50 KiB
[D][HSF] Let's talk about Interstellar?
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Author: u/tvcgrid *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2lxebi/dhsf_lets_talk_about_interstellar/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2014-11-11T03:01:48
Post:
I recently saw Interstellar and I'd recommend it as a good sci-fi epic. It has generated a lot of discussion on it's own subreddit, but I thought why not make a discussion thread here.
In particular, I found it visually stunning and the soundtrack is amazing. And to have the scientific spirit gift wrapped like this with mainstream-movie screentime is gratifying.
Anyone else see it?
Comments:
u/None [+13] (10 hours later)
It was a gorgeous film, amazing to experience in IMAX 70mm. However, the plot made no sense and the characters were all idiots, so it's about as far from rationalist fiction as you can be.
u/tvcgrid [+0] (10 hours later)
How did it make no sense?
How were the characters idiots?
How do you think you know what you think you know? Those are pretty strong opinions right there.
u/None [+11] (11 hours later)
Here's my extreme reduction of the plot:
Humanity is in danger!
Guy goes through mysterious wormhole
Guy falls into mysterious blackhole
Look there's a mysterious tesseract here, let me us it to send "the data" to my daughter!
Humanity is saved the end. Also don't worry about the wormhole or the blackhole or the tesseract. They make perfect sense-they were put there by future humans with a love for convoluted plots and indirectness and high probability of failure. Or aliens with a love for convoluted plots and indirectness and high probability of failure. Or they just randomly happened because "anything that can happen will lol".
But regardless of how you try to interpret the plot, what the hell was the point? The drama was dramatic and that's fine and all and that's nice, but there wasn't much to think about after the movie was over.
As for characters being idiots - Cooper wasn't an idiot because he was the tropeful wise-crackin' bad-assin' smarter-than-the-supposedly-"smart"-characters Bruce Willis-esque character, and it was obligatory that everyone was like, "We need to do [ridiculous action] because of [tenuous reason]" and he's like "No, we need to do [obvious thing] because [it's literally the only thing that makes any sense or has any hope of working]." Anne Hathaway's character was horribly unprofessional, wouldn't listen to Cooper's instructions, and for some reason thought that love was a supernatural force, and was willing to stake the future of humanity on that belief. In other words, she was an idiot. Mann... I don't even know what Mann was trying to accomplish, but whatever it was instead he managed to explode despite every telling him "DON'T DO THAT YOU'LL EXPLODE". In other words, he was an idiot. Murph was a "brilliant scientist" yet couldn't forgive her dad for "trying to save humanity" or something, EVEN BEFORE SHE KNEW THAT PLAN B WAS HOAX. And even if Cooper did know and Murph knew he knew, did you have a better idea Murph? Or do you prefer the death of humanity to having your father leave? Murph should have just stayed 10 for the entire movie, it would have matched her actions better. Actually that goes for everyone except Cooper and maybe Michael Caine.
u/tvcgrid [+6] (a day later)
Here's one thing it did right. It's a definitive fuck you to the deathist point of view. Also, it at least in name underscores the importance of science and discovery. And exploration. I'd say that was the point. To make a sci fi movie that extrapolates from what could happen. Hell, new physics came out if this.
Mann lost his mind. Hathaway was under incredible pressure and besides, cooler heads prevailed and she grudgingly agreed too. Also, there's something to be said about artistic license.
But yeah I agree, some characters make suboptimal decisions (see? No intrinsic character disparagements!). You made a lot of good points. There are all these things that need some suspension of disbelief, but perhaps some that are still problematic after admitting the premise. Oh, it's not rational at all either, I agree with that, it doesn't try to be.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
You're basically saying the film's characters have no license to be human.
u/Izeinwinter [+9] (11 hours later)
Eh, no, MoreDonuts is right. The worldbuilding does not really hang together - a food crisis and enough grasp of biotech to hope to establish off-world colonies can't co-exist, having a need for lots of farmers.. and fully robotic combines is also incoherent, not giving an exploratory mission the finest optics equipment the NRO can make or dig out of storage is just flat out insane, which means landing on planet one makes no sense whatsoever... and I have some issues with the things done with Anne Hataway's character, and the movie loved Cooper far to much - it's just bad story telling to center everything on one guy to that extent.
It did a few things very right. The scene at the end where Brant was gearing up to start a colony all buy herself? That was potent. The movie diluted it by implying Cooper was on his way (See earlier point about everything having to be about Cooper somehow) But it's one hell of an image nonetheless.
Honestly, I think the movie would have just worked a lot better if Cooper had just never left the black hole and they tied up the loose ends without him. He got to say goodbye via the watch. The meeting with his old daughter on the space station is just surplus to requirements.
u/tvcgrid [+2] (11 hours later)
Why would existence of advanced bio tech necessarily preclude that sort of food crisis? I can see your point but it's not that weighty. We have advanced enough tech to contain Ebola, but it spread in West Africa nonetheless; maybe there were other hurdles to containing the food crisis. Anyway, I kind of treated it as part of the premise. Not too ridiculous compared to sci fi in general.
And perhaps the machines doing the farming were not fully autonomous enough to finish the process by selling crop in the local markets...you'd perhaps still need an overseer who knows stuff about farming. Or just owners of the machines.
I do agree with the point about there not being advanced optics. They could've spotted trouble or at least better argued why landing was necessary. I thought landing a robot should've been enough...they looked very capable. Perhaps they ran out of money/time to fully build out a piloting system and took a shortcut with a human pilot? But the point about not having the best telemetry...yeah.
u/Izeinwinter [+2] (19 hours later)
People starve despite having the means to feed themselves, yes. Wars cause that all the time. But societies at that stage of disintegration don't have a prayer of mounting the kind of space program needed to get an offworld presence going! Space is difficult - if you are having trouble with surviving on earth you are guaranteed to fail at it in space. If you want to construct a crisis forcing an evacuation, it needs to be something which the toolkits needed for said evacuation cannot trivially fix. Like discovering the sun is scheduled to have a very unfortunate encounter with a smallish black hole or something.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (a day later)
I also think it's a long shot. Hence the feeling of facing the almost impossible. It's a nice positive emotion encapsulated in the name 'Endurance'.
Besides, I wouldn't attach too much weight to that hypothesis, since we have so little knowledge about the technological feasibility of different actions. It would be hard but how hard? Hard enough to be impossible?
Also, premise.
u/Drexer [+6] (11 hours later)
How were the characters idiots?
"BECAUSE I FOLLOW LOVE; AND YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN LOVE WHICH IS 5TH DIMENSIONAL OR SOMETHING." - Coming from a 40 year old woman who apparently has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen who has just read their first romance novel.
u/BT_Uytya [+10] The Laundry (17 hours later)
If you try to steelman her words, they would come like this:
"Hey, my System 1 screams at me and tells that we really should try Edmonds' planet. I don't know why, but maybe my intuition could be evidence here? Maybe my System 1 acts like this for a reason?"
This thought actually occurred to me while in cinema. I quickly ran through the Kanneman's "expert prediction" checklist and concluded that well, no, there is no possible reason for her System 1 to be correct here: Power of Love doesn't exist, and her intuition couldn't possibly be trained in "black hole astrobiology" or whatever.
And then I turned out to be wrong, and she turned out to be right. Because Mann had faked his data, and this situation is actually about psychology, not astrophysics: the subject where expert predictions are valid. And it's perfectly plausible that intuition of Brand actually had tried to tell her this:
"Hey! I know Mann and he could not be trusted! He is coward at heart! His data is too perfect. I know Edmonds, and Edmonds is a good guy who will not lie. Edmonds' data isn't so promising as Mann's but at least I'm sure his data isn't faked. Edmonds' planet is a good choice because I love him."
Hooray for intuition. You could call this "power of love", I think: the ability to use the model of your soulmate to your advantage. As, for example, Cooper did: he wouldn't be able to transmit "quantum data" to Murphy were it not for his knowledge of her knowledge of Morse code.
u/None [+3] (18 hours later)
I do believe trying to interpret a piece of fiction "generously". However, if in a piece of fiction a main character's motivations are guided by mysterious off-screen unmentioned and never revealed intuitions that are guided by mysterious off-screen unmentioned and never revealed knowledge, both of which are counter to her actual words and actions, that's terrible writing in worse ways than just having a stupid character. I also think if love did turn out to be a mysterious 5D force, that's the worst writing of all. Therefore, I think the most generous explanation is that just she's an idiot.
Also, something something "generalizing from fictional evidence". It is an interesting point, and it probably is worth remembering "make sure to check that your 'expert prediction' is actually based on the field you think it is", but I still would not say "Hooray for intuition". If this was a rationalist fic, it probably would have been "Hooray for ignoring your intuition when it doesn't know what it's talking about!"
u/Daimonin_123 [+3] (2 days later)
Considering the preceding scene "Oh look, massive 100 meter tall wave of water approaching fast, if it hit's us the mission is over. I'm gonna run out there even though everyone's shouting to get back so we can GTFO and try to pull some water logged computer bits out of the wreckage!"
I'm pretty certain that she simply suffered from a terminal case of teh stupids.
Also, did they forget to put a radar on that ship? Cause a radar should have warned them of oh look massive approaching wave well before they even got out. Maybe before they even landed.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
The interpretation you describe would have made the movie better if it was actually in the movie. Unfortunately, it isn't.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (11 hours later)
Yeah that was weird coming from her. But maybe she was under incredible emotional pressure? Isn't it possible that there could exist such a person on such a mission (they don't really have the best pickings)? Why would the probability of her being an emotionally balanced person be so high as to override a basic, biological drive?
But I do agree, would've been better to at least see her overcome this or battle this out with herself and reluctantly agree with Cooper at the very least.
I don't buy the flowery love angle either... But I could imagine some people saying that.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
But I could imagine some people saying that.
The problem isn't that "some people" might actually claim that love = magic. The problem is that those people are idiots.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (a day later)
In your own words, do idiots exist in the universe? If yes, why is it weird to have one in a movie?
Not saying I agree with a facile emotional reaction like that, though.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (4 days later)
I disliked Brand's comment as a rationalist, but it was nice to see an astronaut/astrophysicist say something "human" and "emotional" instead of playing her as the "cold-hearted scientist" as Hollywood is often want to do.
After juggling it around in my head a little bit more (and actually feeling a pang of disappointment about the whole 'ghost' reveal as some sort of bizarre thread-strings of bookcases) in which love crosses time...
I came up with my theory that Brand and Cooper "were right" because they made themselves right: in other words, they told the alien-transhumanists "hey, this is how the world works, so here are the two events that you'll need to make happen in order for the universe to exist! kthxbai"
(see my very long post for more details)
u/Drexer [+6] (10 hours later)
Good direction, acting and soundtrack.
Stupid physics and stupid people using once more the trope that scientists have yet to grow past the emotional maturity of their high school years.
I enjoyed the movie from a technical standpoint(as in, it hit all the right points and did everything 'theoretically right') but I found it meh in any other aspect.
And I certainly do not see it fitting this subreddit. Using 'sciency' words and terms and even concepts does not make it science if its using them as props and not as tools.
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
Stupid physics
Well, it wasn't that bad. Even NDT liked it. There might be a few inaccuracies, but it's nothing compared to other recent space movies like Gravity.
Also, I'm a fan of the movie just because it gave scientists the chance to make Hollywood-budget simulations. Best simulation of a black hole yet, and we actually made some new discoveries as a result. That's pretty awesome, whether the movie's plot is any good or not.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (10 hours later)
How was the physics stupid?
Btw did you know Kip Thorne was involved in it from the beginning and was an executive producer? Also, he got 2 original papers out of it too.
Oh plus, read Phil Plait's mea culpa... it's easy to pattern match a movie to 'bad science but technically excellent', but in this case you'd have to go deeper to argue that overall it had bad science.
I agree that it worked really well as a movie, though. But I didn't find it unreasonable either...and I could imagine people acting the way they acted. I mean, even one of the antagonists was not textbook evil; you could see that in their own eyes, they thought they were the hero.
u/Drexer [+1] (11 hours later)
Calculate the gravity gradient associated with a time dilation on the order of 1h:7 years.
That's just the first bit.
The movie might have used a bit of science to illustrate and characterize its story, but lets not pretend that it was in any way physically self-consistent. I understand that for people who only have a passing knowledge of general relativity it might seem like a real step up from the usual portrayal of space, but it really plays with picking and choosing what it wants to use and disregarding the rest. Also hiding from criticisms behind "we don't know those details, so we can assume those kind of random things". Lack of knowledge is not an excuse for goddidit.
In reality spaghettification is a real consequence.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (11 hours later)
Not that simple. A rapidly spinning black hole would make that possible.
"From what I can find, there is a stable orbit around a rotating black hole that can produce that kind of time dilation, so I was wrong there."
u/Drexer [+2] (11 hours later)
Do you realize that the post you linked to does not adress the criticism I raised?
You seem to be repeatedly making a lot of appeals to authority while ignoring or even misunderstanding the problems of other viewers.
I mean, I will fully admit that I only studied Special Relativity and have no General Relativity formal study, but I do have friends who've worked with topics such as the stability of AdS spacetime and whom I've bounced those ideas of after the movie so I'm reasonable certain about that point of criticism.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (11 hours later)
Calculate the gravity gradient associated with a time dilation on the order of 1h:7 years.
That's what I was responding to and it seems I linked to the right thing. How was it not relevant to the above? He still didn't like the movie but that's because of the story. And there are other details that are wrong in the movie, but the above bit he argued could happen. It's a nuanced POV.
I'm working with limited time and this is a comment thread, so I decided to link to other people's words. I'm not saying 'believe this because names X and Y believe this'. Just linking to further reading material to extend the discussion's mutual background knowledge. Just searching for arguments that already exist and their structure.
The above time dilation point was the only bit referenced earlier and as you can see, it's not weighty enough to support such a broad generalization as was made originally.
But hey, this movie wasn't across the board encyclopedic either.
u/Drexer [+2] (12 hours later)
Calculate the gravity gradient and then check the forces that they would be subject to when going down or up. Like I said:
In reality spaghettification is a real consequence.
u/tvcgrid [+2] (12 hours later)
Through where, Gargantuan? The worm hole?
u/Gauntlet [+4] (a day later)
Movie looked beautiful and I definitely loved certain parts.
However:
Some sort of food crisis caused by disease spread in dust storm. Grow everything in hermetically sealed buildings. Use algae as a base for most foods. Grow meat in vats.
Need to find a new planet for colonisation. Aliens help out with wormhole. Fine. Wormhole is in orbit around Saturn. What year is this 2001? Hell I loved that.
Fate of humanity rests in relocation/colonisation. Infinite resources should have been available to NASA.
Oh we happened to send 12 people out to get data on these planets. Why? Send a bunch of satellites and probes. In fact there are allusions to artificial wombs so send a bunch of fertile eggs and those super smart robots to care for the children.
Set up a space station orbiting the Wormhole at both its ends. If radiation based communication fails you can just physically shuttle data back and forth through the Wormhole.
Launch an intelligent mission from these stations to figure out if any of the planets were viable. No one has to go crazy. No one has to die.
Let's set aside the fact humanity had the technology to protect themselves from the radiation emitted by the accretion disc. None of the planets near a blackhole are safe.
Love is a biochemical reaction not magic.
Guy on mission: "We'll send one of the robots into the blackhole. PAST THE EVERY HORIZON. Maybe we can get data if it transmits it fast enough.
Guy: Why isn't the data coming through?
Every physicist ever: it's a blackhole. NOTHING GETS OUT PAST THE EVENT HORIZON. However Michael Cain figured out quantum gravity 40 years ago. Applications for space travel are decades away but we did manage to build a probe that might be able to come back.
The girl has a mental breakdown and believes her ghost dad is talking to her through the random ticks of a broken watch. No way she came to that conclusion via any train of rational thought. Turns out blight makes you crazy. Even so she is still a brilliant engineer and designs a gravity based engine. Humanity finds cure for blight illness. Craziness is managed.
I prefer the mysterious 'them' to be aliens as 'them' being future humans would create a time paradox.
The crew should have been mainly female so they could have repopulated a planet using fertilised the eggs if disaster struck.
Pretty much covers how I would have fixed the major problems. There is room for tonnes of drama in the movie. The slow deterioration of morale as the crew finds each planet in turn not viable would have been great. Coop not being there for his children as they learn of his son's mental illness and his daughter following in her father's engineering footsteps. His daughter also succumbing to the illness even as she works to save humanity and succeeds. Drama of a plan A succeeding but also the multiple plan B's as well. Several world's seeded with human life. What would happen next?
u/tvcgrid [+2] (a day later)
It could be a stable time loop in which there's no paradox. Still deterministic.
Maybe the above was more feasible overall. But I can see various suboptimal and not-smart actions being taken, though. People make mistakes and are wrong about things. That's also a part of observed reality. It's not so ridiculous for a movie to show people making mistakes.
I think your strongest point is about sending eggs on every mission and automating their incubation. Idk though, maybe they can't get to term automatically. But still, each of the Lazarus missions could've had them. I guess it's possible that they were resource constrained in some way.
They did send a bunch of probes though, but perhaps they don't have strong enough AI to rely on them? I'd argue it's ok to assume that as a premise.
Interesting points to think about!
u/Gauntlet [+5] (a day later)
You make a good point about mistakes and people making suboptimal choices. In fact Brand(t?) going for the data on the water planet made sense. We see it all the time where people go above and beyond and get away with it. It was nice that she failed spectacularly and was deeply affected by that. A lot of the character stuff in the movie was done superbly well. Crazy Dr. Mann's actions made sense in a twisted way.
I can see politics getting in the way of dealing with the food crisis. Immediately after an obvious world war a government would want its people to know they are safe and that there is hope for the future. Maybe they couldn't grow enough food in sealed complexes to feed the number of people left so the majority had to grow it in the open.
However I don't think that a group of people who designed the strategy behind the space missions did not see the obvious flaws and how to fix it. Even if they were resource confined there were far better ways of doing the mission. It's not like it was a heat of the moment scenario either, they had decades to plan it.
My real problem with the time loop is that it does not add to the story or characters in any meaningful way. I felt it was included as Shyamalan type twist to make the movie seem smarter than it was. I think the idea of an alien race helping humanity out of the blue and making no other contact was far more interesting. It brings up the question of whether a price is attached. Maybe they accidentally caused the blight during a first contact situation and felt guilty.
If it were just one or two things the movie wanted me to accept as a premise I think I would have been okay. It was the fact that my suspension of disbelief was shattered a short while after they went through the wormhole.
I think the writers came up with a lot of interesting ideas and problems and a fascinating scenario. Instead of asking "How would humanity react to this?" they went with "How dramatic an adventure can we write?". That's what gets me riled up, they didn't think things through well enough.
A few years back my friends and I went to see John Carter of Mars. It wasn't an absolutely awful movie it was just bland. John Carter was clearly fantasy and actually surprised me with its understated sci-fi elements. However one of my friends took personal offence at that movie. For 2 years he lamented the couple of hours that movie cost him. I think Interstellar is my John Carter.
u/fljared [+3] United Federation of Planets (15 hours later)
It wasn't rational.
Why did Astronaut #2 wait for 23 years instead of leaving to try and solve the mission alone? Not because it made any sense, but just so Cooper had a place to return to, but still loses 23 years of life, so that there can be drama?
Why go down to planet #1 at all, given that you'll lose years of time? Especially when the sane alternative is shot down with only a few mutterings about a few months of travel and resources.
Why spend decades on a fake plan that no-one but you, the astronauts, and one girl really care about? Lie to everyone else about how the project is going and redirect the resources anywhere else.
The scene in the beginning, where Cooper hears about how the moon landing was covered up, is done because it is shocking to the audience and helps give sympathy to Cooper when he defends his daughter. (Never mind that they never deal with the fact that Murphy's response to disagreement is violence- Right or wrong, you can't raise a child to hit someone for disagreeing with you)
That scene isn't done because it makes sense- What, they got everyone over 40 besides Cooper and his dad to pretend the space race was faked? Why? Public opinion was already against the space program, they don't need to lie to convince people.
I do actually like Dr. Mann's characterization, though- His slip from sanity makes sense when he's been alone for decades with no hope for rescue.
u/superliminaldude [+3] (17 hours later)
That scene isn't done because it makes sense- What, they got everyone over 40 besides Cooper and his dad to pretend the space race was faked? Why? Public opinion was already against the space program, they don't need to lie to convince people.
Actually, I think one of the main reasons this was included is as a not-so-subtle reference to Kubrick, who some conspiracy theorists state helped fake the moon landing.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I didn't catch that being a reference of any kind, but it sure as hell tipped me off that something in their history was going sickeningly wrong.
u/Daimonin_123 [+2] (2 days later)
Never mind that they never deal with the fact that Murphy's response to disagreement is violence- Right or wrong, you can't raise a child to hit someone for disagreeing with you
Actually I didn't necesarily see that as her being the aggressor, more like on of the other kids went all "Grr you stupid. I beat you now." so she defended herself... but since she was defending the 'politically incorrect' point of view, she was blamed.
What, they got everyone over 40 besides Cooper and his dad to pretend the space race was faked?
I doubt they had to put so much work into it. Declassify some secret documents saying it was, get some supposed experts to back it up, the vast majority of people will swallow it. Give a reason like "It was to bankrupt the soviet union", and you leave anyone who doesn't toe the party line looking like a crazy conspiracy theorist. Especially when most people have more important things to do, like surviving.
u/Zeryx [+1] (11 days later)
Actually saying the moon landing was faked made sense to me. They wanted people to grow up without hope of leaving the earth so a mass-panic wouldn't ensue. Things would've gotten a whole lot uglier with people vying for limited resources to go into space while the current population can't even be sustained.
Well, that was how I took it, anyway.
u/FaceDeer [+3] (4 days later)
I saw it, and I didn't really like it.
It was very pretty, yes, and there were a lot of individual moments and set-pieces that were way more scientifically accurate than 99% of the science fiction movies out there. Loved the design of Endurance. Loved the visuals of the black hole. The fact that suspended animation and time dilation and realistic travel-time to Saturn were used were great. The AIs were awesome characters, and none of them "turned on humanity" for no reason.
But it was all woven together into a plot which made no sense.
They have the technology to build those awesome spacecraft, human-like artificial intelligences, and yet all they gave the forerunner explorers were simple "yes/no" beacons? They didn't have space probes even as competent as the ones we've got orbiting Mars in real life right now. Mountain-sized waves would be obvious from orbit.
For that matter, if a planet is orbiting a black hole close enough to have 1h:7y time dilation, it can already be dismissed as "safe for habitation" right then and there. They should never have bothered.
Or, actually, they could have bothered. Why not send "plan B" artificial-womb colonies to all 12 of those planets instead of those useless yes/no explorers. Follow up with plan A colonization if you get the chance.
Apparently, Earth had the resources to build gigantic self-sufficient space habitats down on the planet's surface, they just didn't have the magical gravity drives needed to lift them into space. But why did they need to lift them into space? When Earth's environment degrades to the point where it's uninhabitable, just seal up the habitats and live inside them while they're still down on the ground. They'd be much easier to build if they didn't need to be designed to survive in space and you'd still have access to all of Earth's resources just outside the airlock. You could build a lot more of them and save a lot more people than the tiny fraction of Earth's population that they did with the space habitat in the movie.
Earth has a couple of fully-reusable SSTO shuttlecraft that can come and go at will from a planet with greater than Earth's gravity, survive landing in an ocean and "surfing" a giant wave, and yet NASA's depicted as being a shoestring organization that has to rely on old leftovers from the glory days already in orbit. They could have had those shuttles going up and down routinely on Earth to build better space infrastructure (not sure why they needed a big Saturn V style launch the first time when all the other planets were SSTO).
If you want your second-wave explorers to make an objective decision about which planets to go to, don't include someone among them who was in love with one of your stranded forerunner explorers. At least, not unless she's thoroughly psychologically screened to ensure she won't make decisions based on gut emotions.
"Frozen clouds." Ugh.
Anyway, in addition to just being bad, I don't think this movie fits the definitions of "rational fiction" in the sidebar. Very little problem-solving went on in this movie, the rules of the fictional world were not sane or consistent, and lots of stuff happened because "the plot requires it".
u/iemfi [+1] (5 days later)
Well it's a hollywood movie, I think it's rather unrealistic to expect no plot holes. I think it's great when you take into account that fact.
The whole water planet thing is a huge plot hole, but it's only a small part. And the habitats not working on the Earth's surface could be explained by the blight being able to get through solid walls. Or the blight covering the sun such that making a self sustaining habitat on Earth would be difficult. I mean it's nanotech, you could always hand wave something up. And I can't really think of a way to get around the SSTO thing if you want the same group of people to visit multiple planets.
I agree the characters weren't rational, and I laughed every time Cooper took the controls from the robot but I think it still counts as hard sci fi. The rules are relatively sane and with the awesome robots, awesome spaceship, and life extension as a matter of fact (at the end) I think it qualifies as a "rational hollywood movie".
u/FaceDeer [+1] (5 days later)
Nanotech obeys the laws of physics and chemistry like anything else, you can't just "handwave something up". If it can get through walls how did they manage to keep it off of the space stations before they were launched? How would it actually go about blocking the sun, mechanically speaking, and how would that prevent other forms of energy collection from working (wind, geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, tidal, etc.)? Solar power is pretty weak out in the vicinity of Saturn, that space habitat was likely relying on some other power source out there anyway.
This movie was nowhere near "hard science fiction", IMO. A few individual set pieces or visual effects were hard SF (Endurance, the black hole, time dilation), but that can't make the work as a whole into hard SF. They were mixed in with too many flagrant and fundamental violations of physics or plain old logic for that.
And going through the list of bullet points in the sidebar definitions, I can't find a single one of them that this movie satisfies as either rational or rationalist. "Hollywood" is no excuse.
u/iemfi [+1] (5 days later)
Well it could be that it takes some time for it to get through walls and they can sterilize a small area at some expense for some time. And the blocking the sun thing would be a sort of constant dust cloud? Sort of the a nuclear winter scenario? It's rather hard to come up with something which makes Earth less habitable than anywhere else and the story kind of requires that (and not saying much about it leaves room for concocting a reasonable explanation).
Anyway wasn't the plan always plan B? There would probably be a lot of stragglers on Earth for a long time more but the idea was to start a proper colony which didn't have to struggle and could rebuild civilization? I understood it as the Saturn station wasn't built for survival, it was built after the blight and stuff was fixed (from the science which Cooper passed them). Which I guess probably isn't the intended script but it makes more sense IMO.
u/None [+2] (12 hours later)
It led to some cool physics, and the plot was infinitely better than what I expected from the original script (which, for instance, featured millennia-old Chinese robots instead of posthumans). Probably one of my favorite mainstream scifi films since 2001, and that's saying something.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+2] Concent of Saunt Edhar (4 days later)
re: the food crisis.
I believe that the blight was a mass extinction event on par with the creation of oxygen in our atmosphere by photosynthesis. We used to have an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but once the potent, toxic oxidant Oxygen byproduct started polluting our environment, the creatures of Earth suffered a mass extinction event.
The Blight was like a virus or a microorganism that used Nitrogen (the 70% reference that older Brand/Michael Caine references) as an energy source and was polluting the environment. (I cannot recall what was happening to make everyone suffocate, but it was referenced a few times.)
My biggest biological concern with the Blight was that they would bring the Blight accidentally aboard their Space Stations from Earth and they would continue to be unable to grow food (reliant on plants and photosynthesis rather than blight and nitrogen-consumption)
u/lsparrish [+1] (6 days later)
Where would the blight get the nitrogen from? With oxygen, it was the breakdown of CO2 via plant photosynthesis. There is no equivalent component of the atmosphere for N2. If the N2 were turning into N2O (laughing gas) and therefore depleting the oxygen, it would be more believable. But global warming would probably kill us before suffocation in that case.
The fact that it attacks specific human food sources but leaves corn and inedible natural plants like sagebrush untouched bugged me. It would have been more believable as a genetically engineered bioweapon than as a natural disaster. Also, the lack of concern over the fate of nonhuman species seemed like a major oversight.
The only way this works is if extreme political stupidity or something leads to us producing hardly any crop diversity. No potatoes, hemp, soybeans, etc. are shown as surviving or being lost to the blight.
u/6340 [+1] (24 minutes later)
Let's not discuss the physics and suspension of disbelief, that was hardly the point of the movie.
The cinematography, the soundtrack, the acting were all superb. I only thought that some of the plot points and hints were really heavy handed at times, but maybe that's just being genre savvy.
u/tvcgrid [+2] (an hour later)
I loved the way relativity was used to drive drama in the film. I mean... that was a particularly effective scene...
u/6340 [+1] (15 hours later)
Yeah, I agree that the drama and plot was all incorporated well, but if we actually start going into the sciences of it, well...
If we don't need to follow casualty, then why do the humans-who-have-ascended-into-all-but-godhood choose the stable time loop which involves way too many risks to be taken (not so stable after all), rather than simply going back to the planet and getting rid of the Blight with their physics-breaking powers? Not only does that seem to have a much lower failure rate, but it seems like it would have happened the first time! (though talking about firsts is worthless when casualty is your plaything)
And there are way too many illogics like that throughout the movie, so I just called it another sci-fi, and treated it like that. And from that standpoint, it was excellent.
u/None [+1] (17 hours later)
Isn't it sort of implied that stable time loops are part and parcel of a deterministic universe? Yes, future-us are time-hopping beings of magical technology, but the time loop must always have happened regardless. Maybe there's some kind of Time Police in the future meant to keep the Future World from being dramatically changed: that is, they could do things differently but choose not to. Or maybe they're slaves to their own personal timelines, or they're not actually capable of walking around time like Cooper thinks, just capable of manipulating time such that in enables time loops, OR their knowledge of time is so great that the time loop that exists is the best way to go.
They did the right thing and made it vague. When you're dealing with time a lot of plot holes can go out the window. Literally, what happened, happened, and always will have happened.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (4 days later)
There were several sections of the movie that were absolutely heartbreaking for me.
The first, obviously, when they got to world #1 and 23 years pass and everyone gives them up for dead. Seeing MM's reactions to his son and daughter's videos was really touching.
u/None [+2] (5 hours later)
The speech about Love was just bloody narmy, even though I absolutely loved the reveal that "Them" was posthumans.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (4 days later)
(I am cross posting my response from the interstellar subreddit, but I really wrote it for the viewers here.)
After watching the movie last night and reflecting a bit on it... I've come to the following conclusion (and potential spin-off.) Short version: "Plan B", the Lazarus Colony, are the helpers who created the tesseract and the wormhole... and "they" live inside the event horizon with Brand, Cooper and TARS.
"They" exist beyond time in precisely the world that is built to support such an environment: the edge of a black hole. Who knows how humans who are born and raised inside a black hole will develop? Why add in the extra element of "at some point in the future, humans will become 5D alien-transhumans" when the statement "when time is no longer a factor, humans will become 5D alien-transhumans" is just as valid?
Longer recounting of events and supporting evidence: Cooper and TARS went inside the black hole past the event horizon. TARS was able to explain a lot of what was going on: "Cooper, they are trying to communicate with you and they have built something for you to understand their world." In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Cooper neatly closes any threatening-time-paradoxes by manipulating "past"-events precisely in the manner they ought to be... at which point the tesseract collapses and he is rescued minutes later orbiting Saturn hundreds of years later. After an emotional reunion with his daughter, Cooper goes off to find Brand and her Plan B colony on the final planet, which due to time dilation, has only just been established judging by the simultaneous scenes of Cooper stealing the scram jet and Brand burying her lover and setting up the colony.
Necessities: In order for the alien-transhumans to create a stable time-loop that involves Cooper and Murphy, they have to know the story of the the bookcase, the NASA coordinates, the watch, and the gravity-equation.
Theory A: (what most movie-watchers suppose) is that humans eventually "evolve" into these super-exciting transhumans at some point in the future. The problem with this is that the transhumans exist outside of time (like the Tramalfadorians of Slaughterhouse Five.) Additionally, Cooper doesn't seem to stick around long enough to really tell everyone his story -- as a matter of fact, I'm struck by everyone's relative disinterest in the Hero who Saved the World. Even though they have a lot of nifty spacecraft, they haven't used it for hundreds of years to support Brand -- WHAT?!? In Brand's timeline, she just landed on an alien plant and is building small tents, while the rest of Humanity hangs out in a giant space station off orbit of Saturn building farm museums for at least 2-3 generations? Forgive me, but the civilians of Cooper-Station seem like the natural complacent products of a "Caretaker" generation.
Theory B: (what I'm proposing) is that the Lazarus colony, instead of settling on Brand's planet, actually settles in the black hole. Cooper leaves the Cooper Station with relatively few supplies, just himself and TARS basically and goes off to find Brand. They have a supply of humans ready-to-hatch and Cooper arrives with a new space-craft and more fuel. He tells Brand about the event horizon and the tesseract (and this is where my theory gets really wild) and convinces her to abandon the colony and bring the Lazarus Plan Bs to the black hole and they all jump in this time. TARS has the archived entirety of human civilization (and sarcastic humor AI), Brand is an astrophysicist and Cooper is a cowboy-farmer-space-pilot -- combined, they are the perfect progenitors for a Lazarus colony for 5-dimensional beings.
My theory also explains "a lot of the irrational emotion" in the movie: Brand and Cooper have this bizarre theory that "love can communicate beyond time, beyond the speed of light, etc." Why would "they" create a tesseract that precisely falls in line with this theory? Since Brand and Cooper are the direct progenitors of the Plan B Lazarus race -- they essentially create a religion in which this "love" concept does transcend time and space. They give the Lazarus Plan Bs a two-step mission: 1) create a wormhole to Saturn in the Solar system and 2) create a tesseract-link as a bookcase/shrine in the location of Murphy Cooper's bedroom... thus resolving the remaining threads of potential-time-paradoxes.
Unfortunately, since they all live in a black hole, they have a hard time interacting with regular humans (aside from the massive endeavor of creating a wormhole and manipulating gravity) and they can't ever escape.
Theory C: Brand and Cooper establish the colony, perhaps more explorers arrive from our Solar system and an indeterminate period of time in the future, they travel to the wormhole and decide to live there instead. This storyline has less narrative urgency and intrigue, so I like Theory B much better.
u/lsparrish [+1] (6 days later)
This movie hits a lot of cinematic points, which made it entertaining enough to watch, but they don't flow together well as a story. It's more in the category of entertaining spectacle than what I would consider good fiction.
It tries to use contrast, but it tries so hard that many things don't fit very believably. For example, the Dust Bowl gravitas does not fit with a fun story about space travel, and the superhero like character arc of the main character (the story being always about him doing incredible things every other minute) doesn't fit well with the father/daughter relationship arc.
As a viewer you are set up to expect multiple interesting things -- political conflict over whether to expand civilization versus conserve resources, a ghost mystery versus the scientific method, solving a puzzling environmental catastrophe, and the invention of artificial gravity. Most of these get addressed towards the end, but we don't actually get very interesting stories about them or satisfying payoffs/consequences.
For example, the ending of the story is set in a rotating cylinder, indicating that they still don't have real artificial gravity. (The payoff is just that some of the humans managed to escape the pull of the earth. Kind of cheap given that they already have rockets, eh?) The political debate doesn't even turn into a thing, it's just there to set the tone early in the movie. (So the conflict was super one sided, no need to conserve resources there...)
Despite having all these interesting ideas to follow up on, the writers felt like they needed to shoehorn in some deep philosophizing (which turned out to be kind of woo-ish, i.e. love and gravity are mysterious magic that transcends time and space). This unfortunately needed to be there to preface some even more incredible twists that weren't needed.
When the ghost thing turns out to be the dad time traveling via black hole tessaract, this basically makes me think I am watching something more like A Wrinkle in Time than an interplanetary colonization story. It isn't the kind of story I wanted to see, at any rate. It's supernatural in all but name. The crystal clouds reinforced the idea of it being more fantasy than hard sci-fi (I mean, it's physics, as designed by someone who really doesn't care about physics). But playing fast and loose with physics like that, and dragging in spirit-like dimensional beings, clashes with things like the rotating space ship that tries so hard to project gritty realism for how space travel would work, how hard it is, how the danger must be fought by ingenuity.
Some more specific criticisms (many of them already covered here):
- They can land/launch multiple times on other planets, but need booster rockets to leave Earth.
- There is a plot thread about needing to solve a gravity equation in order to get people off the planet. No talk about better launch technology, despite that being the logical alternative.
- We're told that the blight affects wheat and Okra, but people can only farm corn. What about potatoes, soy, sunflowers, and all that? And why no move to greenhouses?
- The suffocation threat didn't seem plausible. There's a heck of a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere. There would need to be substantial mass of blight to bind it with something within a few decades. And nobody suggests it is anything other than a naturally occurring fungi.
- Nonhuman animals would be dying just as surely as humans. The proposals to save humanity are discussed rather coldly, with no reference to the welfare of other species.
- They evidently have fairly advanced cryonics. But the idea of using it to extend lifespan into the far future, avoid dying of hunger, or make it easier to launch a human into orbit are not thought of.
- We get to see two people face death from old age boldly without thinking to use cryonics or time dilation to wait for a cure. But we also get to hear an anti-deathism poem about raging against death, recited multiple times (from the guy who dies of old age on screen).
- Self preservation gets denigrated as equal to cowardice. Self sacrifice leads to a kind of afterlife (almost literally, he gets to be a ghost).
- Newton's third law is invoked poetically rather than literally in a situation where they could have made it literal.
- There's no real romance arc, just a kind of vacuum where it seems like one should be.
I also agree with those who have criticized plot-induced stupidity, deus ex machina, and so on. These things could perhaps be glossed over gracefully in a good enough story individually. I have nothing against an ending with fifth dimensional time traveling posthumans per se, it just didn't fit well with the context (a story about humans solving their own problems). And the movie does still work in some ways (as entertaining spectacle) because it has good special effects and the ideas are fun to play with. But it is hard not to be a little disappointed after it is all over, that it didn't work a little better.