IMDB and Interstellar

[Shpaget]

So, after watching Interstellar (2014) movie I went to IMDB to go through all the goof I've spotted in the motion picture, and what do I find?

Some KSP player has already been there...

In the Goofs section, Factual errors, one entry talks about the inaccuracy of the depiction of a first stage.

It ends with:

Saturn V and Apollo program details per Wikipedia, knowledge of it per KSP and FAR.

Come on guys, seriously?

Edited May 10, 2015 by Shpaget

[The Destroyer]

Well, we all learned a lot about space travel from KSP, and aero from FAR

[dryer_lint]

I don't get why people are bashing Interstellar's science so much. Yeah, it was inaccurate, but guys... consider that most sci-fi movies still have the ship stop if you turn your engines off.

[vger]

I don't get why people are bashing Interstellar's science so much. Yeah, it was inaccurate, but guys... consider that most sci-fi movies still have the ship stop if you turn your engines off.

This just goes to show that there's no point in trying to make a film to please ANYONE.

Even Bill Nye, who always complains about there not being enough public interest in space, and runs a corporation that exists for the very purpose of promoting space exploration.

A film comes out that generates an interest in space travel, making the point that it's a necessary step forward for civilization. And what does he do? Complains about 'ghosts.'

It's actually frighteningly similar to something I encountered back during a certain period of my life. Where a leader of a spiritual organization would talk about a film that is allegedly supportive of said spiritual organization. And while it might follow a certain book accurately, there's a 2-second clip that involves a nipple and it has a song by Metallica, so, "Don't any of you dare go see it."

[rtxoff]

Unfortunately Interstellar totally overwhelms the average cinema visitors. When i watched it i heard stupid comments like "Why does it rotate now?" in the scene where ship rotation was activated.

So from my point of view i can live with the inaccuracies cause for over 90% of the visitors they don't matter anyway they don't even understand they level they already show in the movie.

[Shpaget]

Time dilation, flying through accretion disk, planet orbiting so closely and not being ripped apart. Everything dealing with the black hole is off.

When the bad guy in the smaller ship docks with the big one in orbit and the thing breaks, the ship suddenly starts spinning and falling and even experiencing reentry heat, but a little bit of thrusting from a small shuttle (that manages to dock while rapidly spinning) quickly fixes that and even sends the entire thing on an escape trajectory.

Stuff is being detached from the main ship because Newton says "you gotta leave something behind". They don't chuck it at high speed, they just detach.

20-something years past while they're on the surface of the water planet, main character is 120-something years old at the end, meaning the total time dilation effect amounted to only about 90 years. That does not sound right.

So, why it bothers me? Well, for a movie that has a black hole and relativistic effects as its major plot line, it certainly fails to do them properly.

[SpaceXray]

Time dilation, flying through accretion disk, planet orbiting so closely and not being ripped apart. Everything dealing with the black hole is off.

When the bad guy in the smaller ship docks with the big one in orbit and the thing breaks, the ship suddenly starts spinning and falling and even experiencing reentry heat, but a little bit of thrusting from a small shuttle (that manages to dock while rapidly spinning) quickly fixes that and even sends the entire thing on an escape trajectory.

Stuff is being detached from the main ship because Newton says "you gotta leave something behind". They don't chuck it at high speed, they just detach.

20-something years past while they're on the surface of the water planet, main character is 120-something years old at the end, meaning the total time dilation effect amounted to only about 90 years. That does not sound right.

So, why it bothers me? Well, for a movie that has a black hole and relativistic effects as its major plot line, it certainly fails to do them properly.

Wow, you are the ignorant one here.

You have very terrible memory of r movie and start making baseless assumptions.

We still don't fully understand how black holes work inside, it is all theory and Newton's physics don't work there.

You are no physicist and have no degree whatsoever in the field, so you don't have the right to speak of the movie like that.

[CelticCossack51]

What annoys me most are major historical inaccuracies.

[Deutherius]

Stuff is being detached from the main ship because Newton says "you gotta leave something behind". They don't chuck it at high speed, they just detach.

You misunderstood that part of the movie I think. They were only using the shuttles as boosters, and detached them to get rid of dead mass once their fuel got depleted.

And also to propel the plotline further, but that is not relevant to the physics of this.

[Thomas988]

I don't care if it's inaccurate, I loved it!

[FishInferno]

What annoys me most are major historical inaccuracies.

what historical inaccuracies? it happens in the 22nd centurt and is hardly based on history

[CelticCossack51]

I mean historical inaccuracies in other movies. Anyway, I enjoyed Interstellar.

[Shpaget]

Wow, you are the ignorant one here.

You have very terrible memory of r movie and start making baseless assumptions.

We still don't fully understand how black holes work inside, it is all theory and Newton's physics don't work there.

You are no physicist and have no degree whatsoever in the field, so you don't have the right to speak of the movie like that.

Calling me ignorant and not explaining why you think so is not only rude, but does not further the discussion.

I've finished watching the movie just a few hours before posting this, so I believe my memory of it is quite decent. I'm not making assumptions, I'm retelling the events of the movie. Please point out specific parts of my comment and explain what am I remembering incorrectly.

We might not know what happens inside the black hole, but we do know what happens near it.

No, I'm not a physicist, but I have taken quite a bit of college level physics, including relativistic. However, I don't see that being relevant at all. Anybody can learn about any subject, know the basics of it and engage in a casual discussion dealing with it, without necessarily having a degree in it.

You misunderstood that part of the movie I think. They were only using the shuttles as boosters, and detached them to get rid of dead mass once their fuel got depleted.

And also to propel the plotline further, but that is not relevant to the physics of this.

Yeah, they used shuttles as boosters, but could have detached them without the main character in them, with negligible penalty to dV. In fact, the damage from the airlock explosion and losing those segments of the ship more than compensated for the added mass of one person, and they never seem to account for that.

[vger]

Yeah, they used shuttles as boosters, but could have detached them without the main character in them, with negligible penalty to dV. In fact, the damage from the airlock explosion and losing those segments of the ship more than compensated for the added mass of one person, and they never seem to account for that.

I thought it was mentioned that when the airlock blew, it was no longer possible to detach anything via the command module, meaning someone had to be there to detach manually?

Or at the very best, he would've had to manually fire the engines from the cockpit anyway, and then scramble through the airlock before detaching. Obviously the ship wasn't designed to be used in that way. They probably could've modified it for that purpose, IF they'd had more time. And they had even less time than they logically would have, because the closer they got to the black hole, time on Earth would accelerate. Just like when they were on the planet surface, every second was critical.

Anyway, could the ISS do that? Control the engines of a docked ship without someone being in there? I rather doubt it.

Edited May 11, 2015 by vger

[mordin86]

I'm sure there's a lot of inaccuracies in Interstellar, but I have to say - it was a great movie experience, not everything has to be ultra realistic.

[theend3r]

What bugged me the most is that the black hole evidently has the same speed vector as Earth since they don't need to correct the otherwise insane velocity difference. Which means it's quite close to the Earth. But it isn't.

Also the whole time dilatation thing was extremely stupid. I really tried to enjoy the movie but unfortunately I couldn't.

[ComradeWolfe]

Humankind needs a big ol' rocket to make the push in to space, but once they're there they have a dinky runabout which can zip and zoom back and forth between planetary surfaces and orbit. I guess Earth has soup while the rest of the universe is running 1.0?

Also, corn and all other crops are hit with blight which is so pervasive that nobody can possibly grow anything anywhere on Earth; yet when it comes time to live in space they have no trouble sourcing blight-free magic space corn to grow.

I was also bugged by the ending (not the science): Everything ties up too neatly -- dad is magicked out of the black hole after sending his messages to the past, daughter sees dad again before dying, dad goes to rescue the chick on another planet, the guy the chick went to find is dead leaving her conveniently single yet unbothered... It's like Nolan was trying painfully hard to avoid an ambiguous ending like he had in Inception. And I mean painfully.

[Cydonian Monk]

I was also bugged by the ending (not the science): Everything ties up too neatly.

This.

I came away from Interstellar thinking it had a wonderful little story that was wrapped up in too much movie. They clearly wanted to tell some relativistic Father-Daughter story, but in the process forgot about editing. It was a very pretty movie, and easy for me to forgive the minor nuances and plot oddities that didn't make much sense on the surface, but it was just too long... and far too clean at the end. In a way it reminded me of a Phillip K. ....* ending - I was wondering the whole time if it was real, if MM had actually made it back at all at the end, or if the whole business from the moment he jumped ship to the end of the movie wasn't just a massive hallucination as he tumbled down the gravity well / rabbit hole. I feel the cleanness of the ending only strengthens that argument.

* [Wow, such auto-censorship there. I guess you'll have to google for the author of A Scanner Darkly. ]

Edited May 11, 2015 by Cydonian Monk

[vger]

Also, corn and all other crops are hit with blight which is so pervasive that nobody can possibly grow anything anywhere on Earth; yet when it comes time to live in space they have no trouble sourcing blight-free magic space corn to grow.

The seeds that went to space probably came from a gene bank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault.

[SpaceXray]

Calling me ignorant and not explaining why you think so is not only rude, but does not further the discussion.

I've finished watching the movie just a few hours before posting this, so I believe my memory of it is quite decent. I'm not making assumptions, I'm retelling the events of the movie. Please point out specific parts of my comment and explain what am I remembering incorrectly.

We might not know what happens inside the black hole, but we do know what happens near it.

No, I'm not a physicist, but I have taken quite a bit of college level physics, including relativistic. However, I don't see that being relevant at all. Anybody can learn about any subject, know the basics of it and engage in a casual discussion dealing with it, without necessarily having a degree in it.

Yeah, they used shuttles as boosters, but could have detached them without the main character in them, with negligible penalty to dV. In fact, the damage from the airlock explosion and losing those segments of the ship more than compensated for the added mass of one person, and they never seem to account for that.

Actually, it is relevant whether you have a degree or not. I can also claim to have studied something in college related to relativity and start making assumptions here.

The reason for why Cooper had to stay in the Ranger is because after the explosion, the Endurance got severely damaged and it was also mentioned that the linkages have been destroyed. Thus it was only possible to dock the Ranger and the Landers to the docking ports, but impossible to transfer fuel, connect electric lines and establish a connection between the Ranger and the Endurance ring module. Someone was supposed to detach the Ranger on their side. Though it is a mystery why CASE couldn't do that. Possibly because he was in command of the main Endurance part, and for Brand it was impossible to control such a wreck of a ship.

And once again, it was admitted by Kip Thorne that some things had to be made impossible or seemingly impossible for the sake of the plot.

I recommend reading his book, "The Science of Interstellar", it explains a lot.

- - - Updated - - -

This.

I came away from Interstellar thinking it had a wonderful little story that was wrapped up in too much movie. They clearly wanted to tell some relativistic Father-Daughter story, but in the process forgot about editing. It was a very pretty movie, and easy for me to forgive the minor nuances and plot oddities that didn't make much sense on the surface, but it was just too long... and far too clean at the end. In a way it reminded me of a Phillip K. ....* ending - I was wondering the whole time if it was real, if MM had actually made it back at all at the end, or if the whole business from the moment he jumped ship to the end of the movie wasn't just a massive hallucination as he tumbled down the gravity well / rabbit hole. I feel the cleanness of the ending only strengthens that argument.

* [Wow, such auto-censorship there. I guess you'll have to google for the author of A Scanner Darkly. ]

Wow, censoring Phillip K. D1ck, I have the impression the forums are for babies and won't even allow names that might remind a person of male genitalia.

[Awaras]

The seeds that went to space probably came from a gene bank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault.

And what was stopping them from growing those same blight free crops in, for example, large airtight greenhouses on Earth instead of going to space?

Honestly, the thing that bothered me the most for some reason is that half the ship blows away randomly and yet the ship spin is still perfectly centered on the docking port, lol.

[vger]

And what was stopping them from growing those same blight free crops in, for example, large airtight greenhouses on Earth instead of going to space?

Probably just easier, really. Trying to build an uncontaminated biodome in the middle of the dust bowl probably would be very hard, and prone to fail. They probably tried that already, actually. And I kinda felt like there were more things going wrong with the planet than just the blight. Unfortunately, the film was already running long, so there wasn't time. I really wouldn't mind seeing a prequel film chronicling the events that led up to Interstellar.

Honestly, the thing that bothered me the most for some reason is that half the ship blows away randomly and yet the ship spin is still perfectly centered on the docking port, lol.

Go watch Armageddon.

Edited May 11, 2015 by vger

[Shpaget]

Actually, it is relevant whether you have a degree or not. I can also claim to have studied something in college related to relativity and start making assumptions here.

Why? Why should I not be allowed to talk about math without being a mathematician, about biology without being a biologist, about fossils without being a paleontologist...?

If people only talked about the topics they closely studied and dedicated their careers to, it would make for a boring world, and a very stupid one.

I'll ask you again to substantiate your statements.

[vger]

Why? Why should I not be allowed to talk about math without being a mathematician, about biology without being a biologist, about fossils without being a paleontologist...?

If people only talked about the topics they closely studied and dedicated their careers to, it would make for a boring world, and a very stupid one.

I'll ask you again to substantiate your statements.

I'm not a politician, so I guess I'm not allowed to criticize anything that controls my life.

[ComradeWolfe]

The seeds that went to space probably came from a gene bank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault.

You bring up a good point and one I hadn't considered. However I still find it unlikely that you can bring that much dirt, air, water, people, food for people (while they wait for their magic space corn to grow), etc without some degree of contamination. I mean, we're talking a pestilence so pervasive that no food crop was safe on Earth.

Overall, the movie just had too many disruptions of suspension of disbelief. The robots were awesome though, and totally made it worth seeing.