Interstellar

[traceria she/her]

Tell me some of you have seen it!  Because if you haven't, make some plans! 

 

It's a long one, so dehydrate yourself beforehand so you won't have to use the restroom halfway through.    However, it's so worth it.  

[Left he/him]

I've seen it!   It might be my favorite movie of the year. The robots and all the other science was absolutely fantastic and squares with everything that I understand about such things. The characters were also better than I expect from a hard sci-fi film. And can I just say that the robots were great

[traceria she/her]

I've seen it!   It might be my favorite movie of the year. The robots and all the other science was absolutely fantastic and squares with everything that I understand about such things. The characters were also better than I expect from a hard sci-fi film. And can I just say that the robots were great

 

Agreed!   My husband tends to have a much better way with words than I do, and he said it's like the modern successor to 2001: A Space Odyssey.  We were like giddy children when the credits started to role.  Soooo good. 

[Delightful]

I saw it the other day and thought it was absolutely fantastic! I was pleasantly surprised by my emotional attachment and attention paid to the characters in a sci-fi film, as LeftVash said. Also, the way it was acted, the way scenes cut between storylines, the way I - who knows almost no physics - understood the whole gravity/relative time thing was awesome. (and the relative time! OMG I never realised that time could be so emotional(ly exploited in film )

 

One thing though.

 

I'm still confused by the ending. How did he end up on Saturn? How did humanity end up on Saturn? Hadn't he just become some superior 5D being? And if not, who made the structure he fell into in the black hole? I thought I understood everything and then.....the emotional resolution was perfect, but logically what the heck happened there?

 

Definitely an incredibly fantastically unbelievable movie. Super highly recommended

[traceria she/her]

To answer your question (though refining thoughts from others are much welcome!):

 

To use a helpful special I watched on the Science Channel the other night, there are some who theorize that wormholes exist between black holes and white holes, which is one explanation since the wormhole they first entered was also by Saturn.  The explanation my husband provided, though, is that Cooper was in a 'place' where all time and space were accessible, so he would have been able to come out literally anywhere and any time in space and time.  Whoever or whatever  made time and space tangible to him beyond the black hole horizon was kind enough to make sure he was dumped out where he could be picked up by future humans who had by then built colonies in the solar system.

[Quiver he/him]

So, I went to a midnight showing.

 

First of all- wow that was a bad idea. I am exhausted today; I've only ever seen the Avengers and the Return of the King at midnight shows; I need to get back into practice for the Hobbit.

 

Anyway... it was an... interesting movie. A good one- don't get me wrong- but more... interesting than anything else. 

 

I loved the opening sequence and the beginning; the dust and the small details they used, like turning plates upside down and the narration by the older characters, felt very... authentic, I suppose. It made me feel like I was watching something about the Dust Bowl, which made the visual of wiping the dust off the laptop and the drones and the other pieces of modern/futuristic tech more interesting.

 

(Though, speaking of the drone... I don't really remember a pay off to that story line. I thought the 'anomaly' was going to be revealed as being responsible for it crash landing, but I didn't see how it connected to everything else... can anyone explain that? Or was it just a random piece of world building?)

 

I admit, the science kind of went over my head a little bit... or, well, a lot. I also liked the music, though I think the bombastic organ was played a bit too often; though the scenes it played were (I think) connected to one another, thematically if nothing else, so that might just be my own personal first-time griping.

 

And in response to the princess of Newcago... I agree with Traceria, that whoever it was that built the 5D space-room dropped him back at the point that he would be saved just in the nick of time. I suppose an alternative theory could be that the room collapsed,and Coop happened to end up at that time (because of time, and black holes and stuff), but the more I think about it, the more I think that if he was that far into the black hole, he should have ended up much further in the future than he did.

 

Either way, I think it's to make sure the time loop is closed. The future five-dimensional humans know, from history, that Coop was found outside Saturn, and that there was a "ghost" in Murph's room. They take Coop to the tesseract-space to become the ghost (allowing Murphey to save the world and presumably allow the 5D!Humans to eventually exist), then drop him outside Saturn like history says.

 

Anyway- on the whole, I prefer Inception, but this was a good movie.

Edited November 15, 2014 by Quiver

[Delightful]

I thought the point in the black hole (what is a tesseract BTW? I thought it was a Marvel invention), was that once inside Coop and....forgot his name but the other guy on their mission, had become the 5D beings from inside there, and there wasn't any aliens affecting things. I thought they would then "die", become 5D beings, Murph would get the message, life would emigrate to the new universe....and none of that happened.

 

But if I'm understanding right, you're saying that it was future 5D humans doing everything - but how did they become 5D if no one believed Murph and they ended up on Saturn rather than in the galaxy through the wormhole? And where did Saturn come from, it wasn't part of the plan to begin with, and I thought humanity was desperate and dying and had placed all their interstellar hopes on Coop and his team. So confusing. Hoping I'm making sense here and not just rambling.

 

I agree with Quiver - loved the small worldbuilding details. One of the "home" scenes, I think with Coop's son and family, they're eating corn pie, there's  corn-on-the-cob on the table, and the mum tells her kid to eat his fritters. And even just when Coop's talking to his dad out the front, and there's all this dust piled up on the window sill....to the point that when he opens his eyes at the end and looks outside, what struck me immediately was the lack of dust.

 

What I noticed more about the music was actually the silence - like they're launching into space and it's cacophonous, then it goes dead quiet. I thought that was awesome.

Edited November 15, 2014 by Delightful

[Quiver he/him]

A tesseract is a four dimensional hypercube, obviously.

 

...Yeah, I'm not really sure what that means. I think the word tesseract was used in the film, but like I said... late showing. I got the term from the wikipedia summary of the plot when I was double-checking; if I understand things right, a tesseract is the next dimension up from a cube, with the added dimension (at least in the film) being time.

 

As I say, I'm... mostly guessing, and I could be very, very wrong.  But my take on the end of the movie was that Murphey was extremely well-respected and believed; she had a space station named after her, after all. It was just her belief that her father somehow travelled back in time to give a message to her child self that left people a bit... flummoxed. Think Arthur Conan Doyle; he's still respected as a novellist, and for contributing to the idea of forensics, but he also believed (as in believed) in fairies, despite not having any proof and having evidence o the contrary. People still respect him, they just... overlook that "crazy" part that they don't like.

 

I got the impression that the Saturn Station was being used as a relay point between our system and Gargantia's... though I'll say uprfront that there isn't exactly much to back it up. But considering they seemed to be building man-sized space ships, I imagined they were building their resources for an eventual push into Gargantia's system, most likely to arrive there a few generations after Brand's colony was established. Coop went ahead of time because he's less interested in seeing a future earth colony, and more interested in seeing Brand.

 

The 5D beings being future humans... my theory is that, eventually, mankind ascended to that level of being, meaning they could be us thousands and thousands of years from now, rather than a generation or so. But... that might be cheapening the narrative a little- like I said, I don't really know, and I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on this!

 

And yes, the firefly-style space sound effects were awesome; I'm kicking myself for not mentioning that.

Edited November 15, 2014 by Quiver

[Left he/him]

I just realized I don't know how to do spoiler tags.... I'll white out for now.

 

I think after Cooper had sent his message in the tesseract(weird...) he traveled through the black hole into the wormhole by Saturn. Wormholes don't have to have only one opening which is why that worked.

It's implied that 5D humans from a long time in the future constructed the tesseract and stuff for Cooper so that he could send the data to Murph. Something to do with 5D people can't interact with 3D people just like 3D people can't really interact with 5D people.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

I just barely got back from seeing it and my mind is thoroughly blown. I agree on the Saturn thing, that should've been explained more, in my opinion.

I also believe that it at least implied that the 5D beings were humans. It was after Murph had figured out the equation from Coop's data that they figured out how to launch the Space Station into outer space and decided to stay at saturn for some reason.

[Edgedancer he/him]

I´m just came back from watching the movie together with my family. I liked (to be honest my eyes got a bit watery at some points) but people already praised the heck out of it, so I´ll skip that phase and get to the point where I nitpick about a few things that my entire group disliked.

1) The beginning spoils the ending hard. Everytime suspense was comming up I was like... Oh right the movie told us that the population of earth will be safed.

 

2) Why did they enter the planet with slower time in the first place? All of us figured imediately that the person couldn´t have been there for more than "2 hours." (Plus the guy getting hit by the wave had a case of "lets be an idiot to die for the plot") Making it feel contrived for the sake of drama.

 

3) Exact opinions varied on this but none of us trusted Mann for a moment.

[traceria she/her]

You all should read or watch a couple things.    1) A Wrinkle in Time 2) Watch a little Stargate SG-1 if you have some time, particularly episodes related to the Ancients. 3) Flatland (mandatory reading in my math major Geometry class in college).

 

Saturn first became important in the film because that is where the wormhole showed up.  So, as in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, which, for those who are unfamiliar, features a space station strategically placed by a stable wormhole, it becomes an important spot in the solar system due to the location of the wormhole.  

 

As to the 5D humans, I'm not 100% convinced they absolutely had to be future humans, just beings interested enough in life in the universe, specifically humans on Earth at the time when we first meet Cooper.  They leave it open enough that viewers can walk away thinking differently from one another and no one is necessarily wrong.  It would be pretty awesome if the 5D beings were actually descendants, so to speak, of the AI robots like TARS and CASE.

 

For me, even though it was a certainty humankind would be saved in some fashion, I was so emotionally invested in Cooper and Murph's story that I felt just as lost and in peril as they did at various points.  I was much more vested in that "journey" than the destination of the human race.  It would be interesting to hear what the makers of the film intended in this regard.

 

If I'm remembering correctly, they went to the wave planet because the signal was most definitely a continuous thumbs up and they wanted the data.  They figured if they could get in and get out, they wouldn't waste TOO much time.  Instead, they wasted a WHOLE lot of time, lost a man in the attempt to get the data, and belatedly realized that the time dilation actually accounted for why the signal was still giving a thumbs up (it had technically not been on for very long).  Though there could be arguments about why this trip and these scenes weren't absolutely necessary, I think it did a few things for the storyline.  1) It showed flawed humans making a flawed decision, which is more in line with real life than what you sometimes get in movies where it can be expected that the protagonist will, in the end, make the impossible shot and save [fill in blank].  2) It really brought home to me just how risky their mission was and how tough it was going to be to make choices, particular the right ones.  3) It also made me worry about the time they had to do it all in.  Now, at the end of the film, you realize that to Cooper and Brand, time ends up not being the most important variable and yet THE most important at the same time.  Let me explain.  The wasting of time on any of the planets ends up not mattering at all.  At the end, Cooper is still able to contact Murph and save humanity despite all the wasted time.  Brand is still able to set up the plan B colony despite the wasted time.  On the flip side, time is of vital importance because it, along with gravity, is what makes it possible for Cooper to contact Murphy at multiple moments in time.  Going to the wave planet, though, made me-the-viewer think the trip to the surface was a colossal failure and put their mission in jeopardy.  It appeared to do so, but it also is what contributed to them making the last ditch effort by giving the black hole a fly by. 

[Lightsworn Panda he/him]

I've always had a problem with not reading spoilers. Right now, my fingers are positively itching from not clicking those spoiler tags. 

 

Caleb LeftVash, you can put words into spoiler tags by putting your words into something like this: [spoiler*]Words[/spoiler*] Don't put the asterixes in, since I put them there to negate the activation of the spoiler tag.