Interstellar = Awful
 

Saw it last night on IMAX. The acting isn't terrible, some of the special effects were great. However the plot could have been written by a couple of stoned D- high schoolers with a very poor concept of what Physics is about. Also the directing was terrible, which shocked me because I like Chris Nolan's work usually.

2 hours 40 minutes of awful pacing that tells a story which defies basic science and after about 2 hours seems to have no idea where it is going or what it is about. The last 15 minutes are so implausible and nonsensical that if I were at home I'd have just turned it off.

Save your money. More importantly save your time. It's 2+ hours of my life ill never get back. Not even from a wormhole.

Not a surprise,when you get for leading role guy which usually do romantic movies only.

But according to the advertising the film is "brilliant" "groundbreaking" and "the most amazing movie you will see this year". No?

I feel lied to and manipulated by Hollywood and its' marketing machine. :(

Thanks for the head's up.
Interstellar not stellar.:)

yeah I agree first part was okay and then when they all talking about love I just bolt tit lol

It's what Gravity would have been if someone wiped their ass with the script and then made Bullock and Clooney say only the parts they could still read through all the brown streaks and stains. :2 cents:

seems like i made the right decision when my friends asked me to join for that tomorrow

i read some reviews and then decided to stay home

I haven't seen it yet but I did see Gravity. One thing I'll say is that some of these types of films seem to keep the story simpler than most viewers would like and instead rely heavily on it's "unspoken commentary on humanity" or on "where our present society is headed", or "what we're doing to the planet and to ourselves" etc.

For me, sometimes I'd just like to watch a good movie that doesn't require any extranious deep thought in order to fully "get it." Not always, but sometimes.

Anyway I never did have any high expectations for Interstellar, but I fully intend to see it.... in a few months when it hits Movie Central.

So.. it's the new Inception? Or am I going too far?

It's rated 9.1 out of 10 on IMDB. Somebody fugg'n likes it :winkwink:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Inception was an all time great film...when compared against interstellar. The again, any movie is great compared to this nonsense.

Or...

Someone who spent 160 million to make the movie is distorting opinion by artificially hyping up the media coverage and reviews about the movie online. Yes, I know everything written on any website is true, but maybe just this once someone is gaming the media. :1orglaugh

I'm sure you're absolutely right :thumbsup

that movie was indeed pretty bad, give me back the 2 hours of my life...

Gravity had 9.something in the beginning and is now at 8.0 and dropped out of the Top 250

let's give it a while

Edit: I saw Gravity and Rush almost at the same time - Gravity was hyped, got all the Oscars etc. but i found Rush to be a much better movie.

Rush now has a 8.2 and is on 153 in the top 250 - Gravity see above

If he mumbles as poorly & inaudibly as he does in those fucking Lincoln car commercials...count me OUT!

Good to see they admit the moon landings were fake

I never listen to reviewers who say "two hours of my life I won't get back."

I knew it!

I'm pretty sure I'll like this movie but I'm not going to the theater to see it. Trying to stay away from groups of people.

I am SHOCKED at the mere thought of the possibility of something so radically unethical!

Besides, how could someone game a system with so much technology around? I thought we were safe from this kind of manipulation here in the 21st century.

I am completely disillusioned now.

Firstly - I do not see anybody from the government admitting that, merely screenwriter "admitting". It is like you admitting it.
Secondly it is not even screenwriter admitting, he just wrote it for the character to admit. Screenwriter may not think the same as characters you know.

Ebola scare? Conspiracy nut? :1orglaugh

If you have any understanding of science, the movie will really bother you.

The other problem is the recursive black hole problem, think of terminator and Kyle Reese going back in time to protect Sarah Connor (he was sent by John Connor) and ends of getting Sarah pregnant with John... Chicken and the egg problem.

Not very good.

I dont really care for movies that are 2 hours or longer.

I prefer 90 minutes.

I never thought I'd say this about gfy'ers...but you guys think too much to enjoy yourselves. There's this thing called suspension of disbelief. It helps you get enjoyment out of filmed entertainment without overanalyzing every detail like you're a scientist.

Did you see the movie?

+1 I agree with you ;)

Just saw the movie and like it for what it is : a science-fiction movie exploring metaphysic.

For sure, if you never care about space and time, nor existence, and if you're not aware about the string theory that could explain more dimensions than our classic 3D+time, this movie is not mode for you.

I completely respect that you don't like the movie but criticizing a SF movie because it defies science is the nonsense specially if you like Inception !

lol, thats no way to live

I saw Interstellar last night. WARNING : Contains Spoilers

It was “great”. It wasn’t “excellent”, but it was pretty damn good.

WHAT BUGGED ME (Minor):

What bugged me about the movie was that it was made with the support of scientist Kip Thorn (Google him) so that certain visual effects look exactly as they should. Unfortunately they let some other physics slip aside. This really bugs me because movie makers, even the usually awesome Chris Nolan, treat the movie audience like complete idiots. Cases in point:

At one point of the movie, a character has to explain the concept of wormholes. Of course it is really meant to explain it to the audience, but in the movie context one character has to explain it to another. So who do they explain it to? Cooper the pilot, played by Matthew McConaughey. ARGH! The pilot should already know this as he’s about to fly into a wormhole. A much better idea would have had Cooper explain the Wormhole concept to his daughter, Murph, instead. Why? She’s young and may not understand what a Wormhole is, and since she’s already science-minded, this might have given her character yet another reason to pursue science later in life.

SPOLIERS:
There are a few other issues such as : The smaller space ship stopping the larger ship’s rotation (It was done too fast and should have damaged or destroyed the small ship or at least the coupling), fiery explosions on planets that don’t have enough oxygen, etc. The robot was too weird.


Now the Good: The very, very good:

The acting is excellent. All A-list actors including 6 Academy award winners were cast in this movie for the emotional impact Nolan wanted, and it works. Though I wasn't too emotionally involved in the characters at first, the ending was a tear-jerker for sure.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT!

The Science Fiction of the movie is fantastic, wonderful, incredible. For me at least, it has every element in science fiction that fills me with Awe: Space, Worm Holes, Black Holes, Time Travel, Tesseracts (4 Dimensional Hypercubes) and Multi-dimensional thinking. As soon as I pushed the “just for the movies goofs in physics”, I was completely into the movie. The visual effects and visual representations of the Black Hole, Worm Hole and Tesseract were very thrilling for me.

For Chris Nolan fans, you won’t be disappointed. It’s got that “something else is going on” feel, and it keeps is secrets almost hidden. It makes the best use of the IMAX format that I have seen to date. The music is excellent. Many points remind you of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clever use of sound / no sound for the space scenes (think “Gravity”). Thankfully NOT in 3D.

It’s really worth going to see especially in IMAX. Don’t skip the movie because someone says it’s bad. This is one of those movies that you have to see for yourself and make your own decisions on.


PS: For the Visual Effects super-fans like me:

- IMDB

How Interstellar?s Black Hole Led To An Actual Scientific Discovery

http://www.penny4nasa.org/2014/11/07...fic-discovery/

Wouldn't surprise me.

I visualize a large room filled with people at computers hired by the studios to spend 8 hours a day for a few weeks just 'gaming the media' to plug and promote their turd of a movie on all the IMDBs, Rotten Tomatoes movie review and social media sites.

wait, so the premise of this thread is interstellar sucks because it conflicts with high school level physics and the movie is propped up with 1000s of fake reviews uploaded to imdb to offset the bad?

ahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

Thats really to bad, I was hoping it would be decent :(

I just saw it. I am a major science fiction nutjob. I love the movie.
I do not get what there is to complain about. I mean without giving away too much...did you expect that the black hole was going to be explained in any reasonable fashion? We have no idea what to expect. Besides being ripped apart and crushed..lol

I thought the movie was awesome. I might even go see it again this week. Switch to Imax though i suspect some of the visuals would have been amazing on Imax

There was zero reason for the son, his wife and their son to be in the film. They could easily have cut 30 minutes out of the film by deleting entirely unnecessary characters.

The death scene with Michael Caine was a pivotal plot point and the sound editing was so bad that half his statements were inaudible in IMAX. He is a great actor and the directing marginalized his performance horribly.

Having a planet close enough to a black hole to slow time by 60,000x what it is on earth is not scifi. Scifi is an exploration of what may be possible.. Not things that are absolutely known to be impossible.

At the end of the film, he is extracted from a black hole how? To where? When?

What 'magical data' is a robot extracting from a black hole? To accomplish what exactly?

His daughter sees a glitching second hand for a brief moment and instantly she knows it's an interdimensional transmission in morse code from her father who she has not seen in decades... To explain the entire mystery of the universe in a series of dots and dashes? Really? If she is that brilliantly prescient, why didn't she just also know the magical black hole data the robot was recovering and shorten the movie by an hour :1orglaugh

When in doubt, if the plot fails, just throw in words about Love and claim its part of the answer is not brilliant writing... Unless you are in junior high school and your teacher really wants to avoid hurting your feelings.

Humans construct 5th dimensional space but can't figure out how to communicate with people that only Mcconoughey can talk to? The girl can't figure out how to communicate with herself even though she mastered the entire universe and multiple new dimensions?

Good scifi like BladeRunner, District 9 and dozens of other monumental films are based in science. They explore extensions and interpretations of science. Bad scifi movies ignore science. This movie was nonsense with ridiculous leaps in the plot like her knowing her dad is communicating with her, a poorly paced story, a string of useless characters, terrible sound mixing and worse. It wastes performances by great actors like Lithgow and Caine to focus on weak performances and takes 2+ hours to tell a 45 minute story.

If you liked this, go watch District 9 if you haven't seen it. One is a great scifi film, the other is a trainwreck mascarading as a movie. See if you can figure out which is which. :2 cents:

A company spending 160 million dollars on a film release can't spend a hundred grand on making thousands of accounts online to post favorable reviews, ratings and comments? You must be new to the Internet. :1orglaugh

I have hundreds of websites, hundreds of Twitter accounts and at one point had reviewed some adult sites more than twenty times each for high traffic websites. I'm not the only one. Give me a budget of a few hundred grand and a couple months notice to work with other similar webmasters and we would be able to push Ishtar to the top of the rating charts on IMDB and elsewhere. When you are spending 160M on a film, you don't leave 'public opinion' during opening weekend up to the public.

keep deluding yourself thinking this sort of silliness so you can hi5 the mirror one more time for your cynical and loquacious review of a science FICTION movie that addresses bigger issues than you are seeing, which is what sci-fi is about anyway.

:)

it's classic conspiracy theory logic, all the good reviews are faked because they contradict this one negative review.

got it.

Sure, and they also pay magazines for their critics. And by the way they pay me to write here the film is a good one.

Sincerely, you like action movies so don't like Interstellar because it deals with subjects beyond your comprehension.

Reading your arguments, I assume 2001 A Space Odyssey is not SF.

the OP should dissect the original star trek the same way. completely overlooking each and every social issue the series attempts to address and is ultimately about, again, that is science fiction. it's not about getting the science "right". How the fuck do you get the science right on shit which science has no idea about yet? you don't.

@DynaMo - If you think little of my opinion about a film, why are you in a thread I created discussing it? I happen to know more about online reviews than most people, because I've made a living writing them and publishing them. If you honestly think IMDB can't be gamed you are being a bit more than naieve.

This film was backed by Warner Bros and Sony. They spent 160M on the film and have been working continually on their marketing efforts since before either of us were born. If you were spending 160M on a product and certain review sites were great traffic sources, wouldn't you want to get them in line ahead of time? Oh right, nobody has ever tried to manipulate critics, nobody has ever launched biased review sites and nobody would bother doing any of it for a 160M film release... They only do that sort of thing when launching a new porn site, politician or restaurant.

@fred I hated interstellar because I do like good scifi, not because I dislike scifi. Bad scifi is bad scifi, it doesn't get a pass just because it's scifi. That's like saying an unfunny movie is great because it was a comedy... If it wasn't funny, it wasn't really a comedy.

because I like to argue with you. I consider you a master debater and worthy of my engaging you in convo/debate/argument. exacly opposite of thinking little of your opinion. if i thought little of it, i would in fact dismiss it without remark.

I really do appreciate that remark.

Now, if we can somehow stretch that elegant comment into a 2.5 hour poorly paced film script and ignore all science, Christopher Nolan might want to use it as the plot of his next movie :winkwink:

Wow pretty cool!


It is, see it. It's not Nolan's best movie (I liked the first Batman and The Prestige the best) but this is certainly his most ambitious. And it's a really complex story to tell too. I plan to go see it again in a week or two.


DEFINATELY see it in IMAX. Not only is the screen bigger, but some parts of the movie were filmed with real IMAX cameras. The movie also switches formats during some parts which is surprisingly interesting. And of course, there's the sound. I'm lucky in that the IMAX theatre near me plays movies like this with the volume control set to 11 - it's so freaking loud, I love it.


SPOILERS: I'd disagree. Remember, its his generation that would be the last to live on earth. It's also the son that is pushing Murph to forget about her Dad, which of course she can't do.

I offer a different take on it. SPOILERS: He was dying, and couldn't talk loudly. Murph even leaned into him to hear him clearly. When he was speaking his final words, the theatre was dead quite. Everyone was listening, carefully.

This method of getting the audience to pay attention was first used in Aliens by James Cameron. When the grunts enter the station for the first time, the audience watches the action partially through video monitors which are noisy, distorted, and crackly, making the audience squint (i.e. pay attention).


Agree completely, and LOVED this part.

SPOILERS: "When" is approximately 70 or 80 years after he left, judging by the age of Murph. But how? Who knows...

SPOILERS!!: While in the Tesseract, the Robot is telling Cooper about what it learned. Cooper is sending this data to Murph in the past via the wrist watch's second hand that is quivering back and fourth.


SPOILERS (ARGH!)!: No, not right away, but don't forget she also figured out why the books were falling, and she saw the lines in the dust, and Cooper figured out that the lines were binary and lead to Nasa / Norad. By this point, Murph knew that any other weirdness in the room might mean something. As soon as she saw the watch's second hand moving the way it was moving she knew it was important. She then spend what looked like years and years to figure it all out. It is also hinted that she was insane, and that she figured it all out by herself.


I struggled with this but only a little. Remember that Brand makes an argument that love trasncends time. You can love someone in the hear and now, and love someone even after they are dead. Weak maybe, but ok. It's plausible and makes sense for the movie. Coopers drive is his love for his family. All the levels and floors you see in the Tesseract are all his family too. Mush? Maybe, but it worked for me.

(In Inception by the way, everything that Dicaprio's character did was for the love of his family too btw).


Mmmm... well maybe, but: It's established that nothing can escape a black hole, not even light. TARS (and another scientist I think) make a point of suggesting that Quantum Data can be broadcast out. Maybe Cooper was using Quantum Entanglement to move the watch hand? Stetching, maybe but only just a little.

Bladerunner had flying cars and clones used as slaves. These concepts are a stretch for some people but for others not at all. In Star Trek TNG they had super slim laptops, touch screens, and music played by computer. All stretches of the imagination in the 80's but commonplace today.

Some movies of course get the physics completely wrong. X-wing fighters in Star Wars could never fly the way they do, but of course it doesn't matter. In Gravity, George Clooney should never have had to "let go". It doesn't matter. Good Sci-fi is good sci-fi. Like you, I hate it when they dumb things down for the audience, but sometimes if its not too dumb, I will just overlook it.

Wow that's so weird... I did't care for District 9. I thought it was long and boring. The effects were beautiful maybe. To me this was 99% social commentary and 1% sci-fi, not much more. As sci-fi movies go, Intersteller was much better. It should be compared to 2001, not District 9 I'd say...

Relentless, you know you made a *challenge my view* thread just by the title you worded: interstellar = awful, come on! you are welcoming debate re: your view with such a sensational title.

!

No doubt and as with all Art we may disagree as a matter of taste.

The gaming of reviews thought line interests me more. That isn't a matter of taste. If you ever want something positively reviewed online, set aside a few hundred grand for me and I'll prove it can be done.:pimp

I like it when someone has an opposing view to mine, well, someone with an opposing that can argue their view effectively and generally maturely. nevertheless, I like to bring my A game into a debate, but I do only tend to stick to topics that interest me, like sci-fi.

Dunno about you, but it hit me, and I was emotionally captured for some time, so, to stress it out, at first, I was about to joke that Interstellar=Armageddon / Gravity, but then I decided to give it a credit, the Numero Uno flick of the year - balanced, dynamic, brave, where a noble at heart but underestimated man would use a chance to take the risk for accomplishing a simply right aim - save his children by saving the human race.

@********** just a quick note on spoilers. I didn't mention any spoilers until after warning people early in the thread. At this point anyone reading should already have seen the spoiler warnings by now.

Films like StarWars and BladeRunner are distant future fantasy. Incorporating things like the force and sentient machines. Films like Interstellar are intended to be grounded in reality, much more like Contact and others in the genre. They are not the same thing. I don't expect a Guardians of the Galaxy to be scientifically accurate... And I didn't expect interstellar to be funny. Perhaps you are right. If you look at interstellar as a comedy it does do a nice job of making fun of science. Perhaps it fits more neatly in the scifi genre where you'd find Idiocracy. As unintentional comedy this film did have me laughing at the plot several times.