beef with my comment is that the denouement doesn't fit my comment, even though the rest of the movie did?

Nitpicking 101.

That ending scene with him taking off was a weird note, to be sure, but on the whole Coop is an emotional, alive, feeling guy much moreso than anyone else in Nolan's films. And it's done by showing, not by telling.

I believe the ending is one of if not the most important part of a movie. It's what you take with you after the credits roll. I don't think pointing out problems with the execution of the ending is nitpicking. That's not a minor problem. We are beaten into submission with the message of love and hope, but when it comes time for the character to act on it, he doesn't. I agree that Coop is one of Nolan's best characters. I don't think I've disagreed with you. The video scene going back on 23 years of messages is one of the best things he has ever done. But when you call a Nolan character "alive," you are ranking on a different continuum than many other directors. I think he relies way too heavily on exposition and despite his success and the strength of his storytelling in other areas still hasn't escaped a tendency to tell instead of show.

My problem might not even be that he doesn't show enough. It's that he tells too much. One example: Mann goes on about a parent's survival instinct, how what keeps them going is the image of his children. He cracks Coop's helmet. Coop is dying. He sees his children. Mann says, "do you see your children." It's not necessary and it burdens what is happening on screen. We don't need the initial explanation and we definitely don't need the flashback spelled out for us with exposition. When your showing is weighed down by telling, the whole structure is made weaker.

But yes, my biggest problem with the execution of his character arrives at the denouement. For Interstellar, I think that is the most crucial point for showing character, and justifying all that has come before. It doesn't do that. Like a chair missing a leg, it makes all the rest unstable.
 
Best quality "Docking" audio I've found so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYa5luHb2DA

Damn you, thanks for that!

You know, I had mixed feelings after seeing Interstellar even though I liked it, BUT I haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since walking out of the theater. For all the highs and the lows the movie had it certainly has made me think an awful lot. Gotta give the movie props for stimulating my brain activity.


It's also made me terribly anxious for Elite Dangerous to finally release. I've been playing space games ever since seeing Interstellar.
 
I believe the ending is one of if not the most important part of a movie. It's what you take with you after the credits roll. I don't think pointing out problems with the execution of the ending is nitpicking. That's not a minor problem. We are beaten into submission with the message of love and hope, but when it comes time for the character to act on it, he doesn't. I agree that Coop is one of Nolan's best characters. I don't think I've disagreed with you. The video scene going back on 23 years of messages is one of the best things he has ever done. But when you call a Nolan character "alive," you are ranking on a different continuum than many other directors. I think he relies way too heavily on exposition and despite his success and the strength of his storytelling in other areas still hasn't escaped a tendency to tell instead of show.

My problem might not even be that he doesn't show enough. It's that he tells too much. One example: Mann goes on about a parent's survival instinct, how what keeps them going is the image of his children. He cracks Coop's helmet. Coop is dying. He sees his children. Mann says, "do you see your children." It's not necessary and it burdens what is happening on screen.

But yes, my biggest problem with the execution of his character arrives at the denouement. For Interstellar, I think that is the most crucial point for showing character, and justifying all that has come before. It doesn't do that. Like a chair missing a leg, it makes all the rest unstable.

When I say "alive" I am not contrasting him with characters in other directors' works, just Nolan's. I'd say Nolan's films tend to be unemotional, sterile, lifeless in a lot of ways. Prestige was huge fun but the main characters were unexpressive, lifeless. I'd say the default for a movie character is "alive" and Nolan's previous characters fall short of that (apart from Memento, as I stated).

As far as showing and not telling, I think the movie shows Coop's emotions a *lot*. We aren't told that he's unhappy about leaving Murph, we see it and hear it in his tone, in his desperation to make a connection before he leaves, in his tears. That's not "telling."

When we see him react to the playback, there's nobody saying "boy, you sure seem upset about this."

When he's in the tesserract, we see his desperation and pain for it to end differently. TARS doesn't say "you seem to be upset, not that your life is ending, that you made these choices and desperately want to reverse them."

Yeah, he may explain some stuff a bit at times, but I don't see that as a general problem with Coop's emotional state.

Contrast with Inception, where we are told repeatedly that he wants to get back to his kids, but I don't think I ever *felt* that once in that movie.

The ending is a cheat, and a weakness of the film, IMHO, that wants to have all the connection stuff resolved and move on to a hopeful, space-exploring future. I agree it's an off note and could just has easily been a scene where he's spent a week with her and she says "what's next" and he runs off. But it doesn't change the fact that for 2.5 hours prior we have the most fleshed-out human character in a Nolan film maybe ever.
 
It's not just his apathy toward his son that's ridiculous. He spends the entire movie trying to get back to his children, and we're continually beaten over the head by how important family is (to the point where the love between parent and child is a legitimate threat to the entire future of the human race), but when Cooper succeeds over all his trials and tribulations, after he travels across a galaxy and across decades of lost time, after he is reunited with his family, which has blossomed into something much larger than last he saw, he completely ignores them, spends about two minutes talking calmly to his daughter, and immediately heads back into space. It's as if once he gets back, he can't wait to get away.

Right, he finds closure, and then Murph (who's now the older, wiser of the two) encourages him to stay true to his nature as an explorer.

On the one hand, it seems like you didn't really listen to Murph's final monologue... and on the other, you completely missed the themes of "exploration" and "pushing on for humanity".

Fantastic ending.
 
Right, he finds closure, and then Murph (who's now the older, wiser of the two) encourages him to stay true to his nature as an explorer.

On the one hand, it seems like you didn't really listen to Murph's final monologue... and on the other, you completely missed the themes of "exploration" and "pushing on for humanity".

Fantastic ending.
I don't think those ideas were presented effectively. His meeting with Murph doesn't play as closure. Somehow, even in a nearly three hour movie, it feels rushed.

When I say "alive" I am not contrasting him with characters in other directors' works, just Nolan's. I'd say Nolan's films tend to be unemotional, sterile, lifeless in a lot of ways. Prestige was huge fun but the main characters were unexpressive, lifeless. I'd say the default for a movie character is "alive" and Nolan's previous characters fall short of that (apart from Memento, as I stated).

As far as showing and not telling, I think the movie shows Coop's emotions a *lot*. We aren't told that he's unhappy about leaving Murph, we see it and hear it in his tone, in his desperation to make a connection before he leaves, in his tears. That's not "telling."

When we see him react to the playback, there's nobody saying "boy, you sure seem upset about this."

When he's in the tesserract, we see his desperation and pain for it to end differently. TARS doesn't say "you seem to be upset, not that your life is ending, that you made these choices and desperately want to reverse them."

Yeah, he may explain some stuff a bit at times, but I don't see that as a general problem with Coop's emotional state.

Contrast with Inception, where we are told repeatedly that he wants to get back to his kids, but I don't think I ever *felt* that once in that movie.

The ending is a cheat, and a weakness of the film, IMHO, that wants to have all the connection stuff resolved and move on to a hopeful, space-exploring future. I agree it's an off note and could just has easily been a scene where he's spent a week with her and she says "what's next" and he runs off. But it doesn't change the fact that for 2.5 hours prior we have the most fleshed-out human character in a Nolan film maybe ever.

I don't disagree with you. I think Coop is one of Nolan's best characters. I just don't think he's all the way there yet. The baggage of exposition hurt the delivery of some key scenes for me, but in general we agree.
 
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