Interstellar - Help Me Understand Some Things (not the science)!

Hi all,

I've watched this movie twice now and some things bother me about it. If the Cooper character was NASA's greatest ever test pilot, why wasn't he part of NASA's mission from the get go? Surely they would have wanted the best right from the start. It just seemed really odd to me that he wasn't involved at all.

Additionally when he turned up at the secret facility with his daughter, no-one seemed very surprised to see him, and almost instantly gave him a job flying a rocket ship without any formal process or training! What happened to the bloke they would have already chosen for the mission?

Finally, in the final act of the film when Cooper is sending messages through the bookcase, he sent the message "Stay" to Murph, and I assume himself, trying to stop himself from leaving. Why would he have also sent the co-ordinates of the NASA base then? Surely if he didn't want himself to go, he should have just not sent any messages at all through the bookcase. No coordinates, no road trip, no finding the NASA base, no going away on a trip.......no movie??????

Oh and a quick one about the science. How about a movie that does relativity the other way? Lets say a couple are living on the heavy gravity planet and the husband says "Honey I'm just going out for a couple drinks with the boys. See you in a couple of hours". He heads off in his rocket ship and goes through a wormhole to earth. There he meets a girl, gets married and lives a full life with her. Then she dies, so he gets in his rocket ship and heads back to the wormhole, arriving home a few hours later. He's had a whole other life and she just thinks he's had a night on the turps with his mates!

 

Plotholes....big huge gaping ones happen a lot in Nolan movies.

The thing is in fast action popcorn type sci-fi movies you don't notice them so much because -

a) These are not films for deep reflection and analysis.

b) The action moves so fast you don't have time to think about it till the next sequence.

However, if you are writing supposedly "clever/deep" sci-fi you have to make sure you go over the script with a fine tooth comb as you will get many "eh???" moments.

Nolan just doesn't seem to bother. But in his defence sometimes you just have to write stuff that doesn't quite make sense just to fit in the constraints of the plot and time. It's a juggling act and some are better than others at it.

 

I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.

 

How clearly would you be thinking if you'd just passed through a black hole's event horizon and found yourself in a five dimensional super space-time tesserect?

 

I was really let down by this film a lot but not because of plotholes or incongruities - those usually don't bother me. I can deal with plotholes if the movie is interesting.

Well, interesting is what Interstellar certainly wasn't - to me, at least. Bland is a more apt description. It failed to keep me involved, make me empathize with the characters, fascinate me with the mysteries of space - it basically did nothing for me. The scenes that were meant to be emotional felt somewhat contrived and manipulative. Heck, even the special effects didn't blow me away. After it was over I didn't even feel intrigued enough to bother putting my brain to the task of unraveling all that mess.

Of course, there were a couple of scenes that got my blood pumping a little bit faster but as I said, overall it was a disappointment, especially considering the amount of hype the movie has gotten.
Rant over.

 

Not going to disagree with you on this but Memento -- a plot challenge if there ever was one -- is remarkably hole-less.

I'm with Freedom Rider: what defies understanding about Interstellar is how over-hyped and over-rated it is! Three hours of my life I wish I could get back. I should have listened to my favorite critic:



Leonard Pinth-Garnell - "Really bit the big one!"

 

All I know is, that film made me really appreciate okra.

 

Except he would come back looking a lot older – how much older depending on what you consider "a full life", but surely enough that she would notice.

 

Don't get me started. I rolled my eyes several times in it.

 

I still liked it. For me it was a great popcorn movie, nothing more, nothing less.

 

Watched it.......at the end, came to the conclusion that it was 169 minutes I'll never get back!

 

The earlier part of the film has problems, but it all really falls apart in the last 30 minutes or so. Up to that point there aren't so many plot holes as there are silly dramatic contrivances meant to create tension and move the story along. That I could have forgiven. In the tesseract, Nolan blows it. There's no explaining this stuff away, it's just lazy writing.

 

The acting is excellent from the two leads. Special effects, picture and sound quality are all quite good. It's entertaining and fun to enjoy on home theater. The "science" and other plotholes can either be ignored or be used to destroy the entertainment value. There aren't going to be any two or three hour films which cover such a huge topic without any number of holes.

Those looking for somewhat more sci-fi realism should try Europa Report. I'd also recommend Moon. Neither are so broad in scope, so there won't be as many holes.

 

I think that's why Gravity seemed so much better.

Less running time, focused on one person.

 

I wished Gravity was a bit longer but Interstellar was too long for me also.

 

Me too. At the end of the day it's an empty ride, but one I can enjoy. It's not as blatantly dumb as some other recent summer movies. I can also appreciate that Nolan is at least reaching for a better kind of blockbuster; whether or not he'll ever get there is the question. I hope that he does sooner rather than later.

I also laugh a little at the whole idea that, in this world, the moon landing conspiracy is apparently popular enough to have some history and science books removed from schools. That "the world needs farmers, not engineers," and that NASA thought McConaughey just wasn't around anymore. Say what?

My biggest question about the movie is whether or not these decisions were really Nolan's, or if the studio demanded he dumb it down for the mass audience some.

 

Actually, I really liked it. What are the alternatives, Transformers 8? I've liked all of Nolan's movies and I didn't think that this one was an empty ride. I agree that at least Nolan is reaching for a better blockbuster but I've given up on blockbusters and just hope for a good movie. Can't wait to see what he does next.

 

I will repeat what I've said elsewhere. I saw Interstellar in my local cineplex and was thoroughly put off by the WTF first forty-five minutes and the other frequently mentioned problems. I saw it again in a perfectly tuned IMAX theater and it blew me away. As a pure sensory experience, it is stellar entertainment.

 

I'm guessing (total conjecture) that they had already tried several other people who did not work out. Remember that they shipped out Matt Damon several months/years before and he never came back. Cooper was the #2 choice, and they only had so many spare Saturn V rockets lying around.

That's kind of like saying, "why didn't the Good Witch just tell Dorothy to use her ruby slippers immediately to get back home?" Because then the movie would be 15 minutes long.

They were trying to make the movie scientifically accurate (or as accurate as theory can make it), and relativity only goes in the other direction. You go faster-than-light (or close to it) in a spaceship, you lose lots of time while on the ship and come back and all your relatives are dead. Gene Roddenberry acknowledged this in Star Trek, but said "we can't make it part of the story for dramatic reasons." So that's one realistic part of space travel they had to ignore.

I personally think the story is full of holes and there are way too many WTF moments in the film, but I have to salute Nolan for the sheer audacity of making a movie like this -- and shooting on 65mm film, to boot. Visually, it's a very entertaining film. Disliked the mix, disliked some of the characters, and I thought the plot was all over the place, but it's a beautiful film to watch.

 

Hi Vidiot,

Firstly let me say I think your posts are some of the best stuff on the whole SH forum. Whenever I see your avatar in a thread, I immediately think "Great! Good to see Vidiot chiming in on this. This guy knows what he's talking about."

That aside, If I remember correctly, when Cooper gets to the NASA base it's revealed that 12 or so people have been sent off to explore promising worlds, but only three show potential. I really struggle to understand why Cooper, the best of the best, was never approached for the program, yet when he turned up at their base, it was all open arms, great to see you, no worries I'll leave my family for you with hardly a second thought. It just didn't add up.

Stuff like this really pulls me out of a movie. How a film looks is very important, but if you can't make a basic narrative make sense IMO you have no business making films!

 

Totally agree with this part. I don't care how slick the movie looks or how good the production values, if the story being told is full of plot holes or just plain stupidity, then I'll give it no props.

 

Yeah, I agree with this. Up until then, I was willing to go with the flow, despite obvious holes. But the the final 30 minute stuff was just piss poor.

 

Replies in sequence of questions:

IIRC Cooper washed himself out after crashing and tried to leave it all behind. That's what his dream was about at the beginning.

Obviously some time passes between when Cooper arrives and when he's brought into the conference room (he's been pleading to see his daughter for a while, and to the robot, who is only following orders). This gives the people in the conference room time to be informed by Caine's character. The ship they gave Cooper to fly was the same type in his dream, and as Caine says, Cooper is the only person alive who has ever actually flown one. The other pilot has only done it in simulators.

I'll have to think about your third question.

I like the movie a lot, and am not about to try to convince others to like it or to complain about their hating it.

John K.

 

If I'd only seen the movie once, I would've agreed. But I saw it again, and I liked it a lot more. And then I liked it even more when I saw it a third time. It's a grower!

 

Different kind of mission. For Damon's mission, they needed scientists who could judge the quality of planets where mankind could potentially move. McConaughey was there strictly as a pilot, not as a scientist...