Just saw Interstellar (WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS AFTER JUMP)

"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake) 11/08/2014 at 16:54 • Filed to: None

0

3

Fantastic movie. Go see it. See it in IMAX if you can, it was well worth the extra cost. I did have a few issues I'd like to discuss...

My first issue was the first planet. They were worried about time dilation. Obviously. But they were convinced this was where they needed to go. Every hour is 7 years on earth, that's a big deal.

Except how long was the Lazarus astronaut there? Maybe I'm just brain farting, but I thought it had only been 10 years or so since the Lazarus missions. Either way, when Brand gets back to the ship she starts saying that whats-her/his-face would have only been there for a few hours. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GO THERE FIRST THEN? A few hours of data is hardly enough to stake the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE on. Besides, if it's a few hours to 7 years you have plenty of time to go check out the other two planets. If the two planets are failures, you could then go to that one and it wouldn't have been that long on the surface for the original astronaut.

It made no sense to me, and felt like purely a way to skip time so Murph was in her 30s (?) and to kill off that one dude.

My next issue, and really my only primary issue with the spacecraft and physics in the movie (not that there weren't others, but nothing too bad) was when the big ship blew up. Why did it suddenly start falling out of orbit? That's not how it works. Then when Cooper saves it he's saying 'we're out of orbit' implying they reached escape velocity in no time. That's dumb. It felt lazy to me, a lazy attempt at creating extra suspense of the station falling to the planet. Also, I feel like they should have been able to rule that planet out or something before going. It felt like they made some big leaps of faith on the 'data' that Matt Damon was transmitting that they could have verified from orbit.

My final issue, and really the biggest issue I had with the movie, involves the tesseract. What annoys me about it more than anything is I feel like they could have avoided it being a problem/plot hole by omitting one fucking sentence.

Cooper says the tesseract was created by 'them', saying 'them' is the evolved human race capable of living in this 5th or 6th dimension or whatever. That breaks the entire movie. It makes us assume that somehow some portion of humans survived long enough to then save themselves? It's circular: either the human race dies or they don't. The only possible explanation is that in an alternate timeline Brand deploys plan B and the race that evolves decides to save the earth based humans.

Except that goes against the core of the movie, one of the key points made and the entire function of Professor Brand's character: Humans won't do anything for the good of the species unless they see a direct benefit. If the plan b humans survived and became transdimensional beings why would they make the tesseract to save the long since extinct timeline humans? None of that makes sense.

I can accept the whole tesseract thing in a different way (and I must because it was INCREDIBLE and my jaw literally dropped at the reveal): it's not that some evolved species made the tesseract, it's that inside of the event horizon Cooper is in another dimension where he can manipulate gravity (see time, whatever), but there's another even higher dimension in which his subconcious or some other emotion (the love thing?) is able to create the tesseract for him. In that sense he creates the tesseract and thereby communicates with Murph, and when all is said and done this emotion also warps him to outside of the wormhole. My explanation is still a bit of a reach but at least it closes a hole. Except it doesn't, now that I've typed that out it doesn't explain how or why the wormhole was created...

Thoughts? Anyone have any other opinions of the movie?

f86sabre > Jayhawk Jake 11/08/2014 at 17:40

0

I saw it Wednesday and thought it was good. I understand your issues and my only comment is that the story tellers used the fact that they were playing with theoretical physics to give them an avenue to stretch things for the sake of story telling. Really, Cooper's interpretation that humans created the tesseract is only a theory, so who knows.

I thought the love thing was a bit lame,but you "have" to have a human storyline to get the masses in.

Jayhawk Jake > f86sabre 11/08/2014 at 19:07

0

The love thing was offputting at first. When Brand was trying to convince them to go to her lover's planet her whole love rant felt a bit out of place and weird. Like 'forget science and engineering and reason, lets go there because of love'

There was plenty of human storyline, especially at the end with him watching Murph through the tesseract and then seeing her as a dying old lady.

f86sabre > Jayhawk Jake 11/08/2014 at 19:32

0

yeah, I agree. I thought the drive to do what you can for the ones you love was enough combined with Cooper and Murph at the end. The whole "I love the astronaut, so we should go there" felt tacked on.

I thought Matt Damon was awesome and a total asshole. I Don't think he would have passed whatever psych screenings they had for that kind of mission.

On a related note Damon is supposed to play Watney in the Martian. I think he can pull it off, but would prefer Ben Bowder from Farscape. If you haven't read the Martian yet then go get it right now. Like right now.