OT: New movie "Interstellar"
LeatherGryphon
Posts: 11,505
I sat through the three hours of the new movie "Interstellar" and it kept my attention and the science was pretty good especially the wormhole and blackhole and time dilation, and multi-dimension tesseract scenes. I'd like to have the graphic engine that drew those. I understood the plot and the science. But then again I'm a old nerd who would have gone to see this even if it had had bad reviews even if just to rag on the science if it deserved it (it didn't). However, I'm not sure the average schlub is going to recommend this to his buddies. The character dialog does a pretty good job of trying to dumb down the science enough so that an attentive audience can figure out what's happening. I'll be surprised (though delighted) if it breaks-even at the box office.
The only real complaint that I have is that they do too much whispering. And despite the ear blasting volume of modern theaters I couldn't catch a lot of what was said during the whisper scenes. That however, is I think, my own physical problems with hearing loss above 5KHz, and an annoying persistent tinnitus (ringing in my head).
I think the only examples of bad science I had to overlook was the amount of rocket power they carried around with them in those little ships. NASA needs to get some of that fuel !! Also you couldn't get a planet in a stable orbit close enough to a black hole to cause a 1/64000 time dilation where 1 hour on the planet equated to 7 years on Earth. It would have to be just outside the event horizon of the black hole and would be fried by the X-Rays of the debris orbiting the black hole. That, and the fuel need to leave that planet would be astronomical to say the least!!!! I have no idea why they even considered going there 8-O I guess, without a planet to land on they couldn't come up with a plot to demonstrate time dilation and I have to admit, the mile high waves were pretty cool!
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Just saw it too. I agree with you in that it was in many ways a fantastic film. The science was better than many movies, but it still took several liberties that I had trouble accepting.
Rocket power is the main one. It seems like when they lifted off from Earth they used the same types of rockets we use today, clunky and not very elegant, multiple detachments..etc. Making it all the way to outer-space from the Earth's surface required huge boosters and the like. No such extra boosts were needed to land nor take off from these other planets later in the movie. This is a big oversight. I also notice that it took no real time to travel between the worlds of this new system. IT took two years to get from Earth to Saturn, similar times should have been needed to explore the various planets. Oh well.
1. As you noted, no planet could remain in one piece so near a black hole. In the first place, when the Blue giant that created the black hole went supernova it would easily have destroyed any planets within its habitable zone. It is possible however that the planet was one of the more distant satellites before the collapse, and the more focused gravitational field of the black hole might indeed mean that the planet was drawn closer to the dead star as its mass increased steadily over time. But if this were the case the planet would need an incredible amount of angular momentum to keep it from falling directly into the black hole. Further, the tidal forces on the planet would be immense. Basically the side that faces the black hole would be pulled toward it much more strongly than the side of the planet facing away from the black hole. This intense pulling on one side could easily pull the planet apart. Even a planet made of solid iron would turn to mush under these conditions.
2. The giant waves were really cool, but they don't make much sense. Most planets too near their host star fall into tidal locking, where the side of the planet that was slightly heavier than the other would result in the planet no longer rotating on its axis as it used to, instead the heavier side of the planet would always face the star. Once tidally locked, one side of the planet would always see the sun and the other side would always see outer space. The cooler temperatures on the dark side would create strong winds at ground level and always from the same direction as the heated air from the sunlight side would rise up and the cooler air on the cold side would fall. Only along the thin terminator would temperatures be bearable, but again those darned unrelenting winds always facing the same direction.
An Ocean on such a planet would be in tidal lock as well, and unless driven by the winds or other bodies like moons, there would be nor reason for mile high waves.
3. This entire movie seems like it was a contrivance to demonstrate the two brothers theory of Special Relativity. If two twin brothers were to separate, one remains stationary on Earth and the other is whisked across space at near light speed, that upon his return, he would find his twin brother on Earth had aged appreciably compared to him. Why we needed a three hour movie to demonstrate that point is a mystery to me.
4. A wormhole, like an event horizon, is a very special point in space. Crossing into a wormhole is not as easy as driving into it. Within the black hole there would be tidal forces ripping passengers apart. You would need near light speed momentum to remain in tact while passing through the wormhole. More on that in a second.
5. Where I completely went nuts is when this man actually fell INTO the black hole itself. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. First, if he really did arrive at the event horizon his experience of time would slow to 0, so a lot more than 90 years or so would have passed in real time. Further, his physical body should have been spaghettified, literally ripped apart photon by photon. Remaining in one piece after passing an event horizon boundary is fully impossible. Best case scenario, even if you could somehow propel your space ship to light speed, and doing so would shorten your Length, so that at such high speeds you should appear to be no larger than a point in space no wider perhaps than a planck length, maybe then you will have enough internal momentum to resist being spaghettified by the black hole if you never actually pass beyond the event horizon. But this is only true while you are outside the hole and still not moving at speeds above C.
In addition, it is theorized that black holes have a firewall, a sort of area roughly a planck length were lots of photons that are just on the cusp of escape would be trapped in an eternal loop around the star. If the star gains mass from infalling objects, the photons eventually fall inside but if the hole decays via hawking radiation, the photons, might manage to escape eventually. But until then they are still orbiting the star just above the event horizon. Any matter passing through the event horizon would be cooked instantly by these angry photons, destroying you before you have even entered the event horizon.
6. They mentioned that there was a nearby neutron star. The time dilation effect we saw on eh planet orbiting the black hole would have made sense if our target planet had been orbiting a neutron star instead. Neutron stars are massive, not nearly as much as a black hole, but still massive enough to produce time dilations similar to those expressed in the film. IN addition, those pesky neutron stars have so much gravity that the beams of light they radiate are confined to exiting at the star's poles, causing neutron stars to shine like lighthouses from the East and West poles as they spin on their axis. IT is impossible to think that anything could live on a planet so near a black hole or a neutron star. Just the radiation alone released by these structures would destroy the delicate life forms we recognize.
7. Another hidden thing about the film, is that it implies cleverly and subconsciously, that WE are GOD. According to the film, in some point in the future we mere humans will have the ability to reach inside of a black hole and remove information from it that is useful. To cross the boundaries of time as they do in the film to create wormholes arbitrarily, send an astronaut back to our galaxy..requires God-like abilities. The logic of this film says that eventually, after enough time passes, we will be Gods or the relative equivalent of Gods because of our technological advancement. This thought is either comforting or confounding, depending on one's belief and understanding of physics and their faith in humanity.
Overall. I really liked this film. I am still hoping that one day we get a science fiction storyline that uses proper physics, and in those cases where rules are bent for dramatic license, that some sort of reasoning is provided like a new theory or a new particle that's been discovered.
Fun fun!!!!
Thanks for the detailed analysis.
I was concentrating on how they showed the blackhole and whitehole but yeah, the more I thought about it the more I realized the other science flaws that you mentioned. Science is confusing enough for the lay person, why do writers have to throw in such exaggerations and flaws to further confuse us? No wonder the US is falling behind the world in scientists and engineers.
Yeah, Science Fiction is fiction but it's also science. When the facts are known they shouldn't be tinkered with. Play with the people and places all you want but leave the science intact.
Although, I have to admit that early Science Fiction stories took an awful lot of liberties but you don't chastise a child when he's learning to walk. Writers today should know at least college level science before embarking on fiction. And when they hire experts for one topic they should at least ask them about the other topics. And if the science doesn't fit your plot, change the plot, not the science!
The absolute ridiculousness of the science part of the last half of the movie was unacceptable to me simply because the movie makers themselves highlighted it's scientific approach so heavily in the first half.
In the latter half they just threw the "science" aspect of the "science fiction" to a nearby garbage bin and thus the movie does not deal with science in a consistent or predictable way. I do not react well to so glaring inconsistencies in how things are dealt with.
Much was already discussed in an above post, but again ...
The planets near the black hole were considered good enough to explore in the first place? Really? Why on earth there would be M-class planets there in the first place? Why would they be considered better than Earth in the long run while being in so close proximity to a giant black hole and the immense radiation that would inevitably be present? Said planets had an unexplained light source coming from somewhere. What was it and how come it was not affected by the black hole? The time dilation effect somehow did not affect the one crew member orbiting nearby the water planet for 28 Earth-equivalent years? Energy needed to escape the gravity of the two planets would have exceeded any and all fuel resources the expedition had, but they just skimmed away not unlike in Star Wars. It was earlier even shown how the ship barely was able to leave Earth's gravity using a three-stage rocket launch! The gravity needed to induce such time dilation is simply absolutely massive. Somehow the space station orbiting the ice planet was instantly affected by the gravity of the black hole after it was damaged, but we are supposed to believe it had no impact on the planet itself (it had a surface gravity of 0.8G) or items on it's orbit? They completely ignored the vast distances needed to travel after they jumped the wormhole. I mean they traveled to Saturn for two years in stasis chambers, but everything after the wormhole was handily instantly nearby? Including the black hole which sucked the entire station in just minutes after the ice planet episode! I will say nothing about the black hole scenario, because I have nothing good to say.
More than the science aspect I was unimpressed by some stunning stupidity in the fabric of the plot:
1) I mean the equipment on the water planet sent detailed information of the planet including data regarding the water the planet had, but somehow ignored to report the cloud-reaching giant waves? Then the dudes landed in the knee-shallow(???) ocean riddled by the giant waves, but somehow they missed those waves while orbiting and when they were descending? They must have been visible and they were shown to be very much in motion and numerous to boot.
2) The crew members (and their expected demise in an expected order) had too little impact on the mission. I mean even the pilot was not needed in the end as the final woman somehow was able to pilot, navigate, fight off the vast gravity and land a damaged ship all by herself.
3) Our pilot actually left the very next day after finding out the NASA base nearby? What? He had not flown a space mission for a decade and we're supposed to believe that he was instantly able to not only jump into a spacesuit but to command an experimental space craft as well? A nice ship though ... it even had an eject lever to eject the pilot into space ... an interesting design solution for a space-faring vessel.
4) The one dude experienced 28 Earth-equivalent years alone in a cramped space station where you couldn't even look out because the ship maintained artificial gravity by rotation... alone ... unable to communicate to anyone. Water supplies? Food? Not even a chess computer? No impact on his sanity even while we were earlier shown he himself had doubts about his mind handling the space flight (but was instantly soothed by the sounds of jungle through earphones)?
5) A man meets his aged daughter in a room FULL of his living relatives. NOBODY SAYS EVEN A "NICE TO MEET YOU, SIR!" ??? What was that?
6) A scenario where Earth was actually headed towards destruction would elicit no religious uproar? Not one mad prophet chanting in the streets? I'm not a religious man, but I think the social aspect of how religion affects a proposed doomsday-scenario should have at least been mentioned in a sub-paragraph.
7) Our hero was shown to be able to manipulate gravity, but the manipulation was localized to his daughter's room. Then how come the clock digits were shown to be interpreted by his daughter in the NASA base she was working? If he could affect gravity at the NASA base, it completely changes the entire premise of the movie.
8) Our future helpers had technology to form artificial wormholes and fold dimensions. Their *ACTUAL* plan was to hope somebody would jump into a black hole after jumping the wormhole? THAT was their plan? Well it worked, but I find it kinda stretching ...
Granted, it was visually very impressive. Unfortunately not all pretty cakes taste good.
6/10.
Agree with much of what you say. But my understanding of the limited localization of his effect through the black hole is that he was guided by Love to those particular places in space and time where his daughter was. In the bedroom or in the NASA lab. Somewhere before he falls into the blackhole they discuss the attractive power of Love. I'd "love" to see the equations for that!!!
It's almost like two people wrote this screenplay, but the science guy died and the guy from Kansas took over to finish it.
No, it's a well known "shortcoming" of the film. Chris Nolan deliberately had it mixed so that voices were hard to hear.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2014/11/18/why-chris-nolans-interstellar-sound-mix-is-a-problem/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/showbiz/movies/interstellar-sound-nolan/
I believe Chris Nolan simply hates dialogue. Like "The Dark Knight Rises", where the uber-loud IMAX cameras disrupted so much of the sound recording that they had to do massive ADR work, taking all the actors into a recording studio to redub their own dialogue, leading to some really meh performances.
Don't forget, he also gave us the meme of the "Inception sound". Foghorns away!
Thanks for that assurance that I'm not as deaf as I thought I was.
Another show that I have trouble with is the new "Dr. Who" adventures. The background music is too intrusive. I have to turn the volume up so loud to understand the dialog that the music becomes disturbing to the neighbors in the other apartment. So I use headphones and probably exacerbate my hearing problems by the excess audio power so close to my eardrums.
I do like the Dr. Who stories, but I'm hoping someone in the future will eventually build an audio filter that can distinguish between whispering dialogue and the 200DB music and finally normalize them so folks can actually hear such shows as they should--anyone who creates it will make a bloody fortune!!
(just so you know, sound at 200DB can punch holes in concrete!)
I do like the Dr. Who stories, but I'm hoping someone in the future will eventually build an audio filter that can distinguish between whispering dialogue and the 200DB music and finally normalize them so folks can actually hear such shows as they should--anyone who creates it will make a bloody fortune!!
(just so you know, sound at 200DB can punch holes in concrete!)
I'm firmly convinced that the audio engineers for many modern movies & TV programs are no older than 20 and spend their nights at uber-loud nightclubs and never pay attention to what people say anyway. Dialog, schmialog, mustn't let it obscure the music.
Either that, or they've been going to the nightclubs for 20 years, are over 40 and are profoundly deaf. And like Beethoven have to resort to feeling vibrations through their bones. At which point dialog is irrelevant anyway. 8-(
And yet, Theme Song Man gets no respect from the other superheroes.