It should be forbidden to go to the toilet during a film screening
In the French press, they say the same thing. Above all, they say that the technical dialogues are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Therefore for the majority
I think those droids were trying to channel Hal 9000
. ) So, I haven't made up my mind whether its a really great movie or not.
Its a beautifully shot and well acted movie and reasonably thought provoking and lots of human emotion too, pretty much on par with what I'd expect from Nolan.
Now I may require a rewatch as I'm not entirely sure I got the full picture in a few places, but honestly, my heart sank at some (what I thought) fairly basic science oversights and cheesy explanations dialogue.
[WARNING: Spoilers in my points below. You really don't want to open those spoiler tags if you're still intending to watch the movie. I MEAN IT!]
Some of the things that spoiled my immersion. As I said, I might not have got the full gist of it on the first watch, but these points did sort of rattle my meter a bit, and I can usually stretch my plausibilty belief framework pretty far.
There were probably a few other questionable points, but these were the ones that stood out quite clearly for me.
- We've just been caught trespassing a highly secret NASA base and we find out our old professor is running the show there, so hey, a massive conicidental get-out-of-jail-free card. Exactly one hour later our hero is told that the program simply cannot get off the ground without his involvement. Now that may well have been correct, but this decision was made in ONE HOUR? Really? Before that, Cooper didn't even exist to them and an hour later he's in on the program without even going for an interview or meeting the original pilot in command.
- Yaay, we're going to space. The way we get up there is to use a 3 stage rocket before we attain orbit with our cool little shuttle ship thing. Great, even looked believable. So then we head on through a wormhole and we land on other planets with the same little shuttle which can now seemingly punch through the atmosphere on its own without any further need for multi stage rockets. So why did we need them for Earth?
- Alright cool, we've left earth and docked with our spinny not-really-station station, lets spin her up to get some gravity. OK, cool, we got gravity now (but really we're still sitting in the little shuttle ship which is right in the center where, um, theres almost no centrifugal force and thus no gravity, yet eveyone is walking around just fine)
- So, um, lets see, it takes 18 months to fly out past Saturn, hit the wormhole, and now we're through, OK, lets quickly just fly to one of those three planets over there quickly. It'll take maybe a day or so now, so no need to bother going back into hibernation (speculation, but all travel in the new solar system seemed to happen in moments)
- Why is it (in Hollywood sci fi) that whenever a wormhole appears in our solar system that it will have an exit point in a galaxy completely different from our own. I mean, sheeesh, is living in a galaxy having 400 billion star systems and having a diameter of 70000 light years not enough space to find a suitable exit point for the other side of said wormhole. I mean, its not like you can tell the difference that you're in another galaxy vs only 10000 light years away in the same galaxy.
- Right, we're through the wormhole. Gee look, there are 3 planets here, all of them potentially life supporting (wow, imagine that, in the same solar system, but okay, I can stretch a bit of plausibility for good story telling). I think its safe to first choose that little planet over there thats orbiting that FRICKING MASSIVE BLACK HOLE, because gee, that seems like a real safe place to consider moving our entire human species as a possible safe haven for the rest of the future of humanity. (and I'm not even going to try to understand how they can decipher what the beacon is telling them from the previous downed ship with all the time dilation effects surrounding that planet)
- Speaking of which, so the time dilation effects only affect the people on the planet. Apparently if you're in orbit, you're completely free of those effects. So the time dilation event horizon stops in the upper atmosphere because its, uh, closer to the black hole. Like orbiting the planet would never take you around to the other side of it thus making the orbiting ship closer to the black hole. Yeah, silly thinking on my part.
- So our original plan of approaching the planet from underneath is going to waste a lot of fuel, here, let me draw a picture the depicts us saving a huge amount of fuel by using an approach vector that takes us ABOVE the planet instead. Stunned silence and everyone nods in agreement thinking, hey, wow, how come we never thought of that?
- We've said good bye to the girl and we're dropping at a rapid pace toward the black hole event horizon, any moment now, the gravitational forces should be so strong that I'm expecting that ship to be completely disintegrated even before we hit the event horizon. I mean, ITS A FREAKING MASSIVE BLACK HOLE - not even light can escape. (And as a Hollywood aside, I think a huge opportunity was missed by actually NOT having a special effect showing the entry across the event horizon, but hey, thats just me). OK, honestly, I have a bit of a hard time believing that a black hole is a survivable thing. I enjoyed the Black Hole movie from Disney all those years ago, but have long since grown out of that mind set. Nothing in the movie showed me that the future 'helpers' had sufficient techonology to manipulate this kind of a force of nature.
- OK, so we're trapped in a multidimensional room behind Murphs bookcase, we're trying to give her information to stop Cooper from leaving. So heres a good idea, lets give out the coordinates to the secret base that does exactly the opposite and catalyses the whole adventure in the first place, thus starting the story all over again.
- Right, so the third and last planet really is a candidate for human habitation. Awesome. But wait, isn't this planet part of this same solar system that is STILL ORBITING A FREAKING HUGE BLACK HOLE that is slowly sucking all nearby matter into it? (OK, they didn't exactly say humans were ultimately going to live there, but they sure alluded to it) And really, what this point really boils down to is why bother surveying a system for habitaion that had a black hole for a sun in the first place. The original team should have just turned around and come back home. (Because I bet some of you might say that they werent really there looking for human habitats at all, but there specifically for the black hole. But then how come no one on the new mission questioned this before they set out on the mission, since they seemed to know what they were getting into?)
And throughout all that dialogue, it may have been there, but I completely missed exactly what this whole gravity experiment was supposed to accomplish. Why did they NEED to get data from inside the black hole. (Yes, I know to complete the equation or something, but what was it all for? It sure didn't look like it was needed to save the human race.) Hopefully a second viewing will enlighten me. But that aside, there were way too many cheesy explanations for things. I know things needed to be explained simply, but it really came across a bit like a surfer boy getting a revelation into a new way to ride a wave. "Hey man, theres no them, man, its us. It was US that did all this. From the future, like, man." (OK, its just a dig at the dialogue, I think Mathew McConaughey is a decent enough actor on the whole)
And while I did think the robots were sort of cool, I also don't think their design is particularly practical. But I'm no engineer, so what do I know. I must add that I thought the robot was going to do a very cliched 'I've been programmed with a higher directive your existence is no longer useful' type plot twist, but I was pleasantly surprised that the robot was one of the good guys throughout the movie.
Having said all this, I did feel that there was a lot to like in the movie as well, and my hat goes off to Nolan for attempting something this ambitious. I'm just not quite sure that this will end up in my DVD collection the way Inception did.
Anyway, I was wondering whether we're going to see a Cooper Station around Saturn once Elite (full) is released into the wild.
I had fun reflecting on the movie and its flaws, resulting in my unplanned wall of text, but you're absolutely correct. Its just a movie and despite its flaws and confusing plot line, still a pretty good experience.Lol, you're right. I tapped it out last night on my PC and it didn't look all that intimidating. I browsed it again on my tablet on the train to work this morning and I had to scroll down more than 2 screens, which looked far more imposing.
Thanks for your comments, and for not taking my post too seriously.
Side note: Despite the terrible science in Prometheus, if you just take Prometheus as a movie that sets up the Alien movies, then the science plotline is just a vessel to get to the real story. For some reason I didn't find the science fantasy in Prometheus as jarring as the flaws in Interstellar which portrays the use of science as the core plotline.
I was waiting for the robot at some point to say "Im sorry Cooper, Im afraid I cannot let you do that"
