Interstellar

[timsfitz]

Why did they launch from a Saturn type rocket in to get to the Endurance when they have little SSTOs that can reach orbit easily from a planet with 280% earths gravity. Clearly they posses almost Star Trek levels of shuttle technology..... That or it's just a movie and they wanted to keep it entertaining.

[psyper]

Why did they launch from a Saturn type rocket in to get to the Endurance when they have little SSTOs that can reach orbit easily from a planet with 280% earths gravity. Clearly they posses almost Star Trek levels of shuttle technology..... That or it's just a movie and they wanted to keep it entertaining.

I think it was a case that they were using tech that they had available - the ssto's were too small for the crew and equipment that the saturn took up to the main ring of the ship but they couldn't build a larger one from scratch - so they had the ssto's taken up separately and then brought the crew and rest of the equipment up on the saturn.

[Pipcard]

Humanity's first warp-capable ship in the Star Trek universe, the Phoenix, was launched on a conventional chemical rocket (a converted ICBM because World War III had just happened).

[White Owl]

Best part of the whole movie, and I don't give a damn that it doesn't actually make sense that Endurance was deorbiting.

[Linear]

The movie did well into kind-of keeping with Physics when it could, and ditching it when it made it more entertaining.

I liked it a lot.

[Unheld]

I full heartily agree with TythosEternal.

It is far too much Fiction than Science.

Please don't get me wrong, Sci-Fi movies don't always have to be realistic, but I expect that they are... in fact that every movie is, at least believable in itself.

This movie was just not plausible even in its own "set of rules"/physics.

[SpaceXray]

Just returned from watching it a second time.

Even though I have a brick for a heart, the scene where

Coop is driving away and Murph is crying got me teary eyed

.

Anyway great movie, kept me on the edge of my seat all the time.

Thinking about a 3rd time. Who should I drag with me next?

And btw this time people clapped AGAIN.

[tygoo7]

Went to see it for the second time earlier today. Still cried on the emotional parts. This is a great movie with a great story and soundtrack!

[Motokid600]

I honestly wish they'd make a 2100: A Space Odyssesy. I loved Interstellar. Very emotional movie. Something 2001/10 is not. But I watched those movies on SciFi last night and... They are better. I get a better feeling of the grandure of space especially in 2010. My favorite scene may be when there transfering over to the Discovery. Love the shots of Io under John Lithgows feet.

So, yea.. Instellar was great, but a 2100 Space Odyssey with that classic waltz music NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Motokid600

[SpaceXray]

I love the fresh look on Interstellar. Maybe we've just forgotten than we don't need loads of fancy CGI and unrealistic physics for a sci-fi movie. All we need is a good plot which will be appealing to the majority, which hints and how things currently are bu doesn't push it in your face. We don't need 50+ explosions either. We don't need ridiculous human-like robots. What makes a Nolan film is great cinematography, the lack of a load of CGI(a benefit since things actually look much better without it), and of course, the great scores of Hans Zimmer. An additional icing on the cake is the tremendous acting. I think Matthew and Mckenzie Foy did their best.

Matt is much better in serious movies than these cr*p comedies, and Foy is a very good actress for her age.

A little extra from a space nut:

Nolan and the guys who designed the Endurance+the Lander+the Ranger are geniuses.

The ship is so practical it is just amazing, the way you can re-configure it, the great choice of docking nodes, how you can re-locate the SSTO's around the main ship to balance the CoM and so on.

Edited November 16, 2014 by SpaceXray

[SpaceXray]

My cinema surprised me with a free movie ticket for buying 3 tickets this fall.

Interstellar (3rd time) here I come!

[Cannon]

Just watched the movie "Interstellar" few days ago and..damn.

Can someone help me understand the movie better, i mean time dilation and these things, I've been trying to find some good explanations on YouTube but failed.

Thanks in advance!

[Kryten]

Don't worry, the people that wrote it didn't understand it any better than you do.

[Vanamonde]

Merged into the existing thread about the movie.

[dryer_lint]

I just went to watch this movie yesterday, and it was awesome. At first I didn't get the ending but the more I think about it, the more blown away I am

[Dispatcher]

Good movie. Slight spoiler: however the part about certain educational systems presenting certain historical facts as conspiracy fiction was completely ridiculous and unbelievable. Its like that portion of the movie was inserted as some kind of social statement; totally awkward and entirely unnecessary. The "suspension of disbelief" which is thought to be important in quality video games and serious movie presentations was lost to me and those with me and it took several minutes for the "realism" of the movie to come back.

Otherwise it was good and I could see homage paid to earlier fiction (such as "2001"). I also like the fact that the trailers did not reveal any plot twists. I'd recommend it to others.

[AndrewBCrisp]

I know my expectations were probably too high, partially as a result of excited science and science fiction communities and partially because I'm a big Matthew McConaughey (and Nolan) fan. There were simply too many moments of disbelief (yes, let's eject into a debris field inside a black hole--then let's count how many thing are seriously whacked about this one single sentence!), which simultaneously lacked any serious point or direction. Then they had the balls to skip over the seriously epic and interesting components of the story--what are these massive stations orbiting Saturn? how is Brandt setting up her colony? when and how did we magically reach back and configure these magical tesseracts, and how did we manage to avoid the obvious causality issues?--as if the previous 2.5 hours were better spent on poorly-constructed character development, the obligatory psychotic scientist plotline (tell me where that led again?), and bemoaning some strange and unsolvable crop issue affecting the entire earth from which an easier solution than elementary biology and crop science is apparently to transport a couple hundred embryos to another galaxy. Sigh...

If I may address this...

The black hole: If we are talking about Cooper's ejection from the Ranger as it breaks up, let me remind you that Cooper is a trained pilot with the requisite conditioning and reflexes. Yes, he separated from the Endurance to give Brandt the chance to escape and get on with Plan B and so he didn't expect to survive, but it's a safe bet that with his ship breaking up around him, his reflexes took over, even though there was no guarantee of survival. A last second screw THAT, I want to live! moment. Which leads us to:

Mann's supposed 'psychosis': It was made clear to us early in the film that all of the Lazarus missions were one-way trips, and that any world that was non-viable would not have a second visit to rescue the stranded volunteer. For some, that was a non-issue as their worlds killed them on arrival (see: Miller's Planet). Others might have made their peace with it, but Mann clearly did not. He too had a screw THAT, I want to live! moment, which led to his deception. He wanted to be rescued and taken to whatever planet that Endurance had - or would - select as Our Future Home. Since he had to lie to do it, that meant covering up his lie, and doing away with anyone who would get in the way of his self-rescue plan. Cooper was in the way because he planned to take Endurance back to Earth and to send a probe into the black hole just to give what few scientists are left back home a fighting chance to solve the gravity problem and thus evacuate everyone (an option that Mann considered to be madness). Brandt, et al, were in the way because Mann couldn't trust them to forgive his deception once they found out. As soon as the truth was known, there was a good chance they would have tossed him out an airlock sans suit.

He was desperate, and selfish, but perfectly sane.

Moving on...

The Minutiae of Colonization and the Mystery of the Tesseract: The important information was relayed in the film: TARS had gathered the necessary data about the singularity. Cooper found a way (with some extra-dimensional help) to relay it to his daughter. Murph took that data and used it to solve the gravity problem. Everything after that was just engineering and time. Lots of time.

We know that Professor Brandt's Plan A involved mastering gravity and launching stations from Earth pre-built - he said so near the end of Act 1, and every time we went back to the NASA bunker we saw workers and robots building things in the background. Heavens, the bunker itself was intended to be the first such station. Murph was a young-to-middle aged woman by the time she had her breakthrough. We last see her as a very old woman, probably near or past her hundredth birthday. From this we can infer that humanity had a good 60 to 70 years to build those stations. The clues were all there, we just needed to connect the dots. Having the film spell them out any clearer would have meant lengthening the already very long film or cutting more important narrative elements to make room.

As for Brandt setting up her colony - again, the clues were there. We didn't need to see any more than what we did which was: despite the death of her boyfriend/fiance, and despite the fact that she believed she was the last human being alive, she was still plugging away on Plan B. Showing more, once again, would have meant a longer movie or more important material being cut.

Ditto with the Tesseract: we're not here for a future history lesson. All we needed to know was that Someone had built the Tesseract and used it to save the human race - the same Someones that built the wormhole and planted one end of it in our solar system. When they did it was irrelevant, same with how.

As for the causality issues, either the mysterious Someones were as Cooper believed - our distant descendants - and so had a detailed history to draw on, or they were aliens who, wonder of wonders, trusted Cooper to be a bright enough boy to do the responsible thing. Or perhaps not - they did close up the tesseract the moment Cooper had relayed the data and they knew that Earthbound humanity could take it from there without further help. Shutting down the tesseract once the primary goal was accomplished was their way of making sure Cooper didn't try to muck anything else up.

I'm sure that all of these details would no doubt be interesting - and might make for a very interesting book, assuming one is not already being written ("The Science of Interstellar" does have a certain ring to it.) But that's all frosting on the cake, in my opinion. It might add to the experience of some, but not to the experience of all. Big budget films need to appeal to all, and that means that the needs of narrative supercede the needs of exposition.

Lastly:

The Unstoppable Blight: If I read your comment correctly, you seem to be making the assumption that humanity was presented with an either-or choice with regards to the Blight. Either use biology and crop science to stop it, or leave the Earth. I submit that the first option had been tried... and had failed.

Recall the PTA meeting scene: not only was history being rewritten to keep people focused on "the here and now", but universities were no longer accepting people. The big focus of civilization outside of the NASA bunker was farming, farming, and more farming. Most of the farming was automated - implying a lack of unskilled labor, which implies a lack of people. Ditto with the fact that armies no longer existed - in a world where mere survival is the best you can hope for, you don't throw away something that can help with that survival (like defending from hostile neighbors that might want your food) unless that something is no longer necessary. This in turn implies that a significant fraction of humanity is dead. Perhaps Europe and Asia are abandoned entirely except for small enclaves. Perhaps all of humanity now fits into a subsection of North America. Who knows?

Faced with the loss of crops, I suspect every nation would have poured resources into fighting the Blight at first; a struggle that probably went on for years if not decades. But, once people started dying by the billions, it's a safe bet that the bulk of surviving humanity gave up hope of beating the Blight - especially since with the mass dying, the brainpower pool would have shrunk considerably. Research is still going on (again: the NASA bunker - note the greenhouses and Professor Brandt's statement that corn is next on the Blight's hit list), but it's more in the "how much time do we have before the End" category. Only the discovery of the wormhole offered any option other than extinction.

The simple options had not worked - leaving only the difficult and the desperate.

A final point: we need to remember that, no matter the genre, stories are about people. Everything in a story has to serve the purpose of showing a person struggling to achieve something or to escape something and whether or not they succeed or fail. Any side-trip on that narrative journey has to still serve that narrative journey or it's a distraction.

Answering all your questions in the film might have been wonderful engineering and science - but terrible storytelling.

[PakledHostage]

Just watched the movie "Interstellar" few days ago and..damn.

Can someone help me understand the movie better, i mean time dilation and these things, I've been trying to find some good explanations on YouTube but failed.

Thanks in advance!

I was in a book store yesterday and I saw a book by Kip Thorne titled The Science of Interstellar . Maybe that'll help you out? I had a browse through it. He talks about the physics that "inspired" the movie physics and where/why they took liberties for the purposes of the movie's plot.

[SpaceXray]

Don't worry, the people that wrote it didn't understand it any better than you do.

Actually, do remember this is Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne we are talking about.

The same Kip Thorne who helped Carl Sagan write "Contact".

[lajoswinkler]

The movie is so good that it forces nerds to try harder finding inaccuracies (something so easy when you watch "Armageddon" lol), and when they do, they s-hit all over it. It's "Gravity" all over again.

Just enjoy the f-ing movie.

[SpaceXray]

I just realized what the hell was happening in the other galaxy.

Anyway, there were 3 planets, Miller's, Mann's and Edmunds+a black hole (Gargantua)+ a neutron star(name unknown).

Miller and Mann's planet were directly orbiting Gargantua(mentioned in the movie).

The star was apparently orbiting Gargantua too, and orbiting that star was Edmund's planet. Hence

in the end, we find out and see SUNset on Edmund's. Logically, it was than unnamed star Edmund's was orbiting.

I hope this made sense to people now.

Miller' and Mann's received light and heat from Gargantua, or maybe all the way from the neutron star itself.

Edited November 17, 2014 by Rainbowtrout
Actually putting in spoiler tags

[XiXLLAMAXiX]

Why did they launch from a Saturn type rocket in to get to the Endurance when they have little SSTOs that can reach orbit easily from a planet with 280% earths gravity. Clearly they posses almost Star Trek levels of shuttle technology..... That or it's just a movie and they wanted to keep it entertaining.

It's possible that they wanted the SSTO to be full on fuel when it reached Earth Orbit (?). Also, I believe the highest gravity planet they landed on had 130% earth's gravity, but I might be remembering wrong...

[AndrewBCrisp]

During that particular scene, I remember thinking "Dr. Mann should have practiced on Kerbal Space Program."

RE: the Ranger spacecraft - I think someone in the main Interstellar thread suggested that conserving fuel while still Earth-side was the big reason why they used that big booster (plus, the launch looked cool). The engines were probably the most advanced ones available and had a wicked Isp to match, but every drop of fuel saved increases your safety margin by a bit.

Re: planet gravities. As I recall, Miller's Planet had 120% Earth gravity, while Mann's planet had a "comfortable" 80%.

[lajoswinkler]

I just realized what the hell was happening in the other galaxy.

Anyway, there were 3 planets, Miller's, Mann's and Edmunds+a black hole (Gargantua)+ a neutron star(name unknown).

Miller and Mann's planet were directly orbiting Gargantua(mentioned in the movie).

The star was apparently orbiting Gargantua too, and orbiting that star was Edmund's planet. Hence

in the end, we find out and see SUNset on Edmund's. Logically, it was than unnamed star Edmund's was orbiting.

I hope this made sense to people now.

Miller' and Mann's received light and heat from Gargantua, or maybe all the way from the neutron star itself.

Neutron star is called Pantagruel. It's from Rabelais' set of novels with a giant and his son, "La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel".

Both Gargantua and Pantagruel are shiny, though sometimes we can see something is "wrong" with Gargantua on the sky as it looks like a weird annular eclipse.

[SpaceXray]

Neutron star is called Pantagruel. It's from Rabelais' set of novels with a giant and his son, "La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel".

Both Gargantua and Pantagruel are shiny, though sometimes we can see something is "wrong" with Gargantua on the sky as it looks like a weird annular eclipse.

Agree. When

they exit out of the wormhole you can see how cleverly they "hid" Gargantua with the star, creating a black holar eclipse(sort of) and you can clearly see there was a star there.