Hacker Cinema
Interstellar
2014 · Film · 169 min
Directed by Christopher Nolan
The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.
100 positive55 negative19 mixed164 neutralfrom 338 commenters
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380 comments on Hacker News
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
Yeah, I haven't been involved in film projection since late 1998. Back then, it was at my university student cinema, we had 70mm capability but only showed one or two films a year in 70mm because there were so few films available for us to hire in that format. If I recall, the main one we showed every year was Backdraft. By comparison, there were 2 showings per day during term time (so 7x10x3 days per year) and most films would only be shown 1 or maybe 2 nights.
I was told then that we were very lucky to have that projector as there were only around 4 or 5 cinemas in the country with 70mm projectors (other than IMAX), and I can only imagine it's gone down since then. That said, it's hard to find information on it now - the only list of 70mm cinemas I could find had 5, but included IMAX and not my university cinema even though they showed Interstellar in 70mm last year so probably are just not listed because it's not open to the general public.
Nolan used Imax 70mm cameras to film some scenes in the Dark Knight Rises, like the plane scene to open the movie. Dunkirk and Interstellar used 65mm IMAX cameras.
I think Tenet was an absolute garbage movie, and Interstellar was mediocre at best. Honestly, I'm not planning to watch Odyssey because those two movies were so underwhelming.
As someone who enjoys (especially when I was younger) lucid dreaming, I found Inception well researched, and definitely dove into themes like consciousness, agency, and the reality (or unreality) of cause+effect in human behavior. These are universal themes but quite difficult to explore concretely without resort to contrivance like lucid dreaming (Inception), time reversal (Tenet) or amnesia & reverse narration (Memento). Memento was much more focused on the mental state of both the protagonist and audience, and in that sense was a better dramatic film. Tenet and Inception were much focused on the universe model. Interstellar seemed to be an attempt by Nolan to put human connection and emotion at the center, specifically the transcendence of love, but that approach wasn't a good fit for Nolan's personality or his technical skills.
Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.
I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
Someone refers to a sci-fi-esque (more imaginative than scientifically accurate) virtual rendition of an interesting scientific phenomenon (black hole) in a fanous sci-fi movie (Interstellar), in their scientific analysis/critique comment on a HN thread about the virtual sci-fi-esque rentition of such a sci-fi object (black hole)(yes, a simplified easy-on-eyes pseudo-accurate rendition of a black hole, for VR/AR immersion at home, counts as sci-fi-esque, IMHO), and someone else who worked on such famous object (black hole) depicted in that exact sci-fi movie, responds to the comment.
Peak HN, right here!
> And with $160MM in funding at a $1.1B valuation? I don't know about their debt, but to get to LEO in 8 years on that little money is extremely impressive.
Interestingly that's $5 million less than the the movie Interstellar cost to make.
Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.
Hitchcock made "Psycho".
Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".
While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.
You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.
Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.
All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.
Software can (and will) be like that too.
Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.
I don’t know, Interstellar is one of the silliest movies I’ve ever seen…
There's a wonderful exchange in the movie Interstellar that speaks to this:
Cooper: You're ruling my son out for college now? The kid's fifteen. Principal: Tom's score simply isn't high enough. Cooper: What's your waistline? 32? With, what, a 33 inseam? Principal: I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. Cooper: You're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass but only one to measure my son's future?
The point being is that a person, and their future, should not be distilled into a single number like an SAT score because people are far more complex than a single number. I would also contend that splitting them into a few numbers, such as by subject area, doesn't help either.
I do definitely watch TV and movies from time to time. Really my beef is with social media. TV and movies as media, that's a wagon I just largely fell off of at some point.
I'll still watch a good movie, for sure. Interstellar, Primer, Coherence, Run Lola Run, The Big Short, Contact, Excalibur... But The Expanse, Project Hail Mary, The Martian... I enjoyed the books more than than the movies, and the movies were good. Still haven't read Contact, shamefully.
>three Batman movies
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
Well, interstellar has also some nerd stuff in it. If I remember correctly Kip Thorne did physics consulting on the movie and they even use a simulation running on a cluster to visualize the black hole physically correct.
They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.
For the past 10 years I found most movies to be unwatchable and not worth the time. Last one I saw was Project Hail Mary at a cinema and it was really bad in spite of a huge budget (more than Interstellar!).
So long, Hollywood.
I'm just here to share my love for this film. I'm a big movie fan. I've been watching the Fifth Element since high school, and I've only grown to appreciate it more and more as a film as I get older.
It's so full of life, creativity, color, humor, and themes we can all relate to (purpose, love, loss, etc).
This is peek Bruce Willis, and the movie is filled with other exceptional actors including Gary Oldman and Ian Holm. Milla Jovovich is extremely entertaining to watch as a sort fish-out-of-water, and I know Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone but in my opinion it's right on-brand for the film. Cracks me up every time for decades.
Mostly the effects have aged really well. That's generally thanks to heavy use of practical effects, as this article highlights.
I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.
Indeed. This has been my gripe since first SpaceX booster landing attempts - I understand that "livestream from an IMAX camera" may be very low at the list of priorities for space missions, but... it shouldn't. Even if recovered after the fact, having a solid, high-quality footage from flight and orbit would make a huge impact on the publicity goals they're all explicitly trying to achieve. There's a shortage of good footage from space; at this point, a 4k/60FPS recording released in public domain would easily redefine how space scenes look in movies, TV and video games in the next decade[0].
I'm not saying it's an easy engineering problem, but at least for LEO, the recording side is a solved problems (we all carry more than good enough hardware in our pockets), and the major challenge would be about keeping the lense/viewport clear throughout the ascent, and dealing with vibrations.
--
[0] - It already happened many times. The step shift of how black holes are portrayed after Interstellar folks did the math is the most obvious one to notice; more subtly recent productions seem to also take into account the asymmetry of the brightness, after the telescope photo of a black hole reached public awareness. But even earlier, there's e.g. been a change of how planets are shown - you see much less of the geographical atlas spheres with clear continent lines, and much more of low-angle, close-up shots that look suspiciously similar to the footage from the International Space Station.
Me and my brother just saw the movie tonight and we stayed for the credits. I thought the images were beautiful.
I enjoyed the film, but the pace felt rushed, like I never had a minute to breathe. I suppose I wish it was more like Interstellar in its tone - not fair, I know. Missed the bit from the book where Grace figures out he's not on Earth: would have been cool to see on screen. I think it's time to read the book again.
Ah, maybe I remembered it wrong... wasn't there some movie/show in the news for not having space explosion sounds?
Maybe it was Interstellar.
Has someone made a p2d yet where they split a 4K movie into a bunch of docker layers to push and pull through an OCI registry? I have a 70GB REMUX copy of Interstellar that I'd love to docker push to gitlab.
Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
Dark Knight is an edge case because Christopher Nolan is a special kind of retarded when it comes to mixing his movies. He literally refuses to accept that people want to understand what characters are saying. [0]
But here's the thing: Most movies are mixed for 5.1 or more surround setups, where the front middle speaker has most of the dialog. Just boost that speaker either via setting or in a stereo/virtual surround by a significant amount and add some volume compression and you get something that's reasonable on a home theater setup.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing
I think you are true to a point. But great movies get almost universal praise with scores of 9/10 on IMDb or near 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The same goes for food; there are things that are quite controversial, but who says no to fantastic ice cream or bread?
But most importantly for movies, it is not the micro-genre that decides. People who are not into fantasy or astrology still love Lord of the Rings or Interstellar because they are particularly highly produced, where all crafts making up that movie are treated highly instead of strategizing and optimizing.
But people still love movies where everyone is an idiot, like Jurrasic Park or Interstellar. I wonder if it then translates in their real life decisions.
Rivals of Aesther - like Super Smash Bros but with Steam Workshop support for player-made characters... TARS (interstellar) vs Ronald McDonald vs Obama anyone??
nidhogg - deserves to be in an arcade cabinet but honestly this one is ALWAYS a hit...just 2player though
Broforce - 80s action stars in 80s action movie multiplayer platformer
Ultimate Chicken Horse - competitively build a platformer level and then race to complete the level first, best with 4 players
TowerFall Ascension - 2-4 players, also deserves to be in an arcade cabinet
Screen Cheat - FPS made for the couch; think N64 Goldeneye or Quake, but all the players are invisible, so the only way to figure out where your opponents are is to look at their quadrants (screencheat)
Overcooked 2 - it's pretty kid-oriented on the surface, but it's a game where you must out-communicate the absolute chaos unfolding around you in order to succeed...such a good couch-multiplayer experience, but best for experienced gamers imho
Rocket League
Magicka
Regular Human Basketball - control giant basketball automatons by jumping inside them and operating the manual controls in a team v team. Minimum 4 players to really work well, supports up to 10 players shared screen
That should get you started! But oops that wasn't my casual coop list, more my "makes for memorable group experiences" list.
It Takes Two, Portal 2, Untitled Goose Game, Halo Master Chief Collection was like $10 recently, all come to mind as positive local coop experiences I've had.
It's remarkably easy to get ChatGPT to hallucinate. A go-to for me is to ask it about factual things as compared to other factual things. The description of the Bluey episode is wrong in nearly every possible way. Additionally, the response continues on analyzing in multiple ways, and again continues to get the fundamental facts and therefore the analysis wrong.
Prompt: Compare the Space episode of Bluey to Interstellar
Response: That’s a really fun and surprisingly fitting comparison! Let’s break down how Bluey’s “Space” episode parallels Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar — both emotionally and thematically — even though one is a 7-minute preschool cartoon and the other a 3-hour sci-fi epic.
1. Core Theme: Love Across Distance
Interstellar: The film centers on a father (Cooper) who leaves his daughter (Murph) to save humanity, exploring how love transcends time and space — literally. The emotional heart of Interstellar is the bond between parent and child that endures despite impossible separation.
Bluey: “Space” In this episode, Bluey, Bingo, and their dad (Bandit) play an imaginative game where they’re astronauts who have to separate to save their mission. The moment Bluey and Bandit must say goodbye echoes that same emotional tension — the pain of letting go but also the love that motivates sacrifice.
Parallel: Both stories use the setting of outer space as a metaphor for emotional distance — how people we love can feel far away, and how connection can bridge that gap.
I think the message is quite easy to understand as it's written but maybe that's not the message you want to convey. The message you're conveying makes no logical sense and doesn't seem to have any basis in testable scientific methodology. Your writing style is that of a "science communicator" and not a scientist proposing a hypothesis. As most science communicators, so much gets lost and because you have no actual scientific references it comes across as pseudoscientific nonsense with no backing whatsoever. You say the same equations work but failed to show it and failed to show it at the extremes. If the same equations work then you also have to ask yourself are you describing something different or just plugging in different values? Also I have my doubts that the equations actually work since you say that there is no speed limit. The speed of light is something that is fairly well understood. It's a measurable thing The time dilation that comes with it is also a measurable thing. Your last paragraph says there is no speed limit which would break all of the equations.
If you understand what scientists are saying, no one is saying that dark matter got removed from the universe. The inability to detect something does not indicate that it is not there it only indicates that we have not found a way to detect it, but it's effects are clearly measured so a term is given because it is unknown what it is I mean.
These terms of dark matter and dark energy have been seized upon by "science communicators" which oftentimes poorly explain complex topics. Then their poor explanation is seized upon by others and the understanding gets further diluted down.
There was a time when black holes were this spooky thing as well that were poorly understood. Astrophysicist could clearly understand that something was there that they could not understand or comprehend but they could measure the effects of it. Given time they were able to clarify it and come up with theories to explain it. This is the state we are in with dark matter and dark energy. These are terms given to something that they know is there because all of the evidence points to something being there but they have no ability to detect it other than to see it's effects on other things.
Without you putting together some hypothesis that can then be tested and verified independently what you have is sci-fi technobabble. It can be the basis for interesting storytelling like in the movie Black hole or Interstellar, but it's nothing more than fictional dreaming.
Honestly, string theory is more plausible than anything you've proposed.
This was envisioned by the movie Interstellar where the opening scene shows them chasing an old autonomous Indian Air Force drone that had been flying for years, ostensibly after that agency ceased to exist. I'm sure it's been in other media as well but that's what comes to mind here.
Anyway, it should be interesting to see where this goes in the future.
I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
> genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Brief moments at the start of Interstellar
A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.
Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.
These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.
I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?
Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.
Is Dalí's The Persistence of Memory a painting about the death of painting?
I like the nuanced interpretation of Interstellar being about film, but to say that _it is_ about only that is too restricting.
This thing about good art, is that it keeps giving new nuanced interpretations to whoever appreciates it.
> a movie or TV show
Any movie or TV show recommendations from the past 10 years that is actually enjoyable?
I am pretty much done with movies. I don't even remember the last one I really enjoyed. Sunshine, Interstellar, Hateful Eight, Once Upon a time in Hollywood... Nothing notable in the past 5 years though.
TV shows? Most require a subscription, which I am not willing to do for just a show or two.
I'll have to go check out "Blue Max" -- remember the movie but haven't seen it in years. My favorites: "Last of the Mohicans" soundtrack by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; "Inception" by Hans Zimmer; "Interstellar" by Hans Zimmer
I think this ties in more with the decrease in quality of movie/music sound mixing. There are current movies coming to theaters with mixing so bad that they have to rerelease it with the proper audio (such as Across the Spiderverse). Many, MANY albums that release today have noticeable digital clipping because engineers have now assumed that high gain is always better etc. etc.
There used to be a reason to have a 5.1 surround system, because that's how the movies were supposed to be enjoyed. There used to be a reason to engineer your home "soundstage" because that's how the music was mixed and optimally appreciated.
I don't think the bar of entry being money is truly the reason, rather that people have become much more passive consumers of media, and the producers have recognized that and absolutely enshittified their products.
As for the cheap speakers = cinematic experience, watch Interstellar with 5.1, then with the soundbar and tell me how equal the experience is.
They also have far more price sensitive customers and they're competing against streaming platforms. It's not like the cost of movies and TV has gone down. But, nobody is going to pay 50 bucks for a seat unless it's a spectacular movie at the best IMAX in the country. I think a seat for Interstellar cost close to that when it came out. The average blockbuster in an average small theater? Physical theaters are already on their last legs. They've banked on lower seat count to put in larger couches/recliners, started to offer alcohol and they still make margin on the food. They're also re-running classic movies for not much more than a rental - The Matrix again? All of Studio Ghibli? Yes please. In many ways it's a great time to go to see movies in the theater. The experience has markedly improved and the cost to consumers hasn't risen that much in absolute terms.
The Regal near me charges about $15 for a normal evening seat, less for a matinee. I'm sure I've paid more in Ticketmaster fees for a single performance.
That movie was so weird. It had flashes of brilliance but also a really dumb "idiot ball" plot in a lot of ways. Astronauts would never be as stupid as they're depicted in that film, things like "oh gee I think I'll take my helmet off around all this potential biohazard."
It also doesn't really work in the Alien universe at all. It would have been much better had it been set in an entirely different 'verse, maybe even its own things.
IMHO the Alien canon should be: Alien, Alien Romulus, and Aliens, in that order (since Romulus is in fact supposed to occur between those other two in-world). Maybe the sequel to Romulus (and Aliens) could be an updated adaptation of the William Gibson script that begins when Rain reaches the "non-Weyland colony" (which would kinda fit with Gibson's script).
My opinion on Interstellar is similar. It had brilliant moments (and visuals!) but overall I didn't like it. I couldn't get past things like: okay, so we are in a kind of semi post-collapse world apparently run by milquetoast descendants of the Heritage Foundation. Where exactly did they get a starship? Did they just have, like, a warp drive sitting around up on concrete blocks in someone's lawn? What? Also they had to lift off from Earth with chemical rockets, but somehow they're able to lift off from much larger planets later without thinking about delta-V budget at all. Sorry but if you're gonna say it's hard sci-fi it's gotta at least try to know something about physics and have coherent world building.
Yes I'm a sci-fi geek.
I mean I still love going to the theatre for a nice big screen movie. I have a great IMAX theatre nearby, and a lot of local cinemas. There are showings of older films — Lord of the Rings last year, Interstellar in IMAX, etc. People show up for these. “Movie theaters are dead” is definitely a big exaggeration.
But yeah, I’m not gonna pay to watch the average mediocre new movie at the questionable regal/AMC and pay like $40 for refreshments. But I’ll totally go out to see any movie (new or old) which are great experiences and benefit from a huge screen and fantastic audio system.
Theaters have over-indexed on quantity over quality. There are loads of locations with poor projection quality and shitty sound, dozens of screens, and lots of crap movies coming out. Why would people show up for that when they can stream something better at home on a potentially nicer TV?
So yeah, the industry will change a lot, but it probably won’t die.
I went to the theater recently to watch Interstellar rerun.
The movie was great. However, going to the movie theater reminded me why it's been years since I went.
People talking, turning on their phones that flashes your eyes, hearing people eat popcorn, people coming late, etc. Just a terrible experience.
This is such crap. It's just like the Replit CEO saying that software engineering is dead, or Altman saying AGI is imminent. They're stating a version of the future that they would like to appear because that would be the best outcome for their businesses.
But in reality movie theatres are in no way dead. People like the experience of going to a theater with friends, buying yummy snacks, watching a giant screen with really high volume. Seeing the interstellar relaunch last winter reminded me of just how LOUD the movie is, that's something you just can't get with 99% of setups people watch movies on at home.
Well I'm astounded. I talked to it for 13min, it crashed, but remembered the context when I returned a few minutes later and talked for a full 30min (it's limit).
It 99.9% felt like it performed at the level of Samantha in the movie Her.
I started asking all kinds of questions about how it worked and it mentioned a word I had to have it repeat because I hadn't heard it before: PROSODY (linguistics) — the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. I asked about personality settings, à la TARS from Interstellar, and it said it automatically tailored responses by listening for tone and content.
It felt like the most "the future's here but not evenly distributed" interaction I've had since multi-touch on an original iPhone.
that's the mindset that I'm trying to challenge. "new" depends on your perspective while you are enjoying the content. The second and third watch you can appreciate different aspects: scenes that were missed, subtleties in the performance or the writing, set design.
Learning how to continue appreciate things that you've already experienced gives you the power over the experience. You don't have to depend on an a constant influx of "new" content.
I've seen Interstellar, Matrix, Gladiator, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings 20+ times. They are even more moving now when I watch them because I can see how I've changed and related to the movies in a new way.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
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Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
> This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music
It’s kinda the same though. If I want to watch Interstellar, I won’t settle for Gravity because it’s what Netflix has. If I want to watch Interstellar and it’s not on Netflix or Prime Video, I’m going to pirate it.
But it is partly "just the times". There's a dividing line in 1977 called Star Wars. Before Star Wars it was much more common for science fiction films to use long establishing sequences of especially space technology. For a 1960s audience when the actual moon landings were fresh to mind, the long, slow ballet of space was very palpable and appreciable. Star Wars changed a lot of things for scifi, including reducing some of those establishing sequences to their quickest and most basic. It is harder to appreciate something like 2001 on this side of Star Wars. Scifi movies have been trying to mostly be "the next Star Wars" for almost every decade since, with few exceptions, many of which don't always do well in the box office (Tron is a cult favorite, but early theatrical audiences found it slow; Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often considered a bomb by Star Trek standards for being a pre-Star Wars sort of movie released two years after Star Wars; Gravity and Interstellar both got accolades in somewhat recent years for mostly sort of getting away with pre-Star Wars scifi pacing, but partly got away with it from Brand Name stars and directors and a focus on IMAX tech and spectacle).
2001 didn't feel out of place versus scifi movies of its time. It feels slow and ponderous post-Star Wars.
The black hole simulation that was shown in the movie Interstellar is explained in detail in this paper, freely available on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
As a physicist with a modest background in computing, I was also surprised by how powerful the iPhone GPU is. It can indeed lens the input from the camera at high resolution and in real time with high FPS.
The conveyor belt analogy from this article is deserved. I feel like this has been true for a long time, like 20 years or so. Remake after remake. Yet another superhero film. Uninteresting pipelines of shows and movies that recycle existing IP but also destroy existing canon (look at Star Wars). There are exceptions - we still have some great films (like Interstellar ten years ago) and shows (like Game of Thrones). But it does feel like most of the content from traditional media is noticeably bad.
I also think though, that Hollywood has become unlikeable and polarizing for many other reasons. Some of those reasons are the political culture of Hollywood (with bias in one direction). Some of it is the moral culture (like Harvey Weinstein). But a lot of the exhaustion with Hollywood is simply that the faces of Hollywood - celebrity actors - just seem really self aggrandizing. The award shows. The unwelcome public stances on random topics. The ostentatious displays of wealth (fancy cars, mansions in exotic places, etc). The worship of celebrity that is practiced through glowing magazine interviews, coverage of personal issues (like divorces), and merchandising.
Democratization is coming for a lot of different industries, and Hollywood is one of them. The availability of high quality cheap audio and visual equipment, the over supply of talent, the low costs of techniques like CGI, the prospect of new tools like generative AI, and social media for publishing are all pulling attention away from traditional channels. I think this will be great for viewers. Independent content creators are becoming very good at what they do. It doesn’t mean the death of Hollywood entirely, but it does mean that only the very best can survive.
I also think this affects movies and TV shows differently. People have appetite for great TV shows still, and outliers like HBO will survive due to exceptional content quality. But movie theaters, as a way to market and draw viewers, are a dying concept. The industry keeps trying to evolve by offering different gimmicks (like 3D and “4D”), luxury experiences, dining experiences, and so on. But you can’t get away from the fact that it is very inconvenient to have to go to a theater, deal with noisy crowds, etc. We also all have much more awareness of how illness spreads after the pandemic. Theaters will go away, except for maybe the possibility of film festivals or other such events. That’s a big change for movies, but TV shows aren’t losing anything from the death of theaters.
Wonder if the movie Interstellar was inspired by Wheeler.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
The whole premise is bogus and explained by Michael Caine in only a few sentences.
We have a plague on Earth and doing an interstellar travel is the solution?
I was very disappointed. I’m OK with a few plot holes, but this is so fundamental to the story that the movie can’t stand on its own.
The theory doesn't make any sense; unlike The Sixth Sense, the main character in Interstellar interacts with a lot of people. If he's dead, so are they (or they're just figments of his post-death experience).
The journey doesn't make any sense as a post-death experience, since none of the events are tied to his life (before the events of the movie), so there's no deeper meaning to the wave planet, or the ice planet, or falling into the black hole.
Also, Nolan doesn't do meta-contextual films. His specialty is the technical aspects of storytelling (see, e.g., Memento, The Prestige, Dunkirk, and Tenet), not in imbuing deeper emotional meanings into his works. Indeed, one of the big critiques of his films (excluding Dunkirk and Oppenheimer) was that they generally lack any emotional depth.
> If the moon orbited earth a little bit faster, would the number of microseconds per day accumulated change (even if ever so slightly)?
Meaning, if you attached rockets to the Moon to speed it up while not changing its orbital radius? In that case the speedup relative to Earth clocks would be less, yes.
> in principle, I should be able to come up with a thought experiment that highlights what that speed means
I gave you one upthread, in the subthread where the movie Interstellar was being discussed.
> Would this hypothetical faster moon, billions of years orbiting earth at a different speed, look geologically younger than our regular speed moon?
Meaning, if you compared the two after billions of years of Earth clock time had elapsed? Yes.
It might be easier to think about this as “if you are on the moon and point a telescope at a clock on earth, clock hands move slower on earth than on the moon." This is distinct from "all humans everywhere have a normative experience that the clock hands right next to them move at the same speed.” Or "you never experience falling into a black hole, but you do fall in." You can also watch the movie Interstellar, it has clock hands moving slower in gravity wells as a minor plot point.
As in the Interstellar movie:
chuckling to 0% no acting surprised not making bullshit when you don't know
If you’re an engineer, surely you recognize that the major plot whole in the movie is that doing an interstellar travel is way more difficult than whatever blight they had to fight.
I don't think this is wholly wrong, but there is an alternate explanation for why a small number of physicists advanced the field so much in the early 20th century while a ton of physicists don't advance it today.
All the low hanging fruit has been picked.
All we have left today in fundamental physics is the edges of particle physics and quantum gravity, and the latter has so far proven hard to research without convenient access to a black hole or a particle accelerator the size of the Moon's orbit. Convenient access to a black hole would be so cool we even made a movie about it (Interstellar).
Outside fundamental physics a ton of these new physicists are working on important but niche problems: superconductivity, condensed matter, plasma physics, fusion, all kinds of materials science, etc. A lot of that stuff didn't exist at all back then, or only existed as a theory prediction or a proof of concept.
A similar problem exists in other hard science disciplines. It's just easiest to wrap your head around in physics because the edges of our understanding are more clear.
Soft sciences and humanities are by definition factional and open ended, so in that case more people just means more discourse.
My point is that I think more than one thing is going on, and I don't think you can attribute stagnation to a single cause.
When you make "then and now" comparisons, you have to look at the entire picture of what has changed. Single-cause analysis is almost always wrong.
It did look like a lens in interstellar. A sci-fi movie.
Kip Thorne was also in charge of the science of Interstellar (2014 movie).
He even wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar.
Also he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Very smart man!
Dune 2 was totally worth it to watch in IMAX. Similarly I remember Interstellar being an amazing experience in IMAX. I wish more similar movies were made. That would make me go to the movies more frequently.
Tangent: The image at the top of this blog post is amazing. Why does the scale feel immense? It is like something from the film _Interstellar_.
I just finished reading Tau Zero after hearing about it here and also recommend it!
I expected relativity to play a role, but the time dilation the crew experienced was on a _far_ grander scale than I imagined. The book also left me thinking of favorite time travel/relativity classics like Interstellar and, going back, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (my favorite Star Trek movie).
Citation needed; the top X on IMDB has a mix of recent (2014's Interstellar) and older (1972's The Godfather) films in their top ranked films: https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/
Of course, rankings on any platform should be taken with a grain of salt; if you like the film you like it, can't argue with taste or personal preference. Ranking tries to apply an objective fact (a number, an expert's say-so) to an inherently subjective question (did you enjoy it).
Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar.
Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading.
I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
its not fun at all, i got la land land, interstellar, inception and baywatch, all being similar to the movie today. And they weren't really similar
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
The movie Interstellar has a pretty stupid idea about it. But I heard a physicist say you can't fault that idea either because like you said it's unfalsifiable.
I watched Interstellar in a movie theater with remarkably low image quality. The picture was as if they had chosen the wrong gamma setting. I was very dissatisfied with Nolan's work at the time, because I didn't know that it was a presentation issue. Ironically, I realized that it was so only when I've seen it again on my home TV, which was not a high quality one, but still produced better image quality than what the theater had offered me.
Reminds me that explosions in space in Interstellar were silent (as they should be).
I hope this kind of thing catches on. If a movie shows a distant explosion and its sound is heard at the moment of the explosion, you don’t really think about it. But when they treat the sound accurately, it really grabs your attention.
Even mathematically it doesn’t make any sense: we would need to go to a causally disconnected region of spacetime to be able to go faster than the speed of light, but that’s just not feasible. Once you go to that causally disconnected region of spacetime, the only outcome is to go to a singular point in space (even though you can go back and forth in time, theoretically at least) : if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is well represented into the movie «interstellar» and indeed he goes to a region causally disconnected to ours: a black hole.
That's not a fundamental force and the insinuation made me dislike the otherwise nice movie, Interstellar.
A great succes for India, and hopefully a lasting impetus for space exploration.
Interestingly, I'm told that the costs of the lunar mission ($75 Mn) are much lower than the movie ‘Interstellar’ [0]
0: https://inc42.com/features/chandrayaan-3-touchdown-a-proud-moment-for-india-a-big-boost-for-spacetech-startups
I remember when I watched Interstellar for the first time, I thought, "No way people would be that dumb to brush off space exploration just because they're caught up with Earth stuff."
But the more time goes by, the more I think the movie nailed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VKTLFlwr4Y
Not OP, but apparently in the movie Interstellar a school teacher is convinced that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union. I've spoken to an amateur Apollo historian/buff and I am convinced we landed on the moon in the 1960s.
This is a very SV, production-oriented mindset. Everything is a means to an end, to check a box, to move to the next. However, not everyone thinks that way. I'd argue it's not a particularly healthy point of view. If you extend it to its inevitable conclusion, every step in your life is only meaningful because it leads to the next...and ultimately everything culminates in one's death, meaning nothing except your death was of any meaning. I'd encourage you to read Oliver Burkeman's "Four Thousand Weeks" to get a different perspective on how some things are an end to themselves.
I think there's a case to be made that exploration is an end of itself (this is the case made in the movie Interstellar) but that seems to be different that the point the OP made and that you're arguing with resources etc.
For me, one of the beautiful subtexts in the movie was Adams' remembrances of dreams of horses, where it wasn't explicit whether it was the aliens expressing the images to her, or she was summoning the feeling of communing with another being, using that experience as a tool to open her mind to what the beings were expressing to her. It captured the feeling of synesthesia very well. Between Arrival and Interstellar, the potential of movies to express incredibly complex ideas with new visual metaphors seems to finally be coming into form.
Has a method of long term stasis been found yet (like you see in Interstellar or other movies) where you can nap and be kept alive for that long? Otherwise I think you'd still need to overcome the mental limitations of being stuck in a metal tube for thousands of years with no way out and no way to pass the time. Or at the very least, some way of staying asleep for a few years--wake up for a few months--sleep for a few years--wake up for a few months and so on.
This video might help understand where mass comes from and how to potentially modulate it, because mass can be thought of as bound energy creating voids in the gluon field:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztc6QPNUqls
The Higgs mechanism affects electrons, not quarks, and is only responsible for about 1% of matter's mass. Most mass comes from the binding energy between quarks, which creates flux tubes between quark-antiquark pairs. If we add more energy to pull quarks apart, eventually the total energy added exceeds the mass-energy equivalence of another quark-antiquark pair, so a new pair gets created from the vacuum. I believe this is related to the Casimir effect, but IANAP (physicist).
Keep in mind that the mass-energy equivalence also applies to time. So like in the movie Interstellar, when they go down to the water planet, gravity is so high that time passes slower for them than the guy in the orbiting ship. In other words, the ship sees the landing craft move slower and slower as it approaches the surface. This difference in the speed of time near a gravity well is what slows the inner edge of a satellite slightly more than the outer, curving it along the path of the orbit, which from the satellite's perspective feels like a straight line at that velocity, because it's weightless and feels no other acceleration other than tidal force. So if someone could move large amounts of energy into a confined space with some kind of flux capacitor (is this a pun? I don't even know anymore), they could slow time there and create a virtual mass through mass-energy equivalence by E=mc^2. If they did it in front of the satellite, it would begin to increase in velocity towards that mass. So this is sort of a warp drive mechanism, although I don't know how you'd confine it, and the energies involved would be planet-scale to achieve 1 g of acceleration like near the Earth.
Also if someone made a closed loop where electron-positron pairs were sent one way, then their energy was used to create quark-antiquark pairs sent the other way, there might be a 1% imbalance in mass due to the Higgs mechanism, which would add momentum to the loop opposite the direction of the heavier stream. Although due to conservation of momentum, I suspect that this wouldn't actually happen, because any momentum above light pressure should get lost to heat/entropy/etc. But it would be a fun experiment to try. The same experiment would also work just sending light energy photons one way and matter-antimatter pairs back the other way, but I've never seen a proof as to why this would or wouldn't beat light pressure. This would be a reactionless rocket, not a warp drive.
If there's a gravity field like a gluon field, just with slightly different rules, then I don't see why it couldn't be modulated. In fact, I think that the dark matter strands connecting galaxies are densities where perhaps something like slowed neutrinos or axions collect and slow time. They could even be places where gravity "flows" along eddies left over from the Big Bang, although this seems strange to us because gravity normally only flows into gravity wells. There's also currently no explanation for the Hubble constant in the expansion of the universe, so perhaps something is creating space over time. So I don't see why space couldn't be created behind a craft to push it forward. We just don't know how.
There are so many unexplored interactions like this, that I don't think any physicist can confidently say that warp drives, reactionless rockets and folding space are impossible. Which means that I give it 50/50 odds that some kind of sci-fi space engine will be invented within the next few decades, probably starting with a reactionless drive like the EmDrive, which (if it works) uses resonance to time the interaction of microwaves with the rebound of atoms in an asymmetric field, similar to the Biefeld-Brown effect explored by Thomas Townsend Brown in the 1920s, which was later found to just be an electrohydrodynamic (EHD) effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld–Brown_effect
Unfortunately only physicists are privy to the mental associations which allow thought experiments like this. Textbooks leave us mainly theory and equations, not insights or abstractions. Physics formulas are like trying to understand the behavior of an app from its assembly language. So in a very real way, academic gatekeeping prevented almost everyone from contributing. For every divergent thinker like Einstein, there are 100 convergent thinkers who judge skeptically and crush ideas into oblivion.
I'm just an armchair warrior full of derivative ideas who has never invented anything, who would love to run experiments like these. But just like you the reader, I'll spend the rest of my life making CRUD apps to make rent because billionaires have all the money, instead of getting to be like Dr. Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV, suddenly able to explore every possibility under the freedom of UBI. That was a joke, but not really.
In the movie interstellar were they using gravitational communication to write the book? Can someone enlighten me?
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
Loved Interstellar and Dune. I also need earplugs if I'm going to the theater to watch a Nolan movie—they're so damn loud.
We need more movies like Interstellar & Dune and less Guardians of The Galaxy 36, people might be more willing to go to the cinema then. I can get free tickets and still don't go more than once or twice a year.
That's is why I called it two separate axes and not two ends in a single axis. You need a base level of technical competency to understand what the limitations of your equipment are to leverage it to the fullest extent and avoid doing things that will just plain not work, and the technical features are needed to accomplish specific things, but artistry is till required. Feature films have been captured on iPhone (you can say that is little more than a stunt, but it still exists).
Not everyone is filming Barry Lyndon with f/.95 aperture in candle-lit scenes. Watching older films where both the glass and the film were subpar compared to what's available today, where the grain was high, the focus puller wasn't at the top of their game leaving characters somewhat out of focus (when looking closely, maybe not noticeable at 480p or 720p), but the films are still enjoyable. Parts of The Batman were filmed on a Helios 40-2, an objectively terrible lens when it comes to it's optical characteristics, but it can evoke a look that you can't otherwise get which helps with the mood the cinematographer was trying to capture. You won't be able to capture the vast expanses of night time scenes of Nope (filmed as day for night with infrared cameras) with subpar equipment. You need full sharpness for easier rotoscoping when dealing with VFX. You want the best cameras available to capture miniatures of spaceships like in 2001 or Interstellar to make people believe these are real spaceships. You can leverage a new technology in a new way, like 28 Days Later used new at the time digital cameras (that would nowadays be considered subpar) for easier application of effects like undercranking and lower production costs, or how they used 360 shutters in Collateral. But you can also make a film like The Man From Earth that was shot in a single room, with a bunch of actors and an camera that was average at the time, or Saving Private Ryan simply undercranking and using really short shutterns to ensure that the beach landing scene was crisp through and through. Everything Everywhere All At Once didn't have Marvel-budget level gear, but they still made one of the best movies of the past few years.
I don't fully disagree with what you're saying: better tools expand the envelope of what you can accomplish. But technology is in service of the art, not the other way around (unless you're producing marketing material for the manufacturer, I guess ^_^).
I love combing over features, and learn about the mechanics of these amazing machines, and the theory of the physics of light (even knowing how it works, it is still feels like magic that you can take a full picture of an object that is partially obstructed as long as you can make that foreground element blurred enough). I'm a shit artist, but I trust one with a point and shoot to make something better than I can with my DSLRs. I can't wait to see what new story telling tricks people will come up with new tech, like Nope did.
That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.
I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.
The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot
Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.
All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.
I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.
These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.
As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.
There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)
One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.
The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
> He found 2001: space odyssey kind of slow and tedious
Oh man, have you rewatched it lately? I had very fond memories of 2001, like I’m sure many people here, but I watched it again and found it slow and tedious and then some. The first act with the apes and wailing operatic singing went on forever. The stuff on the moon is forgettable. I was really surprised to find out that everything I remember about the movie, where they’re near Jupiter, starts halfway through. The ending is so weird I’d forgotten most it that too. There’s no question about 2001’s influence and place in movie history, but by today’s film standards, for kids who are used to modern film, 2001 is harder to appreciate. Or I don’t know, I looked up the critical reception and maybe it was then too… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)#Reception
I have made the mistake of showing my kids films that I loved from my childhood way too many times. It has backfired and made my kids not want to watch movies with me, and most of the time they’re right and the films I loved just aren’t that good by today’s standards. My youngest is also afraid of watching space movies, especially with me, because I liked a lot of them and maybe started trying to show him when we was too young. The quality of films and shows has gone up, though, and my kids helped me see it. Once I completely stopped pushing the movies I liked, the kids started sometimes finding them on their own, but they also show me movies they live that I wouldn’t have considered. It is also surprising how often movies I like haven’t aged well in terms of social dynamics, my kids are fairly sensitive to mildly racist or sexist dialogue, and there’s more than we remember from movies made in the 70s-90s.
Sci fi movies my kids have loved: Villeneuve’s Dune, The Last Mimzy, A Wrinkle in Time (non-Disney version), Cowboy Bebop (anime), Interstellar, Arrival. (Will add more if I remember)
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
My 9yo has seen Interstellar 4 times and if asked will tell you it’s his favorite movie before you can finish the question. Strong recommend if OP’s kid hasn’t seen it yet.
Arrival - best science fiction movie in recent memory (maybe ever?)
Ex Machina - also great.
Her - different style, but still very good (also with recent LLM developments maybe closer than we think).
The Martian (not as good, but entertaining)
Also I know parents have their preferences, but 12 seems old enough for any of this (if they’re reading Asimov)
I was disappointed in interstellar (but it is a beautiful movie) just dumb in a lot of ways and the “but what above love” subplot really annoyed me.
I’d give gravity an honorable mention. The director’s other movie Children of Men is one of my favorites but doesn’t really qualify as scifi.
For shows, the expanse is probably the best recent thing.
I’m not sure if Super8 qualifies, but I think that’s a generally underrated movie.
Yes — relativistic effects are so fundamental that they affect every system/process (including atomic clocks ) and therefore any measurement scheme. That’s why we talk about “time slowing down”. The movie Interstellar has one popular depiction of this.
It's just an idea I've been noodling on that hinges on Hawking radiation existing and having the same formula regardless of whether a black hole is standalone or has matter falling into it. The radiation would form an outward force not just through light pressure, but by space rebounding out to balance anything trying to fall in.
I'd like to see better proofs around stuff like neutron degeneracy pressure and the strong force. Electron degeneracy pressure is straightforward to understand from quantum mechanics, but I don't know if there's direct measurement of the strength of neutron repulsion from particle accelerators. Maybe the value they're using is empirical from the stars they've observed.
The way I think of it now is that neutron stars evaporate too, so if one is on the brink of collapse, we'd have to add enough mass to overcome that rate of loss and also get the black hole lifetime long enough that it goes into runaway collapse. Otherwise its mass will go back to decreasing slowly. Although if you look at the note at the bottom of the link, it states that objects heavier than 0.75% of Earth's mass are growing heavier due to absorbing the cosmic microwave background energy. So maybe all neutron stars eventually collapse on their own trillions of years from now.
Some other interesting ideas come out of that, like the center of a neutron star is probably nearly frozen in time as it withstands the flow of space into it. Like in the movie Interstellar where every hour on the water planet equates to 7 years in orbit. Or here on Earth where GPS systems have to compensate for time running slower for us on the surface. The center would also be nearly infinitely contracted by its Lorentz transformation, so the space around it would look thin to us outside but be normal thickness from its point of reference. So in a very real way, there's more space inside the star than we see from its radius. So much in fact that the center can be thought of as being nearly infinitely far away, even lightyears away. So spaghettification may make it so neighboring neutrons don't feel as squeezed along the radial axis as those nearer to the surface. Or maybe there's a stagnation line where gravity forms a dimple in spacetime, but if the density gets too high, the line advances inward until it reaches the center and tears through to form a singularity.
But see, we'd have to wait an eternity for the tear to occur from our frame of reference, which suggests that black holes never actually form. They just get deeper and slower, mimicking black hole physics if we think of them as a black box, but behaving differently inside than our intuition suggests.
I think modern physicists tend to prune ideas too early as being untenable or already explored. So they haven't thought through these sorts of edge cases enough. For example, we may not be able to actually reach a singularity by falling in. It's so small that we may end up missing and orbiting instead. That might have ramifications for quantization of the strong force or could explain why mass forms clouds instead of collapsing into points, and relate to String Theory (which I'm not fond of, but is worth mentioning). I have so many basic questions like these that it's hard to reason about this stuff without it feeling like hand waving. And since nobody can point to a definitive answer, these lines of questioning are still valid and worth pursuing IMHO.
It is questionable whether or not HFR is appropriate for film. I do agree that the motion blur you get in 24fps is excellent. I also like it even better when viewing on a 70mm film print.
In my opinion, it would be great to see select scenes in HFR such as the famous docking scene from Interstellar. I don't feel there are any scenes that warranted HFR in Titanic and was curious to see what they would have chosen. Surprisingly very few scenes were added in HFR and the moments that were in HFR were very brief.
The HDR is pretty nice but I think the main appeal of this release is to allow a new generation to see it in theaters and the 25th anniversary is just an excuse to allow this. Keep in mind that it is a limited release that I hear will end in a week or so.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVhbeY7nLM
Off topic. Do you have any movie suggestion close or related to this book? I've seen The Martian, 2001 Space Od, Interstellar, and Event Horizon.
Uhm interstellar, inception, Batman, Joker, LODR. And these are just so called block busters. There many good Arthouse movies released each year …
> Yeah, uh, that was 1999
I’d say Interstellar was a great and new movie in 2014. Also, the last movie I’ve seen ;)
I think the situation with interstellar travel is well summed up in this conversation between TARS and Cooper as they attempt to dock at Endurance (intentional pun hiding in movie title):
TARS: It's not possible.
Cooper: No, it's necessary.
It seems impossible, but if we don't pull it off we die. And I don't mean we the few folks on HN. I mean everyone.
Earth is a graveyard of species. Nearly all (99% IIRC) species that ever existed have gone extinct (most before we showed up). As a species, we can't stay here and live. A 9-mile thin layer of gas over a single small planet is just not a reliable long-term basis of survival. In fact, the fragility of our tiny little habitant is on display right in front of us this century.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
Terrific, thank you!
I should have remembered the film Interstellar, where an observer on a spacecraft orbiting a massive planet (itself orbiting a black hole) feels decades pass whereas the landing party to the massive planet experience about an hour go by.
Even wording this sentence is difficult! I'm reminded of the Persian word for time, which literally means "the thing that passes".
The photon actually experienced only one minute* and you one hour, that is what the clocks would show. The photon sees you one hour older and you see the photon one minute older.
It is like the waterplanet in the movie Interstellar (I think it was that planet), where they spent a short while on the surface and the person in space aged decades.
It is called time dilation [0] and there was a rather interesting experiment done by Hafel Keating [1].
* Interesting to know: time slows down to a halt at the speed of light, and the one second time lapse of the photon goes to zero no matter how long you wait on earth.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment
I always say I only found unconditional love once I became a parent. (From me toward my child)
As you say, the commitment is forever, whether we are present or not. For the movie Interstellar, one of the themes Nolan developed was that at some point we become our children’s memories. It probably happens around the 12 year old mark.
For all parents out there, be present, however you can.
> The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her...
Exact same problem at home... it was so bad on Interstellar that after that movie, she never went to a cinema with me again, or watched any movies together at all :(.
Funnier still was a comparison between Indian Mars Orbital Mission ($73 M) and the budgets for Gravity ($100M), The Martian ($108M), Interstellar ($165M). ISRO (India's space agency) engineers missions to Mars for the price it takes Hollywood to make movies with Mars, space etc.
Interstellar has one, but for that topic I'd suggest Predestination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_(film)
I'd also suggest watching it before reading that plot synopsis.
That's the thing about time-loops; you don't need to have a start and a beginning. There's a good movie about that concept; Interstellar.
The last soundtrack to catch my ear was Hans Zimmerman's score to Interstellar. I've also been rediscovering John Barry's classic film scores, everything from Born Free to James Bond movies -- not exactly up to the minute, but quality lasts!
It's impossible for me not to wonder how many species of life are in this photo, intelligent or otherwise, and things we can't even begin to imagine. The hostile environments, the ones blossoming with beautiful calm, and the frightening distance between everything in the photo where basically nothing exists, I'm having trouble even processing what I'm looking at here, it's just so... vast.
I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.
If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to capture a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.
You gave your review, and I gave mine. We just have different taste. I wasn't saying you have to like it, but you ended your comment with a statement: "[without nostalgia] it's pretty meh. Same with Blade Runner." that I disagree with. We're allowed to disagree; as you said, it's subjective.
Movies like Blade Runner sometimes don't appeal to mainstream audiences. Both BR movies have slow pacing, and often have long shots without dialog. Interstellar is similar in many ways.
Avatar is a good movie. Sure, the plot is simple, but it's a groundbreaking film nonetheless. And still quite enjoyable.
I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid.
As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).
Great movie IMO. I’ve watched it with a few normies and they walk away thinking deeply about interstellar travel, advanced civilizations, etc.
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
My view is a little more negative because of all the hype it gets but only a little. It's just a bad movie.
SPOILER WARNING
To understand the plot structure (such that it is) in Interstellar, you have to start with the writer's desire for the emotional ending of the main character with his daughter, who is now old. Everything that happens in the movie is a really forced way to reach that outcome.
The whole watch time-travel thing was more of that illogical nonsense in service of that conclusion.
The time dilation to make all this happens just doesn't work that way. You have to get to a significant percentage of c before time dilation becomes really noticeable. For example, at 0.9c you're still only at ~2x time dilation [1].
The gravity effects of the black hole don't make sense either.
The "science" of Interstellar is no more realistic than Star Trek or Starship Troopers.
[1]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html
Countless SF films. I found Interstellar very middle-drawer. I didn't hate it but certainly wasn't wowed by it.
I can only recommend "The science of Interstellar" book as a great companion to the movie, explaining the physics side of it. As for Interstellar itself, I watched it the year it came out and I thought it was a pretty cool science-fiction movie. I rewatched it last year sometime after my father died of covid and I appreciated it from a whole different angle. Suffice to say, I don't remember the last time I cried watching a movie.
you sound like those type of guys that try to be 'cool' by disliking what other people like.
Blade Runner is a great movie for its time and it has inspired a lot of artists. It is a Noir (Sci-fi), and the type of movie that only adults would appreciate, due to its storyline. If you are under 25, probably it is not a good movie for you.
Same with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came much earlier. any other movies of the time.
Also Interstellar is very unique in one major aspect: They had to model true science (and maybe made a discovery) when they modeled the look of light around the super massive Black Hole. 5 years later, the real black hole halo pictures came out, and the movie got it spot on.
You might not like the story, but good movies like that try to predict the future. They often miss, but sometimes get it right. Blade Runner deals with AI, Androids, and the question of 'What is human'. We might face this issue if General AI becomes a thing 50 years down the road.
I didn't love Interstellar the first time I saw it.
When I watched Inception for the first time I walked out of the theatre in love with that movie (and I still am), but, leaving Interstellar I felt confused and underwhelmed.
Perversely I think I was actually very overwhelmed by Interstellar because after seeing it many times in the almost a decade since it came out (oh my god how has it been 10 years) it's become one of my favorite films, but, there is just so much going on that it was difficult to connect with it on the first viewing.
I am one of the 11 people on Earth that hates coffee. "Hate" isn't strong enough. Even "despises" I'm not sure goes far enough. It tastes disgusting to me. I can't even stand the smell. This has led me at times to wonder if I'm crazy or if everyone else is. I do notice a ton of people consume a ton of sugar in their coffee so it seems like many don't really like coffee. They like sugar. But I digresss.
I have the same "am I crazy?" thoughts with Blade Runner. Unlike coffee it's not bad (subjectively). I just don't get the hype.
It's a product of its time too. I'd put it in the 80s Cyberpunk bucket where the noir surroundings and mega corporations are a product of xenophobia, basically. There were genuine fears the Japanese were "taking over". And Blade Runner reflects this zeitgeist. In Blade Runner it's the Tyrell Corporation. In Aliens it was the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
Rutger Hauer did give a good performance and there were some good lines [1] but I'd never put it in my list of top films. Not even my list of top sci-fi films. It is better than Interstellar though, which is trash, so there's that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRxHYHPzs7s
In order to represent your walk vertically in a film, the camera would need to be overhead, directed at the ground (or beneath you, directed upwards). You walk forward from your own perspective, but it's rare from other people's perspectives (and still doesn't matter for horizontal vs vertical, since it's the Z dimension, not X or Y). Using depth to represent motion is a pretty bad idea most of the time, given that it's the dimension where movement is the hardest to notice (again, there are exceptions (precisely when you want the movement in the periphery to be hard to notice, only to make it more noticeable when the thing the moves gets closer (or the opposite))).
If you recorded Lord of the Rings, or Interstellar in portrait orientation, they would be pretty crappy films.
> the stuff I pay attention to when walking is more generally arranged vertically than horizontally.
I don't know what you mean.
Another point: your eyes are organized horizontally, not vertically. You have move horizontal vision than vertical. By filming in vertical orientation you quite simply make things more cramped, quite possible losing the space you could use to put more objects in, or just space out the objects you have in order to make things less messy.
Again, there are artistic reasons to sometimes prefer portrait over landscape, but that doesn't mean it's a good default. Making good films requires being conscious of those things, understanding that they are not arbitrary (therefore left just to which way it's more comfortable for people to hold their phones).
I'm basically with you but Interstellar stood out for me, I think he matched well with that film's themes.
I agree with your position that MotF portrays what generally needs to happen for us to have a non-horrifying future, though as a matter of probability it's like getting heads on ten coin flips in a row.
Fukuyama's criticism about characterization is unfair because I don't think KSR was trying and failing to make amazing characters. They were just vehicles for the larger story. Being disappointed that a main character didn't have sex at the end is really missing the point.
An aside: while reading MotF I felt the same sort of relentless sense of passing time that you get in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar. Interestingly both the book and movie are about climate change and time and, also, about centering the story and setting at the expense of characterization.
I'm ambivalent about the advantages of arguing for political change as a necessary part of environmental change. But as you said in an earlier comment, rapid transition (which I think is likely, as we go right to the cliff and then fall off) will itself be horribly traumatic. It will require massive government intervention to prevent total societal collapse. After hurricanes and earthquakes, you don't adjust tax rates, you send in the military.
My own major criticism of MotF is that, as the COVID crisis makes clear, people live by motivated reasoning, and as climate change gets worse that motivation will be fear, and frightened people will act badly. Most of the opposition in MotF are rich people trying to hold onto what they have or technocratic rulers too timid to act. In the actual world the real problem will be billions of terrified people whose past has been or is about to be destroyed and with no clear future. However that story told honestly would look like a Cormac McCarthy novel and maybe KSR just doesn't want to go there yet.
Taught was maybe a bad word choice. If you watch the promotional materials for Interstellar, you get a strong implication that they were the first to show what a black hole looks like, but that is not the case. People have picked up on that on that vibe and think that the tech behind the movie gave us the first pictures. There certainly was an evolution there, but it wasn't the start of it.
No doubt Interstellar popularized and helped re-energizze discussions about black holes, especially since it came out just before LIGO started making discoveries, which propelled things even further.
The idea that Interstellar "taught" us what black holes look like is way overblown and oversold. John-Pierre Luminet and others were drawing black holes back in the 1970s.
https://blogs.futura-sciences.com/e-luminet/2018/03/07/45-years-black-hole-imaging-1-early-work-1972-1988/
https://blogs.futura-sciences.com/e-luminet/2019/05/23/40-years-of-black-hole-imaging-2-colors-and-movies-1989-1993/
https://blogs.futura-sciences.com/e-luminet/2019/06/12/40-years-of-black-hole-imaging-3-from-kerr-black-holes-to-eht/
> The current trend, the symetrical ufo-shape, is scientifically more accurate than the previous whirlpool but isnt perfect. It doesnt show the red/blue shifting.
A bit of a technicality, but the frequency shifting would only occur for rotating black holes but not non-rotating black holes. However, as far as I understand, non-rotating black holes are assumed to not exist in reality.
They did do some test renders for Interstellar with better fidelity. You can see some in this article [1] or in the paper they wrote on their renderer. They were simulating film response rather than human retinal response, but it’s probably close enough.
[1] https://cerncourier.com/a/building-gargantua/
Westworld manages to make it work. Plenty of science fiction films like Interstellar make it work. Hell, Black Mirror's entire point is social commentary yet it doesn't feel woke.
> questioning the premises our society is based on
There's a difference between doing this in a way that also tells a coherent story and one that just forces themes that don't exist into the story. One of those things is woke and the other one is not.
I recommend you go through an exercise I learned a few years back in college[3]. Get into a quiet, comfortable, but alert state (meditation or a cup of coffee often works) . Somewhere you can be undisturbed for 30-60 minutes. Get yourself a few sheets of paper and a pen you like. It's advised you actually hand write this. Maybe turn on some quiet contemplative music -- movie scores often work[1].
Set a timer for 30-60 minutes and begin to write down every conceivable thing you might want to do, anything that seems cool, honorable, worthwhile, interesting, amazing, serene, invigorating, beautiful, or otherwise just iconic/archetypal of your interpretation of what a great life might include/entail. The only rules are you must not limit yourself by thinking it cannot be accomplished, is out of reach, or other "pragmatic" style self limitations, and you must not list things you think you ought/should do where those things are coming from a place that doesn't seem truly genuine to who you are -- they are externally informed. Try to shoot for 100 things.
Ok, got your list?
Now you're going to refactor it into categories. Categorize it into any pattern set you observe. I wont mention any here as it will bias your own groupings. But I really do believe patterns _will_ emerge if you look at it long enough. Try to distill themes of values and what is important to you, excites you, has meaning/purpose to you.
After many days you may want to start to think and begin to pursue these things either concretely (a specific item on your list) or thematically (find ways to incorporate meaning to what you're already doing). Books about habits[2], goals can help with bringing them into fruition. This exercise can be used to help you map out things that matter, reflect on things you have done that you previously said would matter (gratitude), and later on redone to help evolve as you grow.
If I find that you're stalling/procrastinating in overwhelm or negativity I often apply my "Next pizza" rule (I love pizza). I think about what might represent the next pizza in my life (sometimes literally, usually figuratively) and focus on getting there. Focus on doing the best monday through friday on the things that matter I can so I can get to that next pizza (reward).
[1]: Perhaps the fountain, interstellar, or pan's labyrinth.
[2]: such as atomic habits or tiny habits
[3]: this exercise is similar to, but smaller than, the future authoring program https://www.selfauthoring.com/future-authoring
I haven't stopped thinking about this movie since I saw it 2 days ago and I'm seeing it again this week/weekend.
I don't think I've ever seen a movie more than once in theaters. It's good - really good.
The last movie that was comparable was Interstellar, imo.
Didn't a particularly noteworthy event happen during the production of the movie, "Interstellar"?
Edit:
Yes, and here is one of many stories:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/amp
A lot of people strongly disagree with my comment, but I stand by my opinion. I genuinely like almost all of Nolan's and Coppola's works.
The Godfather is absolutely timeless, and I totally get why people love it so much. I like it too, and feel Interstellar hits like the Godfather in that same class of movies that capture both the anxieties and nihilism of current culture.
I've watched Interstellar with multiple audio setups and didn't have an issue understanding the dialog. It may have a higher dynamic range than most movies but that's a good thing.
I personally don't find this happening as much as OP says, but nolan movies (e.g. interstellar) are an example where i have definitely had this.
Anyone remember that movie "Interstellar," where Matthew McConaughey's character hacked the drone and took over its navigation systems?
Curious as to whether or not this has a basis in reality. Surely advanced militaries are aware of drone warfare and can detect the RF (?) control / communication with the drones, and therefore have an opportunity to hack them.
Or maybe they just try to shoot them down? (Which seems difficult to do...)
Uh no. Nolan used a ton of CGI in all the Batman movies he made, in Interstellar, in Dunkirk, Tenet and especially in Inception. Yes he likes to use practical when possible, but the idea that he doesn't use CGI is ridiculous. Everyone uses CGI. Even when it's simple compositing stuff. Everyone conflates CGI with doing a shot/scene entirely digital. Some films do that, but most don't.
I don't know if it was just me or the theater I was in but I felt like some of the effects in Dune were second rate. Was a bit disappointed, especially during desert scenes. I wish I could think of a counterexample of good CGI from modern cinema. Actually, I remember certain parts of Interstellar, for example the black hole and the 5-dimensional book shelf, were really well done. I think I was able to suspend my disbelief and just have my mind blown by them.
Christopher Nolan (the director of Interstellar) has notably not jumped on the modern film making bandwagon. Nolan still shoots on film and eschews CGI whenever possible. The authors of this article might see Nolan as a lone wolf standing against the forces of CGI that have ruined film over the last few decades.
Some movies still have quite a lot of physical effects, like Interstellar did.
Aside from military, this tactic became obvious to me when space became (again) a theater of conquest around 2010, involving both private and public sectors, internationally.
The narrative around space became very strong, sending messages of conquest, entrepreneurship, science, dreams, you name it.
At the exact same period, bloomed movies like: Mission to Mars, Gravity, Interstellar.
I won't be surprised to see a surge of interest in space-related careers in younger generations in years to come.
Reminds me a bit of the movie Interstellar, where the guy's combines and tractors are all automated. I'd be interested to see if they allow a multi-tenant sort of approach with the software. From what I understand, it's common for several farmers to share in the cost of those machines together and then share it.
Avatar and Interstellar, both made with enormous budgets by overwhelmingly successful directors, are weird examples to use for "non-mainstream".
In fact, most of the Oscar Best Picture nominees from 2020 [0] meet that description better than the movies you cited (not sure what was in theaters last year, but most of them were readily available from a mainstream source; I'm sure that in a normal year most would have been in mainstream theaters).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Picture#2020s
Marvel movies are the top of the line financially, but they are all the same basic formula, and they're effectively film versions of old comic storylines.
When was the last time you saw actually original (as in, not based on last year's surprisingly successful novel), creative, non-"mainstream" movies at your city's cinema? Interstellar or (to a certain extent, given that the plot was more or less copied from Pocahontas) Avatar, likely.
Anything else is moved off to niche/arthouse cinema or straight to DVD/Netflix.
With games, it's the same. Innovation has been sorely lacking in many genres from racing to shooters - it's all remasters, microtransactions, free to play and advertising bullshit these days or the atrocity that Rockstar made out of GTA 3/VC/SA. Last actually innovative game in the shooter genre probably was Borderlands.
Pretty much the premise of the movie Interstellar.
Yeah, but with the Nolan Batmans in particular, I rewatched them again at home with subtitles on and got a way different (better, IMO) experience than the unintelligible garble at the theater.
When I first saw Batman Begins, I didn't at all understand that there was some connection between Henri Ducard and Ra's al Ghul (both played by Liam Neeson)... was really confused why Batman's apparent friend/mentor suddenly became the villain, and then somehow a bunch of other villains showed up and wanted to do something to Gotham (but couldn't understand what). At first watch, all I got was that "Batman went through some hard shit before Gotham". It didn't at all prepare me for the plotlines of the subsequent movies and none of the characters made sense until I could rewatch it with subtitles on.
My understanding is that Nolan chose that unintelligibility for some artistic reason, but as a moviegoer, it just means I miss most of the entire plot of his movies. That's especially the case when you combine unintelligible dialogue with fast dark scenes... just a lot of blurry fists and wheels that's incredibly hard to keep track of.
Also Interstellar... first time I watched it, all I really got was "corn farmer goes to space and gets betrayed". None of the intricacies of the Bookshelf of Time™ got through because it was all unintelligible. Argh.
Flashback to "Interstellar", where the first 40 minutes involved this guy speaking in some deep-south US accent with a mouth so full of marbles that he was incomprehensible. At some point later in the movie, I bailed. Apart from the black-hole CGI it was utter crap. Perhaps the incomprehensible dialogue was a deliberate attempt to hide the paucity of plot, logic or story.
Couple of thoughts:
1. I'm not really sure what making this so interactive accomplishes. The result seems akin to a listicle: "X Great Movies to Watch When You're Feeling Y", except with a lot more clicks required and, importantly, no curation. I think I would prefer to see a static list of recommendations with a "random" button and a cool blog post linked about how the recommendations were generated. Furthermore, it seems fairly safe to say (?) that the site isn't dynamically generating recommendations because the list exhausts rather quickly, after 10 or so. Just make a list!
2. The lack of curation leads to a lot of strangeness in the recommendations. For example, my first choice was feeling "weird". I got a bunch of blockbuster action films: Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Interstellar, Black Panther, Captain Marvel.
> It's about what I hope the future
It's about time to be very clear about this. This sentiment based on hope for the future and the entertainment of seeing the rocket land on its butt is not unlike the one experienced by the fan of every crappy sport franchise putting too much hopes on their chances to win the Championship .
Said hope is based on nothing factual , but it's all based on the entertainment they feel when a player full of swagger but no technical abilities comes in to energize the team.
There is nothing noble or superior in putting up hope in stuff which has low odds of succeeding , there might be if you do so at the individual level or betting on yourself.
The moment you start evengelizing or trying to convince others to blindly believe in something impossible then it's not noble anymore. It's kinda sad actually. Profiting off it? That's pure grift.
This is true for everything, space exploration doesn't get a free pass because "it has the potential to revolutionize our specie".
Well so has mRNA and brain research and defeating cancer and winning the war against alzheimer and parkinsons. Same goes for cardiovascular diseases.
The actual killers of humans, you know? The things that will get you and me, not the abstract pipedream stuff which the used car salesmen is trying to perpetuate.
> we want to be putting 100 up on every launch
OMG 100 tons!! The human specie relies on 350mi of atmosphere above us to protect us and at least 10 miles of Earth crust below us to sustain us, that's on top of all the mass that's on the surface. We need all of that to thrive.
What's that figure divided by 100 ? How many launches you need?
Discounting the fact that you can't exactly bottle the atmosphere and pack up the crust...and on top of that you need to simulate gravity.
Again watch Interstellar. In order to provide the happy ending Chris Nolan and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne had to cheat their way by having the hero find the anti-gravity formula inside the black hole.
Because lifting 10 billion people plus the crust and the atmosphere was never gonna be possible with present day or even future rockets.
In fact the real plan behind all the window dressing was to simply abandon everybody and send a bunch of sperm and eggs up there in some sort of hail mary attempt.
The only element in which reality suprasses fiction is that in the movie that plan is shamed and the person who conceived it is branded as an evil liar, whereas I am sure that if Musk were to propose the same thing many if not all of the space lunatics would stand to their feet and clap, telling him what a brilliant idea he had, all while they are left on Earth to die.
Many already did when he said that the first people on Mars would live a short life and die of a terrible death...again it's religion for the atheists.
> I just want a piece of the dream
As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence
Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.
When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.
Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.
As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope.
No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it.
The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially cheat their way into the epilogue of Interstellar. The hero of the movie finds the answer to the problem of how to lift humanity off the Earth into the Gargantua Black Hole, which by definition is the place where all the rules are off, and there is no knowledge of what really happens in there, so that Kip Thorne could, in good conscience, allow it in the script.
People who love space should work on mind uploading and laser transmission of the aforementioned upload. That's the only way we can manage to lift ourselves.
For example though, Interstellar is a convoluted mess, where the resolution depends on the unseen hand of the future humans (with the characters in the film having to take some risks to carry out the plan the future put into place...).
Nolan tends to do that though, wrapping science words around some magic thing that is needed to drive the plot.
yea interstellar would be my top movie pick if i was stuck on a desert island that also had a working dvd player
what about under the skin? edge of tomorrow? ex machina? arrival? bladerunner 2049? tenet?
but maybe you mean that they were flops, ie not huge box office hits, or that you didn't enjoy them
You didn't like The Martian and Blade Runner 2049? Not exactly mid-budget movies but one is a well-made popcorn-flick while the other is the highly improbably well-made sequel to a 40 year old cult classic. The amount of non-superhero Sci-Fi in the theaters at the moment is a bit of the low side for me but there has been significant, good movies since 2014 and Interstellar.
The last SF or fantasy movie I've liked was, I believe, Interstellar. Everything since has either been a superhero movie, Star Wars (please make it stop), or a massive flop. Actually, Bumblebee was pretty entertaining now that I remember.
The TV has kinda become the new medium for SF/fantasy, but it too has started to become flooded with superhero shows, superhero deconstruction and more Star Wars.
A great example is Blade Runner 2049.
In my opinion, it is essentially a perfect movie. Fantastic music. Gorgeous sets. Great fight scenes. Good story. Interesting characters. Proper science fiction.
Most importantly, it stayed true to the original, while still having a novel story, that nonetheless touched on the theme of the original without being overly repetitive like the latest Disney-made Star Wars movies.
I thought the movie was basically genious, and I will now watch anything Dennis Villeneuve directs.
But if you listen to reviews by typical moviegoers, they panned the movie. "Too slow", "Boring", etc...
Interstellar similarly polarised viewers.
This is why most movies are made the way they are: to avoid negative reviews by the mass market viewers and hence to maximise profits.
Or to put it another way: Their only metric is ticket sales, not the level of your enjoyment. They don't get a cent more if the movie touches your soul.
So it sounds like they did a decent job sticking to the science on the Interstellar movie?
I feel like Greg Egan manages to do both very well (e.g. in Diaspora or The Arrow of time series)
On the movie side, interstellar spends a lot of time on making things scientifically accurate, but also examines humanity much more than most sf movies.
So i don't think they're at odds.
Amazing. Kip Thorne's simulation for the movie Interstellar took "a year of work by 30 people and thousands of computers." Of course, that was also an animated simulation with a high level of visual detail.
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/
I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE REALLY explained" content.
I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if not more, questions as I had coming in.
[1] https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567
> In every one of these theaters I am always shocked to see how few people a classic pulls in. Went to see Blade Runner “Final Cut” at AFI on a huge screen and there were like 40 people. 2001 in a 70mm print was about half full. Inception or Interstellar in IMAX (the real one, 70 ft tall screen) was less than half full.
Maybe you chose bad examples.. but all of these movies are movies I like quite a lot and I would not have gone to see any of them in the theater. Why? Because I've seen all of them a dozen times already and I'm sure I'm not alone. If they want to pull in more people, they should probably pick movies people haven't already watched repeatedly to the point of fatigue.
I can think of at least 4 big movie theaters in DC that did this.
The Uptown used to do revivals between big releases. I saw Blade Runner, Ben Hur, 2001, and other classics there. They did not make money on those and had to convert to 100% current releases. I think it is now closed.
The Air & Space IMAX theater used to do “Sci Fi Sundays” where they played a classic science fiction movie on Sunday evenings as the last showing.
The Avalon is in one of the richest neighborhoods on DC/MD border. When it went bankrupt all the neighbors pooled their money and started a nonprofit to keep it open.
The AFI has a theater in a MD suburb, which shows all sorts of revivals and classics year round.
In every one of these theaters I am always shocked to see how few people a classic pulls in. Went to see Blade Runner “Final Cut” at AFI on a huge screen and there were like 40 people. 2001 in a 70mm print was about half full. Inception or Interstellar in IMAX (the real one, 70 ft tall screen) was less than half full.
A small takeaway is that, with so much historical catalog, the audience is very finely chopped up. Only a relatively small % of people love each old movie enough to rally to the theater at a specific night and time.
The big takeaway is how crucial strong marketing is for theater attendance. Undoubtedly there were many available casual fans who simply did not know about these showings. Mass marketing is hard and expensive.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
I had 3 semesters of physics in the university and can’t tell whether interstellar is accurate or not. Ok, I’m no genius, but this leads me to an assumption most people wouldn’t get the difference anyway. There’s just no point to be very accurate when making a movie. You have to be only approximately accurate.
If you are a fan of podcasts: Sean Carroll's interview with Kip Thorne was worth a listen.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip-thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/
In Kip Thorne’s book about Interstellar he talks about what they had to do to make something that would work for a movie. They had to choose a specific mass and rotation speed that doesn’t really exist in nature or the image would not be something that would be intelligible to the viewer and work for the story. This includes the tidal effect in the film. In the end they were making a science fiction film and not writing a scientific paper.
Your comment echoes the film 'Interstellar' and I now have a desire to watch it again.
Who says science can't fill the soul with wonder?
> It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it.
Interstellar was heavily hyped as being "realistic".
I don't agree with this. Scientists are people too, and science is a human endeavor after all.
I really, really dislike when Hollywood portrays scientists and science as fundamentally blind and cold, and that what will really save you is The Power of Love. The good old "leave your cold facts and numbers and follow your heart" trope, which tends to triumph in movies because Hollywood thinks audiences are uninterested in science (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
In Interstellar this is manifested in that the "logical" choice of planet (i.e. the one we would have wanted this group of people to pick, were this a real situation) was wrong (because obviously a scientist lied), and the right choice was following your heart all along.
As for xenomorphs: I utterly love Alien and Aliens (a pity they never made any sequels, right?) but they aren't examples of realistic movies, and the characters often make movie-logic decisions, and that's fine: these are horror-scifi and action-scifi movies, respectively, and don't try to be anything else.
> I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Those exist. Unlike with movies often ridiculing science and scientists, science doesn't downplay the usefulness of emotions and intuition.
Thank you. I've been ranting about the "let's use a big rocket to provide visual impact but then forget about it when it's inconvenient to the plot" thing since the movie came out. Interstellar is the type of movie that gets worse the more you think about it.
Nolan's typical output is films that are a little smart, but seem to believe themselves to be very smart, while delivering a few really cool scenes, moments, or visuals, but not much else. Interstellar's firmly in that category.
You are projecting your beliefs. The popular science crowd thought it was incredibly realistic [1-3]. As you say, the movie is ingratiating to the people who have heard something about time dilation. But even the movie itself gets it horribly wrong. I remember there is a scene of a crew in the orbit of the planet growing old while those on the surface don't because "it is near a black hole" which is true, but the distance between the surface of the planet and the orbit to cause such massive time dilation would imply the humans should liquefy in their suits. Overall, I found Interstellar to go out of the way to use science to explain events in the movie and then asked the viewers to ignore applying the same principles to other parts. I have no problem with science fiction, but if you try to explain the fiction, you have to keep the universe consistent.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/interstellar-science-explained-by-neil-degrasse-tyson/
[2] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-interstellar-belongs-pantheon-best-realistic-science-fiction-films-180953261/
[3] - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne/
There is a great Dr. Who episode called “World Enough and Time” that is all about time dilation: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6340138/
Far better than the treacly Interstellar, in my judgement.
> I don't get the love for Interstellar either
I enjoyed some of Interstellar, but disliked the anti-scientificism. When they need to pick planet, probably humanity's last hope, you know there will be two options -- the scientifically sensible option and the "go with your heart" one -- and of course the latter is the right one. When scientists follow the scientific method they end up making a mistake, because science is cold and uncaring but nothing can stop the power of the heart, I guess.
I would really like a scifi movie that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" mislead you, and sometimes you just have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Actual physicist here. Don't get me started on Interstellar. There is so much needlessly dumb crap in this movie that I don't even know where to start, and the fact that people think it's realistic is just a kick in the pants.
Just for one example...
The crew being sent to save the Earth blasts off in a big ol' chemical rocket with stages. Yeah, fine. I guess rocket tech hasn't advanced all that much in this future. Then they land a ship on a planet in a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences (Note: the gravity alone should have killed them). Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is? The energy to get off Earth is nothing compared to getting out of a gravity well that deep! I guess Nolan thought an oldschool staged rocket looked cool.
The SFX people did some actual science to figure out the black hole visuals but, other than that, this is a far worse movie than Gravity as far as science is concerned. The new age emotions resolution was just a big ol' F U to the crowd. Lazy, sloppy writing.
There are plenty of unrealistic movies on this list, and that's fine. Some are just damned fun movies (e.g. Back to the Future). Interstellar sticks out from the pack for it's pretensions and underlying ridiculousness.
Interstellar is a great film but I would not consider it a scientifically accurate film.
Traveling through black holes would at least crush you via gravity or kill you from radiation.
What you're talking about is the difference between hard sci-fi and pop sci-fi. The pop stuff is intended to have fun Hollywood physics and not taken too literally. But hard sci-fi is intended to be more theoretically plausible.
The issue with Interstellar was it set itself up as a hard sci-fi with some Hollywood sugar with the way it depicted a future Earth, black hole physics (for the most part) and time dilation. But then it took a dramatic left turn into ridiculousness at the end. This really broke immersion of the film for me. Whereas films like Guardians of the Galaxy (and it's ilk) make it clear from the outset that it's a fun distraction from reality. So it's easier to suspend disbelief while watching.
I love Interstellar despite some of the liberties it takes. For me the number one thing Interstellar did so well was communicate clearly that the universe does not care about us.
We are infinitesimally small and insignificant. I felt the scale of space and the unforgiving progress of time, as characters dealt with the emotional impact of time dilation on them, their colleagues, and family. And we, as viewers, get to experience it as we see minutes pass from our POV only to return to Endurance and realize Romilly has aged over 20 years in orbit, all alone; and Cooper’s kids have suddenly grown up without us noticing.
And as others have noted about the film before, it also relates to the phenomena we experience as we age and our perception of time accelerates. If you’re a parent, you feel yourself slipping farther and faster away from your children with each passing year. Chances are if you watched Interstellar as a parent, you felt the film deeply on another level.
And here I am, recognizing some of the plot holes existing but Interstellar is one of my favorite movies of all time. I've watched it several times, watched the first 30 minutes 10 times, and cry most times I watch it all the way through.
Let go of trying to analyze the realistic-ness of the physics (even if it's in this list) and immerse yourself in the story, the moment, and I think the characters are actually very realistic.
I loved Interstellar, but not for the physics. I thought it was a great story about the human spirit, the power of love across time and space, etc. and the sci-fi elements were there to help make it more interesting and to provide explanations for a lot of the events like how Cooper got the messages that lead to the events of the movie in the first place.
I mostly agree about Interstellar, but I think it was the first time a lot of people encountered the idea of time dilation.
It’s old hat in written SF, of course, but hadn’t come up much in major movies before (or at least that’s the impression I get from reactions and reviews by people who don’t read SF).
I was okay with this list until I saw "Gravity" on it. It's preposterous and silly.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield Reviews Space Movies, from 'Gravity' to 'Interstellar': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RkhZgRNC1k
I don't get the love for Interstellar either. Their black hole rendering was about the only interesting thing about that movie. The rest of it was predictable and generic right up until the end at which point is felt like a jumping the shark movement with its ridiculousness.
Love "Arrival" but I won't nominate it for this list. It's for "physics lovers" and "Arrival" is more for linguistics nerds; the central plot of the film hinges on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, after all.
In the same note of "sci-fi but not exclusively physics", I want to recommend "Another Earth"---very indie production, for better and for worse. Also, if you are a physics nerd, a certain plot point might irritate you. But, on behalf of the film, I ask you to grant it a bit more patience and suspension of disbelief. For me it hits the same dramatic notes as "Interstellar". Good quality intellectual entertainment.
Often, artistic license take over actual physics, even when the writer knows about the field, he will prefer do it in a way that fits the plot.
I mean, even Interstellar, with a Nobel Prize on board sometimes forgoes scientific accuracy for nicer pictures.
There is also a game about accuracy, viewer expectations, and attention. For example, most people will thing that the best way to land from orbit is to point the ship towards the ground is fire the thrusters, obvious right. If the ship points 90 degrees away, people will ask themselves why. If orbital mechanics is central to your movie, that's good, but you may have some explaining to do. If you are in the middle of an epic space battle, it is not the time for a physics lesson, so go for the obvious (and wrong) and let the viewer focus on the action.
Since the day I watched the Interstellar movie, I always thought of understanding and making the black hole simulation. I guess I could make it now.
The perspective that we will likely explore the universe using artificial beings is on the right track.
Our species is at the stage of flinging hunks of metal and meat at nearby rocks and planets, whereas the problem of space exploration means ultimately that we are trying to cohere information across distances measured in light years. The former problem is interesting and exciting, but the latter problem is the one that we can probably find solutions for in the span of a couple of lifetimes.
How it could plausibly have been solved by other civilizations is they figured out a way to transmit information to set off the operations that would resolve to the building of the other end of a communications channel.
It reminds me of how relative time was fictionalized in the movie Interstellar, where hundreds of thousands of years here pass over a relatively very short period far enough away, to where (inverting that perspective) if we came up with a quantum device that entangled with some distant photons to set off the reactions that would yield a civilization in 100m of its years, if it were far away enough, we might even hear back from them in a few lifetimes. That's sci-fi speculation, and someone can correct my misunderstanding of general relativity, but I'm saying it might be more plausible to in-effect compute with distant parts of the universe than to solve the problem of preserving meat in cans and how we propel them through it.
It makes perfect sense as a politically-motivated decision. Some excuse was devised to destroy the pods, thus ending the debate forever of whether the Earth might one day return to a green space.
It also forced Dern's character into action, since he would have to return to Earth since his job of caring for the pods was about to end.
The film reminds me somewhat of 'Interstellar' — a once verdant world going dark and expelling the hero.
> It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments.
I agree it's hard, but it's not impossible. One thing that heightens the experience for me is to:
Listen to movie scores while you program.
I first started this to help drown out other noises so I could concentrate. But, I soon realized that there's a lot of drama in the sound: there are highs and lows, chaos and order, fumbles and precision, brief pauses, slow times and fast -- the sound is just like programming!
One time, as the score was building my task was nearing completion. Just as I ran the program and saw that everything worked the movie score delivered a massive crescendo. It was so cathartic and I had never felt so much emotion while programming. I actually cried with joy. That's the closest thing I've felt to actual love while programming.
A few of my favorite scores are:
TRON: Legacy - https://open.spotify.com/album/3AMXFnwHWXCvNr5NCCpLZI
Interstellar - https://open.spotify.com/album/3B61kSKTxlY36cYgzvf3cP
Inception - https://open.spotify.com/album/2qvA7HmSg1iM6XMiFF76dp
In the case of my step-son I've also been stressing that you can teach yourself many of these things - not just giving him the answer but the tools to find the answer for himself.
This has gotten him into space and half his non-school related youtube use has been to watch documentaries on space topics - I think learning that you can teach yourself is a crucial lesson that modern schools don't typically emphasise enough - our daily walks have gone from discussions about fortnite to discussions about exo-planets and what their surfaces might be like through to neutron stars and black holes - I'm incredibly proud of his progress, I knew he was bright (he kills it at maths) but I hadn't really realised how bright until I had to teach him.
Next weekend I think we'll watch Interstellar since it covers many of the things he's been asking about and the visuals are engaging enough to hold the attention of a 10yo.
There was massive amount of in space infrastructure and lots of people. Even though they did space mining there is no way they would be able to put all that in place without RLVs. IIRC they even show them a couple times, basically big NASP like SSTO aerospaceplanes.
They also have regular transcontinental flights going through space, even though its IIRC not clear if its sub orbital ballistic trajectories or FOBS like partial orbit ones.
Still, many would-be hard SF films get this completely wrong - huge space stations and/or interplanetary spaceships yet they launch it all on rather dated looking expandable boosters!
Already The Martian it's pushing is pushing it with using basically improved EELVs (launched by ULA, none the less!) yet having hundreds if not thousands of tons of equipment and propelant in place.
Interstellar or Ad Astra is bad shit insane - dinky ELVs and multiple interplanetary colonization attempts and humongous space ship in the former and KFC & artillery fireballs on the Moon in the former. And Ad Astra even has booster stages being dropped when launching from Mars because hey, why not waste even more resources!
Usually any UI in a movie is bad and drops me back to reality out of the magic of the movie.
There are meaningless percentages with silly labels, animated histograms, so much useless movement, scrolling nonsense, and sometimes even a world map, blinking stuff -- all crammed into one screen. And best of all, the useless extra data is often rendered extra useless with a font size that is too tiny to read without a magnifying glass.
There are movies with nice, (semi) plausible fantasy UIs too! For example, The Midnight Sky (damage assessment, map views etc.), Chappie (firmware upgrade, policebot PoV, etc.), Interstellar (flight controls, robot "debug" displays etc.).
Star Trek LCARS screens have been generally well thought of, but not always. There are weird numbers and "display nonsense" here and there. But, I can believe a starship could be steered with such a touch UI with clearly distinguishable big buttons and clear separation of functions.
Interstellar, the 2014 movie. Waited for it for a long time and I went to the theatre on the first day. I was stunned. I keep re-watching it every now and then too.
> Dialogue audio was weirdly quiet
That's Nolan for you. His sound quality (there is probably a more precise word for this) is appalling. A lot of the music in Interstellar is too loud while the dialogue is hard to make out. Same with Dunkirk - the gunfire in the opening had me cover my ears in the cinema to protect my hearing and throughout the rest of film I was wishing there were subtitles.
I dont think this is only because you have seen a lot of movies already. There appears to be a whole movement of youtubers doing movie critics who pretty much agree that modern productions have very bad story telling. Some of these are indeed a bit older, and that might be a reason why "we" agree.
But when I add my personal experience to the analysis, I can only say that I basically stopped watching TV a few years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore. Action filled stuff is so needlessly loud and over the top, and the story telling indeed feels very shallow to me. In a sense, I miss the times when technology wasn't so advanced and movie makers actually had to make up for that by a good story and nice pacing. I think Interstellar was the last movie I enjoyed watching. The industry basically lost me as a consumer.
Opinions vary. We walked out of the cinema when cars starting traveling in reverse. Simply unwatchable, utter crap. For reference, I liked Interstellar very much.
I'm almost sure it would have bombed in any year, in fact, because everyone is postponing releases and freezing production until Covid-19 passes, it probably got an even higher box office than what it would have got in a competitive environment.
From my understanding, this is a Nolan problem. The Dark Knight rises had similar issues with sound mixing, especially with Bane's voice in certain scenes. I remember Interstellar having issues as well. Funny enough, Googling his last few movies (ex: "Dunkirk sound mixing problems") all lead to articles around the time of the movie's release and the audience complaining about sound problems.
Slightly off topic, but I personally use subtitles for everything I watch now because I got tired of missing dialogue for different reasons. More movies being on demand is a blessing for me in this regard.
The audio mix for Interstellar was awful when I saw it in at the cinema too. I spoke to the manager, thinking it was a problem with the sound setup at that venue, and he said it was being widely reported around the world.
Saw it in theatre a few days ago, and agree that the sound mixing was bad, making the dialogue difficult to follow. Didn't he learn anything from Interstellar in regards to this?
Excellent movie otherwise, and I look forward to watching it again with subtitles. (Although it's possible I already have.)
I don't work as a physicist (but I got my degree in Engineering Physics @ CU-Boulder, 2009) and I went to see Interstellar in IMAX on opening night. I really enjoyed it overall, and the scenes involving the realistically-rendered black hole were worth it alone.
I'm relatively easy to please when it comes to movies, but to each their own of course.
"Interstellar" was an excellent film, physicists who haven't learned to suspend disbelief may have trouble enjoying it.
Very interesting article. Explains spacetime in a way non-physicist like me understands. Even better than Hawking’s book did. Or maybe those books built the base of understanding that this article now profits from ;-) Fascinating stuff. Always reminds me of the movie Interstellar and how they treated time. Getting back to earth to find out your young daughter is now in her 80’s :)
I believe (from my limited knowledge from Interstellar) that it’s the opposite: higher gravity environments move slower relative to lower gravity environments, which enabled the “go down to high gravity planet for a couple hours and come back and it’s ten years later” plot point in the movie. So if you’re in intergalactic space, time is actually passing very quickly in the higher gravity environment of a galaxy.
But a person’s experience should always be the same, no matter what reference they are in. They will perceive time as passing at the same rate in all environments, but it will be different from people in other environments.
Caveat: IANA physicist, and this is not physics advice.
Anything from Zal Batmanglij is out of this world. You should check his early films. I've watched "Another Earth" back in the day for instance and while maybe right now, there is more popular stuff that followed, it was very different back when it appeared.
I guess it was before things like "Melancholia" and "Interstellar".
This guys is a genius.
The movie Interstellar was based on the premise that one can modulate gravity. What does Matthew McConaughey do as soon as he learns how to do it? (Spoiler alert) He sends data to his daughter.
It's almost like human nature. If anything can be used to send data, we will send data, no matter how inefficient. We will send an entire ICBM with a thermonuclear warhead to send the rather low-entropy message, "Do as I say, or else."
The movie Interstellar explores these concepts quite well. it's not 100% accurate but Kipp Thorne was consulted for the visuals on the black holes in the film at least.
Last week I watched the movie Interstellar and I still don't get why the main character could be younger than his daughter when he returns from space.
And I also don't get your comment. Probably because I don't get relativity.
If we send a clock into space it will just tick away seconds (a unit designed by people). When it will return back to earth years later in my mind it just ticked away the same amount of time as it would have on earth.
What am I missing about relativity?
Fight Club, Interstellar and Whiplash would be my vote.
I made a letterboxd list with some of the movies mentioned here. https://letterboxd.com/whygodwhy/list/hn-films-that-made-you-see-the-world-differently/
"The easiest way to see this, and this is always my challenge—people don’t agree with this—is challenge you to name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it’s not dystopian, it doesn’t kill people, it doesn’t destroy the world, it doesn’t not work, etc., etc."
Interstellar?
I have thought of Personality Vectors similar to this concept but for a completely different purpose.
If we had a Chatbot that would interact with someone hypothetically we could have this kind of distinction between Personality Vectors to mutate its own behavior and to interact with others.
Its sort of the idea I had when I watched the movie Interstellar and TARS is told to decrease his own humor. So if the system would just know who its talking to it would create a preference vector for each person it interacts with.
But you would need some kind of baseline so basically the Personality Vectors would be set to neutral. And each interaction with a Personality vector would be a system that stores a preference vector for each person.
As the system time evolves (which is also in the article) you would basically end up with a set of graphs. There is a notion out there which is called a Dynamic Network analysis [1]. If you also stored the history of that you could then not just be able to rewind the system backwards to a previous checkpoint.
The way you could start learning how to learn a personality vector is a reinforcement learning situation. If you say "bad AI I didn't like that" the system would then look at what it said and mutate the preference vector for that person. Or you could just change the vector manually by a technique that was illustrated above by just saying "reduce humor by 70%".
Then you could have model which would do conditional generation [1] of text based upon interactions with others. It would be basically a reinforcement learning system paired with a generative text model. The reinforcement system would store the Personality and Preference vectors for each person. For each behavior and preference you would need a corpus to bootstrap the system. The reinforcement system would be a retrieval network and it would retrieve a pertained system based on user(s) input and get a generational text network to provide a response. This would be similar to Alpha Go's design. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_network_analysis [2] https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl [3] https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/10932/difference-between-alphagos-policy-network-and-value-network
> instead of getting rid of it
Like we can get rid of Coronavirus? Escaping to space for them is a form of quarantine, or a "green zone" to escape from the "red zone" of Earth. There's no hope of disinfecting a planet.
> Somehow they also know how to get rid of the blight at least in specimens,
It's easy to disinfect small things, like a handful of seeds.
> you wonder why instead of launching giant capsules in space full of plants without the blight, they wouldn't just build giant airtight greenhouses on earth?
The implication is that they're already doing everything they can, but that the Blight will eventually leave Earth about as habitable as Mars, so at that point you may as well go somewhere else.
> They plan and build an interstellar mission all by themselves
It's mentioned several times that the staff of hundreds are NASA (logos everywhere), and that the spaceships are largely the same that Coop used to fly before the Blight. That's why they want him specifically, he's a trained pilot with previous experience.
There's also a lot of technology left, such as AIs with apparent sentience. These are common enough to be used to pilot harvesters!
> hasn't trained for at least ten years
They skipped over the simulator time, it's a movie, not a documentary. What would you rather have as a pilot: Someone who's never flown before or someone who has?
> They could just throw some in space: no suit or capsule needed- do your job and report.
The AIs may not be as good as humans.
> the rocket launches from inside the nasa office building.
It was explained that this is a launch silo, the same as the type used by ballistic missiles. This is standard stuff.
The reasoning is that they're working largely in secret, because their work is unpopular with the public.
PS: The American public being this rabidly anti-scientific is entirely plausible! cough5G conspiracy nutscough.
> Random adventures with CGI on alien planets and very human squabbles follow
They're mankind's only hope and under incredible stress. Their friend dies. They're not exactly going to go about their business like emotionless robots.
Also, drama is entertaining. This is a movie!
Adventures are also entertaining. What's wrong with adventure!?
> Then there's black hole
Which was awesome to see in a Hollywood movie.
> love silliness.
Probably the most out-there part of the movie, but so what? If they didn't put this in there, like you said, they could have just sent robots.
Look at it like this: Have you ever heard stories of lost dogs that travel a thousand miles to get back to their home? Because they love their owners and are desperate to get back, no matter the hardship? Coop is like that dog, his love for his daughter is the thing that helps him find the way home. It's sappy, but whatever.
> the hero rejoins the cute lady in dire need of company- she surely won't reject his love.
Agreed, the mandatory relationship is a trope too many.
So clearly it's a crap movie that nobody should watch.
We should stick to the sci-fi classics like Transformers.
If the first 20mn turned you off, I am afraid it will get worse with the rest of the movie.
That said there are nice CGI of the black hole, where the consulting part really shines. BTW, there is a "Mindscape podcast" episode [1] with Kip Thorne where he explains what technically accurate parts were kept, and the others where he had to (unhappily) let go.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip-thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/
I completely agree with you regarding Interstellar. I think it’s all about expectations. It was advertised to be this hard sci-fi with plausible physics and it wasn’t, as you say.
On the other hand, I remember enjoying watching the Core. It’s a stupid kind of sci-fi that allows you to suspend your disbelief and have fun. What else can you do with a movie that literally calls the metal the ship is made of unobtanium?
If you didn't finish watching Interstellar you missed out. It is one of the best phys-fi movies out there. The physics consultant on that movie was Kip Thorne [0], a giant of gravitational physics and a Noble laureate. Phys-fi movies don't get any better than this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne
Can I confess that after about 20 minutes of Interstellar, I stood up and left the movie theater? I was initially annoyed by the fact the movie makers ignored the tyranny of the rocket equation: a reasonably normal looking rocket took our heroes to some faraway planets. Guys, you need an absolutely huge rocket to just go to Mars. We'll never make it out of the Solar system with chemical rockets only. But somehow, in a world with rusty trucks you get a rocket to take you to some planet that obviously is not one of the seven planets in our neighborhood. Now, you can suspend your disbelief, and accept that in this movie-universe the humankind was more advanced. But then they reach the ocean planet, and instead of getting whatever information they came for via radio transmission, they need to land to pick up a robot. And they couldn't just retrieve a memory stick from the robot, they needed to take the whole thing with them. That's how much I saw from the movie before I decided enough is enough.
> Rage, rage against the dying of the light of consciousness
That's an amended quote from a poem: https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
Fun Fact: the poem was featured heavily in the movie Interstellar.
>What happens when you actually fall inside a black hole and what is the singularity.
Black holes were sometimes called "frozen stars", because time slows down at the event horizon to a stop. If light could escape from black holes and somehow the material continued to emit/reflect light despite time being stopped for it, then as outside observers, what we would see is the star at the moment it collapsed to the size of its event horizon. Though if you entered the event horizon, from your point of view you would see time progressing again inside.
An object falling into a black hole would often go through the process of "spaghettification", being pulled apart because the gravity from the black hole on the close side of the object would be immensely stronger than the gravity on the far side of the object. Though It's possible for a black hole to have an event horizon large enough that the point where spaghettification is beyond it; I think Interstellar had some line to imply that about their black hole.
>I never really understood what happened really when the guy fell inside it in Interstellar and how come he started seeing all those photos. I just accepted it as Hollywood bs.
In the movie, it was supposed to be that the same aliens (well, future humans) that had constructed the original wormhole had also connected another wormhole inside the blackhole. On the inside of the second wormhole, they brought him into a constructed environment to use him as a tool to encode a message to the past to himself that would be able to get him to arrive here in the first place. I think the vague idea of the future-humans was that they used the spacetime-warping nature of the black hole to somehow transcend space and time in our future, but as a nearly one-way trip: they could only interact with our universe / the past through warping gravity (vibrations or making wormholes), and inside the black hole, they had more freedom to do this, and they used that to make the interface for the main character. (Story-wise, I think it seems like good contrivance to allow the mysterious benefactors that ability to give some help, but without being able to do everything and still allow the relatable modern human characters to do all the interesting detail work.)
What happens when you actually fall inside a black hole and what is the singularity.
I never really understood what happened really when the guy fell inside it in Interstellar and how come he started seeing all those photos. I just accepted it as Hollywood bs.
I know my question is based on a movie but would still like to know what will someone witness (assuming of course they somehow live)
I can relate, as I do this all the time, being inside my head, a mashup of multi-verses, projecting myself in alternate realities, being able to time-travel in to the future and opening a conversational 1-on-1 portal to my present self, to answer the question like Dr. Banks from the movie Arrival or when Brand reaches out to her past self in Interstellar, all while taking bus home, or while taking a long shower.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
The first time I heard of this being noticeable on a human timescale was the movie Interstellar. But I don't no think in real life there is that much of a difference between the rate at which time passes near a large mass.
This answer on Quora says the rate at which time passes on Jupiter is only a few nanoseconds off compared to Earth.
https://www.quora.com/Will-time-pass-slower-if-we-go-to-Jupiter-for-example
This reminds me of the black hole shown in Interstellar (movie). It's fantastic even though being in a shelf is kind of unbelievable ;-)
Awesome, but also oddly familiar. Does this new simulation add anything to Kip Thorne's black hole simulation[0] as soon in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar?
[0] https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interstellarOpener_f.png
There were 2 major events when this became to regular people who were interested in black holes. First was the Interstellar movie, and the second was the black hole picture by the Event Horizon telescope team. This independent simulation also comes to the same conclusion. In summary, the light from the side of the black hole facing away from us, is also curved back and thrown towards us, when looking at the black hole from the side.
Fair. You will cringe hard. I haven't been to a cinema for a space movie since Interstellar, but I vividly remember watching The 100 at home, standing up and almost walking away from the computer screaming "THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DEORBIT A SPACE STATION".
Other KSP side effects include: wondering how much Δv your car has, calling reverse "retrograde", calling right/left "normal"/"antinormal", calling up/down "radial-out"/"radial-in"...
I don't buy this article's premise (that there is too much recycled, unoriginal content).
You could make this same argument for all forms of art (music, TV, theater). They can all be explained the same way: the barrier for entry has decreased.
Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud or a video to Youtube. Now there are whole albums/TV series/movies being produced on these content networks as a result of a kind of indie discovery that never existed before. This is wonderful!
The benefit of all of that discovery is the same drawback: that anyone (good or bad) can enter the market. That means in order to capture the "average" audience you have to water down and dilute what is popular to appease everyone. Most pop music is unmemorable. Most pop movies are unmemorable. BUT, they are good enough to capture a wide enough audience to convince them to pay for it.
That doesn't mean there isn't great film to be found. Or music. It just requires a bit more discovery than your local pop Top 40 radio station or whatever they're peddling in the box office.
There have been so many great films in the last 20 years with original stories. Here's a bunch that I just rattled off the top of my head without much thought:
Boyhood, Interstellar, Inception, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Wall-E, The Intouchables (now called The Upside), Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amelie, Slumdog Millionaire
The event horizon is not a shield from gravity. It's the theoretical shell/radius inside which light cannot escape no matter what direction it's travelling. Photons sort of accumulate around the event horizon of a spinning black hole[0], because it takes them more orbits to escape the closer they get to the horizon, but without any matter/photos to observe, the event horizon is just a theoretical shell/radius limiting observation.
A black hole without an event horizon is a naked singularity[1], a concept in theoretical physics resulting from looking at the mathematical equations that describe black holes and observing that the event horizon's radius becomes undefined at certain angular velocities[2]. It's not clear if it can exist in reality.
AFAIK (not a physicist), gravitational force of a specific object (as a function of distance) cannot be discontinuous, can it? It's definitely not under the classical F=G(M1)(M2)/r^2 equation. Force can't be discontinuous unless mass changes discontinuously or space changes discontinuously. But I don't know if there are extreme conditions (and a naked singularity might qualify) where that equation breaks down, or is thought to break down?
[0] to support the movie Interstellar, several people worked on an accurate rendering, based on known physics, of a rotating black hole: https://astronomynow.com/2015/02/14/interstellar-technology-throws-light-on-spinning-black-holes/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_singularity
[2] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/147034/rotating-black-holes-and-naked-singularity
I've got an immediate idea reference from the movie Interstellar, which shows a drone that supposed to be flying non stop around the globe for X number of years until it had its navigation system hacked by people and then landed.
There is always one comment like this. But fine.
It always is worth. These things inspire the nation. Instill pride. They work wonders. And India's space program is much less expensive than many other nations. India sent a rocket to Mars that was cheaper than the budget for the movie Interstellar.
this is something between a joke and a thought experiment.
function cason(x){ switch(x[0]){ case "movie": switch(x[1]) { case "name" : return "Interstellar"; case "year" : return 2014; case "is_released": return true; case "director" : return "Christopher Nolan"; case "cast": switch(x[2]){ case 0: return "Matthew McConaughey"; case 1: return "Anne Hathaway"; case 2: return "Jessica Chastain"; case 3: return "Bill Irwin"; case 4: return "Ellen Burstyn"; case 5: return "Michael Caine"; } } } }
Augeas can do something similar too. But not only JSON but XML and 200+ other config file formats.[0]
$ augtool -r . -L --transform 'JSON.lns incl /catj-eg.json' <<< 'print /files/catj-eg.json' /files/catj-eg.json /files/catj-eg.json/dict /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry = "movie" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[1] = "name" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[1]/string = "Interstellar" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[2] = "year" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[2]/number = "2014" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[3] = "is_released" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[3]/const = "true" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[4] = "director" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[4]/string = "Christopher Nolan" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5] = "cast" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[1] = "Matthew McConaughey" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[2] = "Anne Hathaway" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[3] = "Jessica Chastain" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[4] = "Bill Irwin" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[5] = "Ellen Burstyn" /files/catj-eg.json/dict/entry/dict/entry[5]/array/string[6] = "Michael Caine"
[0]
$ ls .../share/augeas/lenses/dist/|wc 221 221 2867
I agree with both this & the parent comment. I think the tone & aesthetic of those have been more dominant -- at lot from those in particular setting the tone -- in that span.
There are some more uplifting things like The Martian (great) or Interstellar (admirable ambition but falls short) . . . but I think space movies have to be slightly discounted as cultural products because they're something of a subgenre that leans more towards escapism (by definition) than futurism. (Less so with books since there's a lot more room to build out the world vs. squeezing a standard plot (problem-solving drama, Frankenstein story, everyman vs. even-more-powerful-and-evil elite) amongst cool FX shots)
But those are not science fiction. If you tell a story that is within the limits of what we know to be possible with the knowledge that we have right now, you will end up with a very boring story. If you start speculating about what _might_ be possible- you'll end up with time travel through black holes, like in Interstellar, which makes for a nice story, but not a very realistic one.
There is a trade-off between speculation and realism, that leaves a very, very narrow space for an interesting story.
Part of it is due to the fact that most of modern science has been mined mercilessly for "hard" sci-fi subjects, that have now become tropes that can't form the basis for an interesting new story anymore. For example, try to write a story where the entire premise is that someone manages to construct an Alcubierre drive. You'd get ...Star Trek: First Contact. Nice movie, hey. But nothing new, there.
The general model of what a black hole looks like is well understood. The highest definition rendering is that in Interstellar, except for one side being brighter than the other due to the relativistic beaming. They kept that part out of the movie to just make it look nicer.
All the models are the same, and the real picture is "blobby" only because of the process in how it was taken. I think you are refusing to accept that but there's nothing else to say about it. It wasn't a direct photo, it was a complex assembly of several different radio telescopes around the world stitching data together. If we were actually next to it, it would very much look like the one from interstellar.
The video you linked isn't about the prediction being wrong, more that he just didn't expect to really see a black hole at all. Even though black holes are generally understood for decades, there's a certain shock and awe to seeing it real for the first time.
There are 4 images on that page, 1 of which is the Interstellar movie rendition that I already linked to. They are also all the same model only in better detail as graphics technology has improved.
Perhaps you should post exactly what image you're talking about and what you think is different.
Did you see the movie Interstellar? He included it in his video. That's what the black hole looks like, except with the relativistic beaming make one side brighter than the other.
Here's the image from the movie: https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interstellarOpener_f.png
Now imagine that image being taken far away by several ground-based telescopes put together at the edge of their capabilities and using math to error correct and stitch together the final result. What you get is what we saw.
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.
[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip-thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/
Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.
Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)
Smart move by Veritasium, making a video commenting the news just before the news actually happens. Time works in weird ways around black holes.
Anyways, it is a good one. So is that channel in general.
It is also a good video if you just watched Interstellar, because it also explains why the black hole looks the way it does in the movie. Note that the movie black hole rendering is slightly incorrect for artistic reasons, the video shows the more scientifically accurate version.
Interstellar is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. If anybody else is interested in reading more, the book "The Science of Interstellar" is fascinating and very easily digestible even if you're not big on physics.
IIRC, the black hole in Interstellar was also rapidly rotating, which I think was significant to how it looked:
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/
> Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the speed of light.
> ...
> Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”
just had my wife watch it and yea, that was the first thing I noticed, they really did a good job on the science of interstellar.
When interstellar came out wired did a full magazine spread on the movie, covering its science, how they came up with the story and what the director did to make sure it was believable. idk what it looks like online but I've kept the magazine.
I agree.
I bought a lot of Blu-rays (obsessed with "owning" the good movies which I then rip - I extract the original streams without reencoding and then I put the files on my mediaserver) and the biggest 1080p-file I have is the one of "Interstellar" being 39GB (original video and original 3 audio tracks and some subtitles), followed by "the dark knight rises" of 35GBs and otherwise all the rest is between 10-30GBs depending on the movie.
Usually when I play a movie in the living room I see spikes of 2.5MB/s transferred data on the mediaservers, and this is original content ripped 1:1.
"Soundtracks."
That isn't a genre, but each soundtrack offers has its own themes and style. Depending on mood you can have techno (Hackers/Matrix), fantasy (LOTRs/Interstellar), Pop (Greatest Showman/Guardians of the Galaxy), Regional Styles (Last Samurai/Moana), or even just calming/relaxing (Sims 3: Pets).
PS - Try not to dismiss soundtracks just because you never liked the movie/game. I never played the Sims 3, let alone the "Pets" expansion, but the soundtrack remains me of SimCity's sound.
Movie theaters will lose popularity but the theater experience cannot be reproduced in the home at least for the foreseeable future.
I don't see many films in theaters because many films gain nothing by being viewed at the theater. I often see films in like Interstellar, Dunkirk, Blade Runner, etc that are an assault on the senses and have a lot to gain through theater viewing.
The question to me is- will people care? There are plenty of examples of people shirking quality for convenience.
In the movie Interstellar, mildew was the straw that broke the camel‘s back for agriculture. From what I‘ve read, this can be a possibility if CO2 rises too high.
The view from Cooper Station at the end of the movie _Interstellar_, of a baseball hit out of the park into the window of an upside-down house reminded me of O'Neill space colonies. I don't recall whether this was a cylinder or torus.
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
This is going to sound pretentious, but I think some people just don’t enjoy the artistic aspects of film making beyond plot and action. It can be the most beautiful, awe-inspiring imagery ever put to film, and if there isn’t a clear plot and a love interest and a chase scene, they just aren’t interested.
Interstellar is another movie that’s polarizing like that. To me, watching it in imax was just an overwhelming, powerful experience, but about half of the people I saw the movie with hated it because the plot is sort of a mess.
2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
>>Hard to develop a space program when you're spending all your production fighting over scarce resources, plugging leaks, and attempting to feed a planet with decreasing yields.
All the more reason to develop your space program.
At the risk of pointing to Movies, but yet, one of the underlying themes in the movie Interstellar is some day there will be no option but to leave.
So its about time we think seriously about mining asteroids, space colonies and having some kind of permanent self sustaining and growing colonies in space.
Sure Humans are still likely to have the same problems, but you have eliminated the biggest threat to our existence, and we now have thousands of years at our disposal to plan the next steps.
AFAICT the parent comment is referring to Double Negative (dneg). The visual effects company responsible for the black hole shots in the movie Interstellar.
On a related note, there's a paper by the Interstellar special effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne describing how they rendered the black hole in the film and the tradeoffs they made:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
I thought the script to Interstellar was lovely and profound, while that of Gravity (a movie with which it's often compared) was ridiculous and obviously written by someone who had no idea how physics worked.
To each their own.
"Science fiction" admits a wide variety of classifications. Interstellar is clearly science fiction so I don't like the grand parent's wording (I also don't like yours: what does 'science' have to do with being in the future?).
But trying to generously interpret the GP's and your comment, Interstellar was heavily promoted, and portrays itself as an accurate representation of a potential future, with correct physics and details rigorously fact checked, etc., a sub-category called "hard science ficiton." In reality there are numerous flaws in its physics, too many to count really. These aren't nits either--the most ridiculous physics-defying nonsense is in fact fundamental to the plot.
That's only the beginning of the problems. Interstellar was a terrible movie all-around, with plot holes you could fly a starship through. But it is why I think someone might say "It's not [the type of] science fiction [it claims to be]".
I worked at Double Negative (the VFX company mentioned) during the production of Interstellar and had the pleasure of sitting in on an in-house lecture he did for the artists and R&D teams - incredibly good teaching skills. He was able to explain some very complex subjects in a 90 minute session.
For any non-scientists that are interested in this subject, he published a book about his work on the film that was quite interesting.
The abstract specifically says that no new physics resulted from the movie-making process:
"There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting."
An interview with Kip Thorne [1] (who recently won the Nobel Prize for physics [2]) on the science in the movie and a book about the science in the movie that he has written [3]
And a slightly breathless account of how working on developing the visuals for the film drove development of new code and led to new insights [4]
Needless to say, I'm a fan of the film.. :D
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne/
[2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/press.html
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar
[4] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/
I know this is comment made in jest, but what it brought to mind was the movie "Interstellar," where the protagonist hunts drones in order to salvage their parts.
In America.
I think the movie Interstellar closely depicts how life on Earth may turn out. Climate change is never going to stop, humans except few just don't care. Instead they will try to create more machines which will try to use carbon engineering to reduce CO2(as one discussed few days back on HN). With less need for trees and more need to fulfill population demand, if this technology becomes successful, it can be a doomsday scenario for trees and land everywhere will slowly start to erode resulting in greater imbalance in the ecosystem and eventually worldwide famines. Add to that, thawning of permafrost will release large amount of methane along with bacteria which were inactive since ages and for which humans may have no cure.
Most of CO2 is absorbed by oceans, and humans may never be able to find a way to tame CO2 there, this will result in much faster melting of ice in Arctic and Antarctica than anticipated.
No, humans aren't going to find an alternative habitable planet anytime soon where they can travel.
I would argue that if you can set aside the pop-culture legacy of the character of Batman--that feeling of "can something this popular be actually good?"--The Dark Knight is a better movie than Interstellar.
Interstellar has some beautiful shots and inspiring moments, but I think the plot and characters are not as well-realized. As much as I love the subject matter, I think Interstellar is one of Nolan's weaker films.
I’ve watched 4k digital films at two exceptional digitally equipped theaters:
https://cinerama.com/Technology.aspx
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/photos-inside-one-of-the-worlds-most-advanced-imax-movie-theaters/
And I swear each time I’ve seen noticeable digital artifacts (usually where text or some long swoopy line is involved). The digital projection has never given me a “holy crap” hair standing on end visual response.
Not so with 70mm or 70mm IMAX (RIP Seattle’s equipment). I saw Interstellar in 70mm IMAX, and the space scenes really were stunning. Like, clearly amazing.
When we saw 2001 in 70mm at the Cinerama a few years back, several people in our group all remarked how the initial sunrise almost made you feel heat.
Yes, that could be my imagination. But I’ll add that I didn’t even know that I was watching The Master in 70mm a few years ago. I’d watched it with a friend, and I distinctly remember coming home and remarking to my wife how amazing the visual detail was.
I’m firmly in the “digital has yet to wow me visually the same as 70mm” camp. And I say this as someone who thinks CD was the most profound improvement in audio quality that I can remember in my life. So, I don’t think I’m just being nostalgic.
There are dozens of us!
I agree, I really didn't get drawn in by Interstellar much at all. Although I only watched it on a home "theatre" and not an imax blow-your-mind "experience", so maybe I missed out on something that the bigger screen would have given me?
It's just weird that a rapidly-falling-back-to-agrarian society scrabbling for resources would also be able to secretly maintain such a high-technology base. I was waiting for a 1%-esque hidden society to be revealed leeching off the masses or something.
I'm not sure what the agrarian bit meant, I felt like it could be dropped without losing much of the film. I would have believed a dying Earth with every effort thrown into trying to colonize Mars, but Martians get cancer and the colony keeps failing or something. Then we discover this wormhole with what looks like Earth-like planets right on the other end! I could believe we'd throw a lot into a last ditch effort to find a planet we could live more easily on.
I probably over-thought it :)
> Name one other thing recently on air that’s realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)
I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Television
Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.
What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.
If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.
Mostly my feelings/intuition, but here's the argument:
Name one other thing recently on air that's realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Closest thing that comes to mind would be NatGeo's Mars series, but that's half documentary, half speculative concept art, and definitely very niche. Beyond that, there's nothing. Before that, we had the trio of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, the former two being sorta-hardish if you squint hard enough. And before we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that's it.
It's difficult to make a space show that's both true to physics and fun/engaging at the same time. Most authors don't bother with "true to physics" part. The Expanse succeeded at both, because an excellent team took great source-material and expanded on it, instead of butchering it like usually happens. The result was a show that was interesting to non-space geeks, that still gave accurate picture of how space works. If someone asked you, "I wonder why they're doing X", or "I wonder why they didn't do Y", your answer would likely contain some explanation of real-world physics. This is how you give regular people intuition about concepts they're not encountering daily.
So yeah, losing the only show about near-future space exploration that's both engaging and highly realistic - I think it's a bad day for both science outreach and science fiction.
Seeing Interstellar and Dunkirk in 70mm IMAX were the two best moviegoing experiences of my life. The scale and detail of true 70mm IMAX film is totally unmatched by a mere 4K blu-ray. It is definitely not economical to shoot or project such film, and something that will sadly probably die out, but I am grateful he keeps doing it.
It's an uncomplimentary reference to a scene in the film Interstellar.
If you like Inception, check out Interstellar. They're both directed by Christopher Nolan.
Yea...not in the visible spectrum, so you have to be imaginative. Famous theoretical physicist kip Thorne (expert on black holes) uses Mathematica to take an image of space and use the equations for black holes to warp the images used for things like the Interstellar movie.
No, I got that from reading Kubrik's own comments on the meaning of the film. I ignore speculations on what an artist means, it's a waste of time when I can just find out from the artist himself. (there's some interview of him online somewhere where he discussed this.)
The sound and effects are not perfect for today. They are perfect for the 60s. Even by the 80s I could see the effects were starting to look pretty dated.
Every time something takes me out of the experience of the movie, either it should have been edited out, or done better. In the case of 2001, it's an old movie. I am old, and I am a movie connoisseur.
I wanted to enjoy it with my family like I did when I was younger. But the effects look down right silly. And in a serious movie, you can't have silly looking effects. Compare how the movie gravity dealt with zero-G, it makes 2001 look like high school kids made it now.
The one thing that stood out, was there use of tablet computers, that was brilliant, and was done with rear projection, so it looked great even today. The rotating and curved floors are truly inspired work, but the music score is meaningless today, even to me, who grew up with classical music.
If the art of film making can't improve on something made in the 60s, then it couldn't have improved on something from the 30s, and we know neither is true. So, 2001 could be remade, just not by hollywood bozos.
The story is of a profound mystery, but it's not told from the perspective we have today of putting someone inside the mystery, it's told from an odd 3rd party perspective popular in older cinema. Compare how you felt in Interstellar and Gravity, __you__ were there. It was you who is in danger and in risk.
In 2001, the characters were in the mystery, and we were simply observers. Applying modern storying telling techniques (that Kubrik helped pioneer) would dramatically improve the enjoyability of the 2001 story for us today.
Edit: I wanted to add that the scene where he's rebooting/working on the computer (HAL), all he does is push in clear plastic blocks. That is just stupid. (He even just pushed them in IN ORDER, wth?) I work on computers, and he didn't even mildly pretend to do anything at all technical. I think this was pure laziness on the film makers part. They knew computers were complicated back then, and to make them seem so stupidly simple that you could find an error by looking and a sheet of clear plastic with no markings or anything? It fools kids and ignorant people, but anyone with any technical knowledge, it rips you out of the experience. Another reason to update it, or at least admit it is not as effective an experience as it once was. A classic doesn't mean it's good now, it means it was good at one time.
His stories are often lazy, too. The notion of a magic machine that lets everyone wifi and have dreams inside dreams inside dreams together is fun but absurd. The same with the end of Interstellar. Too conveniently we've got a magic wormhole which saves him and drops him a few feet away from a ship around the ring of Saturn. The first half of TDK is incredible, the second is very anti-climatic (maybe not his fault).
Check out anything by Roger Deakins for world class cinematography. Nolan is just good. If you are looking for a director who people might one day consider in the realm of Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson might fit it, but he's got a lot of "weird" movies (even his masterpieces) which don't give him the same wide appeal. [0]
Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan. The greatest directors elevate their actors (see the crazy stories about Kubrick and The Shining). Nolan works with great talent, but the performances often leave a lot to be desired, this is uncontested even by fans.
Nolan makes movies with interesting themes and he never really does anything bad. But for him to be even be discussed in the same thread as Kubrick shows how overrated he is. I say this owning Interstellar (the teaser gives me chills) and I thought Dunkirk was great simply because he toned it down and worked within something realistic. Given 20 years and a Jurassic Park, we might see Nolan the same way we do Spielberg today, but Kubrick? Forget about it!
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/22/16809404/there-will-be-blood-paul-thomas-anderson-10-years-daniel-day-lewis
I suppose I'm in the cult. About the only complaint I can lodge against Nolan is that the exposition is heavy handed in a few of his films, which he spoke to in the article, and I agree he was forced into that position with the intense story he's often trying to communicate in a film's runtime. He's also not a cinematographer, and has generally worked with Wally Pfister or Hoyte van Hoytema.
I would disagree if you're saying the cinematography won't be remembered; van Hoytema's work on Interstellar and Dunkirk is something I remember quite positively even while typing this comment. I would also disagree on character development, as Nolan directed Robin Williams into one hell of an antagonist in Insomnia, a spectacularly underrated film.
INTERSTELLAR SPOILERS
The scene where Cooper comes back from the time-dilated planet and has years of messages to catch up on really makes me emotional. McConaughey really kills it in this movie.
It wasn't a surprise screening. I had been talking about watching it as a family for a few years. And my family enjoys movies that most simply do not. One of my kid's friends all said interstellar was boring, and he loved it. 2001, I think, is just a bit long in the tooth. If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound, I think it would be way more impactful for modern audiences. (the monkey suits really require forced suspension of disbelief today, where in the past they did not)
I even explained the theory behind the movie, Dave ending up in an environment he couldn't understand, like an animal in a zoo. We discussed this movie, it wasn't a throwaway experience.
And to be blunt about Kubrik, he and the film makers were self indulgent in a few places. Where it wasn't art, it was conceit.
I love Nolan's films, the first one I saw was Memento when it came out. I was quite blown away.
Interstellar is (by a country mile) the film that really does it for me, and is the one I'll watch two or three times a year. The strange thing about Interstellar is that after having watched it the first couple of times, every subsequent viewing gets me fairly emotional. I never ever shed tears when watching films, and I've seen a lot of movies in my 51 or so years on this planet, but this is the one that gets me welling up inside and a bit teary eyed. So well done Mr Nolan you've managed to crack a fairly hard (film) nut.
I like this interpretation. It’s been a while since I saw Interstellar, but from my somewhat fuzzy memory of the film, that does seem to resolve everything nicely.
(moar Interstellar spoilers)
Well in the end of the movie it turns out that the future humans built the tesseract (I believe it's called) and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole... you get the idea.
It's a time travel movie, and the whole thing becomes a paradox - if the humans didn't survive they wouldn't have developed to be able to make wormholes and time travel magic, but they did survive because of time travel magic.
So which came first? It's a paradox. One explanation is that there was nothing that actually came first but everything just happened as it should and there was no other way it could've happened, thus, predetermination.
But yeah, time travel paradoxes, fun stuff.
> It’s become very fashionable in the last couple of decades to forget what good government can do, what good union organizing can do. The idea that benevolent capitalists will just take care of us and the people on top will magically distribute wealth and happiness and security to us little people … no. It’s time we wised up. Strength comes from community in all things. Dunkirk is one of those stories.
This reminds me of something that Hany Abu-Assad, a Dutch-Palestinian film director[0], once said in an interview. He was asked how it is possible that from countries like Iran, with its oppressive regime, we get such amazing directors as Abbas Kiarostami, who created beautiful humanising movies. After a brief moment of contemplation, Abu-Assad answered "society is stronger than the system."
> Would you say “Dunkirk” is your most hopeful film?
> Well … yeah. “Interstellar” is pretty hopeful. But then again, the whole world has ended. There is that. [Laughs]
Funny how one can interpret that both as "doesn't sound very hopeful to me", and "the more impossible the odds are that were overcome, the more hopeful the message inherently is".
WARNING: INTERSTELLAR ENDING SPOILER BELOW
What makes Interstellar especially tricky here is that on the one hand, saving humanity (and presumably as much other life as possible) from extinction when the entire planet is dying is about as big a challenge as it gets, and therefore makes the film feel very hopeful, but on the other hand the ending also implies that the universe is predeterministic, and that can be viewed as the opposite of hopeful.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009463/?ref_=tt_ov_dr
There is something in what you say.
I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.
Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.
> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.
I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.
> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.
He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.
The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.
I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.
There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.
> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.
I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.
I have always been curious if all the people saying they don't like 3D actually experience the discomfort they describe or just want to look fancy like old wine geeks. I myself have watched just 2 movies in 3D: Avatar and Resident Evil: Afterlife - both of them looked visually awesome and caused absolutely no discomfort to me. I would certainly love to watch Interstellar and Blade Runner 2049 in 3D, that's a huge pity that's not possible.
TBH, the masses know The Expanse mostly from TV show. But the show indeed is good, and while it has some differences from the books, it mostly stays true to science, even in very minor VFX details.
This is an unpopular opinion, because I've seen here how people like to hate on Gravity and stuff, but I feel like we're seeing a new trend in sci-fi movies/shows - Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and now The Expanse, despite their various levels of science/plot tradeoffs, all are much more faithful to physics than what came before (with a honourable exception of Space Odyssey), and they do a great job at showing you can have a great sci-fi appealing to general population that sticks to how real space travel works.
--
That saids, The Expanse novels are 11/10 Even Better Than On TV, and I highly recommend them. Can't wait for the next one coming out soon(ish).
These mergers get even more distrubing when thinking about the lack of (scientific) understanding of why plants are getting less nutritious. An article last month shed some light: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511
Is the scenario in the Interstellar movie unfolding before our eyes?
I think he was talking more about "mainstream impact" than accuracy in his comment. How many average Joes that maybe didn't care for science and space are now interested because of movies like this? And for ones that already liked science and space it was awesome to see an abstract thought (more dimensions) put into play in Interstellar, that maybe got them even more interested in making contributions towards teams like LIGO? Although there was a lot of silly things in the movie I would like to think movies like those are pretty inspiring nonetheless.
I think it's a stretch by far to call either Interstellar or 2001: A Space Odyssey most scientifically accurate movie. Using a correct simulation of black hole is one thing, but this alone does not make necessarily make it very accurate. This is not the first time I am seeing this, and I don't know it pops up everywhere. There are parts in the movies which make me cringe, like bending gravity by hands inside a black hole, and giving some strange bar code. Or the highly incorrect approximation of probability from TARS. If I were to select an interesting scientifically accurate sci-fi movie, I would select martian or primer. The later is more consistent than what is evident on watching it for first time.
I believe we're in a small golden age for science fiction. There were completely wack aspects to Interstellar but it's still the most "science-y" science-fiction movie to make a mainstream impact since... 2001: A Space Odyssey, basically. I was so happy. I'd say that an executive producer and scientific advisor of the movie winning a nobel prize in physics is a sign that this is about as serious as a Hollywood-budget science fiction movie can get. It's great. Part of me wants to make a sarcastic joke about corn fields and bookshelves, now, but fuck it, those shots of the wormhole alone more than make up for it!
Kip Thorne (with others) wrote the standard text book I used at university on Gravity: "Gravitation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_(book)
It is a mighty tome, with lots of advanced maths (like tensor calculus), and I can't say I got through very much of it as a Physics undergraduate!
I was pleased to see him pop up again as a science adviser for the movie Interstellar and have enjoyed reading his much more accessible book - "The Science of Interstellar"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar
Kip S. Thorne
Should be a household name. He has written several books and was consulted by Christopher Nolan for the movie Interstellar:
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378
This is probably the first time I actually recognize the name of one of the recipients: Kip Thorne. I learned about him when I read about the movie Interstellar, for which he was an executive producer. Then when reading up on him, it turns out he's been involved with a bunch of things I've read about or seen in the past.
When I saw the announcement, I was unreasonably happy for a person I've never known nor met. Funny what a little recognition can do.
Dunkirk Spoilers: I feel like Rotten Tomato doesn't work all the time. I watched Dunkirk, excited from the 93% on RT, and I walked out and felt disappointed. Like I get the cinematography was great, the story structure is amazing, everything a critic should be looking for was all there, but did I enjoy it? No. I thought it was boring. The movie didn't do anything to foster the relation of characters to the audience. I frankly didn't care about any of them, maybe except the Captain that stayed behind to help the French. I personally thought this was Nolan's weakest movie, although the RT score would suggest otherwise: Inception - 86%, Interstellar - 71% both of which I enjoyed way more than Dunkirk.
I think the audience score also on RT is more telling: Inception - 91% Interstellar - 85% Dunkirk - 82%
We could also take movies that people mentioned on this thread: The Dark Tower - RT: 16%, AS: 54% Baby Driver - RT: 93%, AS: 89% Baywatch - RT: 18%, AS: 60%
I also don't trust critics on the basis of people like Armond White, and since many of them do this for a living, a lot of critics can be bought.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Rotten Tomato is actually inaccurate metric for how enjoyable the movie actually is, and consumers are being misguided.
I also think theres an inherent misunderstanding of the RT score. People look at the score and think this is the quality of the movie, when in reality I think of it as a probability that I would like the movie. A score of 50% doesn't mean the movie has a failing grade, it's that when 100 critics viewed it half the critics enjoyed it and the other half didn't, so there's probably a 50% chance that I'll enjoy the movie.
Interstellar is solidly science fantasy. Arrival is arguably science fantasy since it's central conceit isn't very sciencey (amazing movie though).
The Expanse is borderline since there's basically a magic substance (the proto molecule), though everything _except_ that is very hard sci fi.
On the contrary, I have been getting into modern science fiction after being raised on my dad's collection of Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/etc. and the modern stuff is great. Check out Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson. None of that is science fantasy. If anything, I'd say that science fantasy is less popular now than it was two or three decades ago. Look at the popularity of modern TV and movies: Arrival, The Martian, Gravity, The Expanse, Interstellar. Three of those are complete hard science fiction and the others are more in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact than Star Wars.
I totally agree. I'm a big sci-fi movie fan, and not usually a snob, but I found both Inception and Interstellar to be pretty mundane.
FWIW, a classic sci-fi movie that leaves me similarly cold is Bladerunner (although I love Philip K. Dick).
> Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception?
Having to constantly track how many levels deep you are, how time flows at that level, the rules for what may/may not wake you out of a level, the specific actions going on during the specific levels at those rates of time, how they interact all together, and whether you were right about the level the movie took place at the entire time and what that means for it all, and the information you've learned and leaned on to make the assumptions you have at every point.
It's a very complex, complicated movie built out of very simple premises.
> I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception
Possibly. I wasn't super impressed by Interstellar, but not for the same reasons people around me always seemed to point out. To me it felt like a story that might have wanted to make some interesting philosophical points but decided to hide them almost completely behind staid and rote characters and plot and overly interpersonal emotion driven motivations, given the scope of the project they were supposed to be involved in.
> If I've missed any deep concept within Inception
I don't think so, I think you just misinterpreted what I meant by complicated. It's not conceptually or philosophically complicated, it's mechanically complicated. In the same way that two separate expressions of an algorithm or procedure may be simple or complicated, elegant or a bunch of spaghetti code. Inception is a simple set of concepts expressed as spaghetti code, but done so purposefully with the intent to entertain.
Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception? Once you're past the two premises (you can infiltrate dreams; you can dream recursively) this is just a heist movie without any significant plot twist, by which I mean there is no world-changing or premise-questioning event, and only one apect of said premises (the altered length of "lived time") is explored.
To use other Nolan movies as a point of comparison, Memento and The Prestige are much more accomplished in terms of fully exploiting their concepts. And within the domain of movies exploring the theme of "your lived experience is a dream/illusion", there are much more effective and/or complex examples[1].
I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception: people are psyched by the initial concept, so they don't pay attention to the fact that its underlying narrative structure is pretty run-of-the-mill.
I guess I sound like a buzzkill! If I've missed any deep concept within Inception, I'd be glad to be schooled/enlightened, since I like understanding what makes a movie tick. Also, I don't think it's a bad movie at all, just that it's not that complicated once we're past the initial disorientation.
[1] Before anybody asks, in no particular orders: In The Mouth Of Madness, Mulholland Drive, Paprika, Written By. In a different vein: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hell, even Total Recall (1990 version) and The Matrix probably apply.
I've found more interesting indie games than ever before, there's a Golden Age in television going on, and while I enjoy a good popcorn Marvel movie there's plenty of original thinky stuff like Interstellar to whet my appetite.
Oh, I see. You were looking at the attribution notice next to the photo in the article. It certainly refers to the background only. They should have explicitly said that. BHs are just too far away, and our instruments are not powerful enough (yet?) to image them at this kind of scale.
If you watch Interstellar, the imagery in the movie (the giant black hole, and even the wormhole the characters use to travel far away) is actually a physically-realistic simulation of the behavior of light in black-hole-like gravity fields. Kip Thorne, one of the top scientists in the field of general relativity, has collaborated with the movie makers to ensure the special effects were as close as possible to what science tells us right now about these objects.
Are there any efforts to make movie-type window styles for real use? The Tron:Legacy style would be a fun one to have, as well as the one used in the computers in Westworld (similar light-blue-on-black)[1] and Interstellar [2]. I'm sure it's a more difficult process than I'm imagining, but it would be really cool to be able to use the window and interface themes of the computers in your favorite show or movie, especially since some have such great designs.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikup60uEg0c [2] - https://youtu.be/bmz9lMP6aQU?t=2m4s, visible for a brief second just after 2m4s
To be fair though, Interstellar has really awful sound production. You cannot blame the theatre for that movie. Many theatres actually had signs up explicitly saying that the ear-shatteringly loud music drowning out the dialogue is they way the movie was produced, so don't blame them.
And what awful music it was. Just a terrible, terrible soundtrack. They really should not have let Hans Zimmer play with his organ.
I saw Interstellar on a beautiful IMAX screen. There were a couple of teenage boys laughing and cracking jokes behind me most of the movie. Not loud enough you'd kick them out, but still obnoxious, especially in the quiet scenes. They apologized when I said something, but then they started again after 10 minutes.
During Rogue One, the guy sitting next to me waited until the end of the opening crawl to unwrap his steaming jalapeño cheese hotdog, which he then slowly ate over the next 15 minutes, relishing every bite and every chug of soda.
Add to the fact that the acoustics in theaters are still never quite right (it's often LOUD but doesn't envelop you)...
I just don't know why I would ever enjoy the theater experience again, when it's just so damn difficult to enjoy a good film.
Have you been to a real IMAX? They have massive screens that are sort of square-ish as shown on the right. As the article mentions, Nolan films parts of his movies with this bigger aspect ratio. Most movies, when projected on IMAX, still only take up a small portion of the screen due to the aspect ratio. In a Nolan film, like the Dark Knight or Interstellar, during certain scenes the aspect ratio will open up so that you are viewing image on the entire multi-story screen. It is an amazing experience and really immerses you into the movie like nothing else; it takes up your entire visual field.
Agreed on the over-revealing trailers! For Nolan movies, just watch the teasers. Interstellar and Dunkirk both had excellent ones, that don't really reveal anything. I deliberately avoided the full trailers for each.
I saw The Hateful Eight in 70mm, but it was projected on a normal-sized movie theater screen, and frankly, if anything, it looked worse than a normal film. I suspect the staff was inadequately trained in how to operate a real film projector, as the focus looked a touch soft.
On the other hand, seeing Interstellar in 70mm IMAX was _incredible_. Even with the recent IMAX Laser projectors, 70mm IMAX prints contain much more resolution and it was the best looking movie experience I have ever had. I highly recommend seeing Dunkirk in 70mm IMAX if it's playing near you.
That function exists generally in audio, and is called dynamic compression or just compression. I've seen some TVs with that functionality and I know Apple TV can do it, so I would guess you might have that option lurking somewhere in your system. When you turn that on, you're taking a wide dynamic range and squishing it, which essentially just pulls up quieter content, so you have to consider how pure and accurate you like your content playback to be when doing that. Well-crafted films in particular occasionally play with audio level for effect (Interstellar being a dramatic example of that), so you might subtly suck a bit of air from a director's intention which might matter to you.
If you have a nice 5.1 setup, try boosting your center channel, too. That might help.
4k is less resolution than 35mm film, which was used very successfully for most of the history of cinema. Chris Nolan shot Interstellar & his Batman films on 70mm, which exceeds 8k resolution.
So I think you're quite wrong about 4k being "too much resolution for closeups" or being "incompatible with... shorter shot lengths".
It's so weird, looking at a perfectly normal movie and the only thing you can think about is "What? It doesn't work that way!" like if everything started falling up with no explanation and the characters found that perfectly normal.
But I'll disagree on Gravity and Interstellar getting spaceflight right. Unless you are going for very basic.
KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them.
Side effects of playing KSP include:
- getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics
- finding yourself reading up on actual math to better understand what's happening with your rockets (and how to build more efficient one)
- no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics
(RE the last point - after Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and The Expanse series, getting basic spaceflight wrong should no longer be accepted in popular media. Looking at you, makers of The 100.)
"Say this movie took place 200 years from now -- I’d give it a chance," he said. "100 years ahead? Maybe. 50 years ahead? I’m a little hesitant to say TARS and CASE would be at that ability 50 years from now. It’s just not there. There’s too much to do, and there’s not enough money being put into it to see that that kind of engineering is going to come forward. It’s all about the money, you know?"
http://www.mtv.com/news/1996022/interstellar-tars-robot/
After reading this article, i know it will cost A LOT to build a robot like TARS, but what about the level of AI of TARS?
I think if I got to fly by one planet in our solar system, I'd want it to be Saturn.
The scene in Interstellar before they fly into the wormhole is one of the most beautiful space shots. I'd love to experience that in real life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WldmX1zu6vM)
Also, if there are any blossoming film directors hanging out on HN, I'd absolutely pay to watch a full-length movie of space travel of planetary fly bys.
I thought the same too, and more recently the Dr. Strange movie, although I think those were right-angles. How about Interstellar haha.
Well I guess there are different kinds of science fiction - sci-fi that's obviously fiction and doesn't try to pretend to be realistic - Alien, Star Wars, etc. - I'm fine with this - it's just the author taking you in to his own fantasy world - just like Game of Thrones doesn't try to describe how dragons get to be aerodynamic or explain the white walkers superior strength by using dumbed down science.
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
[Spoilers for Arrival, Contact, and Interstellar]
Forget aliens for a moment. Contact is a retelling of one of the oldest stories on record: the plight of the faithful. (Wo)man encounters awe-inspring supernatural force, tells the world but can't prove it, gets dismissed as a fraud/crazy, but goes on knowing in her heart that her experience was real. The rest is implementation details.
Putting a scientist in the role of prophet, and getting buy-in from science-y, atheist audiences by using aliens instead of God (you don't know that they're a God metaphor until you're on Jodie Foster's side), are precisely the kinds of intentional inversions that make adaptations of classic tales great. Present the message differently, using different tools, to appeal to different people in different ways.
In theater, Anais Mitchell's Hadestown takes Orpehus and Eurydice, sets it in 20s Appalachia, and expands a story about a hero into a story about the industrialized world: Orpheus and Eruydice's light, playful hearts are nature and beauty and song, while Hades is heavy industry, the coal mines, the Man, the capitalist machine. Also gives it some awesome music.
Sarah Ruhl's feminist Eurydice, from the same myth, subverts a story of a man's heroics in (trying to) rescue his damsel in distress, and transfers the agency to the damsel. These are both, in my mind, highly successful retellings.
Interstellar certainly has components that you'll find elsewhere - what story doesn't? - but none of them that I can place are a huge part of its identity. I wouldn't classify it as a retelling.
Arrival directly copies the setup of Contact: aliens make contact, we ingeniously decode their communication, the message is a blueprint/schematic for something that might be a weapon. Then it concatenates on the ending of Interstellar: time is non-linear, it can be transcended by the power of (love|language). It is neither faithful to nor a clever inversion of either story. It just takes half a plot from one movie, half a plot from another, and puts a different bridge in between them.
I had a good time in the theater, I'd probably see it again, I just don't have as much respect for the story as I did for either Contact or Interstellar individually. The linguistics were an interesting value add, just not that powerful.
Transcendence, Interstellar and Gravity. I haven't actually watched neither Interstellar nor Gravity, but from what I know neither of them portray technology in a bad light. But Transcendence does overall portray technology in a good light, though the majority of the movie is just the movie makers playing with the audience's luddite fears.
Still, it's a damn bad movie.
This is a thing that I really liked about the movie Interstellar. They faced similar problems and painted a view on what it could look like.
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
There is a line in the film “Interstellar” that stuck with me: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” Now the film plays in a dystopian future, but I think the quote is still appropriate for us as a civilization. If Elon can change that, all the better.
Coincidentally, I'm watching The Martian right now after reading the book last week. I have to agree, the movie just does not capture the same sense of surprise and careful attention to detail as described in the book. The sets are nice though, and it's pretty cool to see how the production team visualized the scenes and hardware compared to how I had imagined them. Seems like there could be some scientific inaccuracies too (e.g. hab repairs with only hardware store plastic film and duct tape).
Overall, I'd say Interstellar works much better in movie form, although perhaps that is partly due to the scale of the concepts it employs compared to The Martian, which is smaller and more technical.
For some reason I didn't really like The Martian (as in the movie). I guess after having read the book there just wasn't any surprise left, and I felt that this sort of story just works much better in book form. I prefer Europa Report over it. IMO Interstellar is the big popularizer of hard sci-fi though, or wouldn't you put it in that category? For me it took its liberties in just the right places where it's justified due to lack of more knowledge.
I think it really depends on what you're looking for when you read SF.
For me, I usually don't care very much about the characters or excellent prose or a lot of the typical 'literary' qualities of a work. When I go to SF I typically am looking for exploration of interesting ideas, settings, or premises. So I find myself being more forgiving of 'bad fiction' if it's the only place where I can find a particular idea being explored.
The way I see it, "someone who writes stories deferring to actual scientists for review" tends to end up treating science as something to throw onto a story to give it a veneer of legitimacy -- like various fantasy/space-opera shows that have 'science advisers' to supply the technobabble needed to make it sound plausible. Interstellar was probably the best example of this going right that I can think of, with the feedback from scientists playing a big part in how things were portrayed and explored.
In general, though, I think that what makes a lot of good SF interesting is the focus on ideas that may only come from having a writer who obsesses so much about such ideas anyway. It's why I'm frustrated by a lot of recent popular SF TV/movie series that tend to gravitate into the typical "character-driven serial drama" format that everything becomes.
> That said, a part of me has always wished this sequence gave more thought to the physics and what it might be like to visualize the experience of traveling through a gate/wormhole like this. I don't think the coloration, visual patterns, or sequencing represents much understanding of the then-current physics theory on what this sort of thing might possibly be like, and I'm not sure it even captures it well in the abstract.
'Interstellar' did some of that, and they had to hire Kip Thorne as a consultant, and run a render farm to raytrace the relativistic effects.
I'm not sure the theory was quite at the same level in the '60s, and the cinema technique was definitely not the same. It would have been a lot harder to do any degree of realism.
What a great essay. Worth the read.
"Upon reaching Jupiter, Bowman is guided into a wormhole, triggering Trumbull’s bravura psychedelic sequence. On either side of a perpendicular line dividing the screen, two vertical planes of brightly colored lights and shapes emerge, rushing past and out of frame, giving the illusion that Bowman (glimpsed in a juddering cutaway shot and then in paralytic stills) is racing through a corridor of infinite dimensions at speed-of-light intensity. Modeled in part after the avant-garde films of Jordan Belson (who later created special effects for The Right Stuff) and fraternal animators James and John Whitney (collaborators with Saul Bass on Vertigo’s title sequence), Trumbull recreated screen space with his slit-scan technique, combining long exposures of circuit board diagrams, Op Art prints, film negatives, and electron microscope photographs for this sequence, which cleverly exploited the simple x and y axis geometry of an ideally proportioned widescreen frame."
That scene is probably my favorite movie scene of all times. My dad was a big fan of 2001, and made me watch the movie when I was 13 or so- I missed a lot of the subtleties, but that last part of the movie added a new layer to existence that I could have never conceived of before. For a nerdy teenager who was really into science and sci-fi, it was mind blowing to be exposed to such an artistic depiction of the subjectivity of the human perception of time and space, and the ambiguity of reality.
It's interesting to read the techniques that went into making it - it's a very creative use of the medium. I can't help but feel that CGI has put special effects designer into a box of vertices and polygons, resulting in special effects that all look the same. I certainly can't think of a single movie that has something as unique and distinctive as the wormhole scene in 2001. I had high hopes for Interstellar, but it fell very flat (there are some groups doing very cool work in more traditional animation however - I really like Studio Laika, for instance).
> The thing is that we have been in the work of parody for so long time that we don't ever know were it started. Get the Rocky series blockbuster, for example. We had a much better history, with a black man and boxe. But then someone stole the idea and put a white man against his worst enemy: another white man with diferent world view (Russians).
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "someone stole" the idea of Rocky for Rocky IV. Sly both wrote and directed that. It's as regular a sequel as anything.
> I find it funny how most of people that discredit the OP conclusion also thinks they are right when they are in the opposite situation. I don't see you Bros complaining when Hollywood whitewash history.
I explicitly said that I'm not discrediting OPs conclusion, I however did not agree with how they arrived there.
The collective "Bro"-thing I don't feel worthy of responding to.
> And last, when did you guys started to think that the "old" stuff is yours? They have legally owners, and they can change to fit or create a better history/world (and some guys like you keep thinking in ways to put it worse), like star wars and the woman and black as main characters.
I can't answer for "us guys", only for me, but I have no problem with them doing whatever they want with Ghostbusters. All I am saying is that the reviews in this specific case isn't about sexism, but the movie not being at all relatable to the original one(s) in tone. Nothing to do with gender. As much right as they have to make the movie, the fans of the original have a right to opinions on it, without it being sexism, simply because the new characters happen to be women.
Personally I liked the new Star Wars, but it's entirely beside the point, but since you brought it up: SW:TFA was so true to SW:ANH that I'm inclined to call it a true remake, much in how Interstellar worked as an homage/rehash of 2001 with slight twists. I happened to like that one too.
An old and maybe not terribly popular one is Enemy Mine. There are bad guys, but they're humans, and they only play a role near the end. But they aren't primary to the story. It's mostly a story of two people thrown together in a shitty situation and learning to get along despite their initial hatred for each other.
There are lots of scifi movies where the story only barely, rather than primarily, deals with the idea of good guys versus bad guys, if it puts them together directly at all. Moon, The Martian, Gravity are recent ones. Interstellar, in its way.
Less true of fantasy which pulls its stories from the idea of grand epics with noble warriors fighting monsters and villains.
Action movies without an idea of good guy and bad guy is a challenge. Maybe I'll think of one while I lie in bed tonight but off the top of my head there aren't any occurring to me.
"Murph" (and the space helmet too) are likely an "Interstellar" reference; Cooper's daughter was named "Murph": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/reference
Young Murph: Why did you and mom name me after something that's bad?
Cooper: Well, we didn't.
Young Murph: Murphy's law?
Cooper: Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen. And that sounded just fine to us.
This is awesome. I love that there is more and more interest in space exploration lately. Hopefully real life events will soon inspire beyond what recent movies like Interstellar and the Martian have shown us.
The movie Interstellar does a decent job demonstrating this (well the gravity piece anyway with the proximity to black holes).
I also think satellite clocks have to take time relativity it into account (both due to distance from earth's gravity and their speed).
Randall Munroe has a pretty entertaining write up that does a decent job giving a high level overview in pretty easy to understand terms: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-space-doctors-big-idea-einstein-general-relativity
>> But they do -- the evidence is copious:
> The evidence is non-existent.
If you're familiar with Occam's razor, you know that, for a given phenomenon, the simplest explanation is to be preferred. There certainly are massive objects at the center of most galaxies, and the most economical explanation is that they're black holes. No one is closing the book on these ideas -- that would be unscientific -- but there is strong evidence that these things are black holes.
That they exist is beyond question. That they have super-high masses confined to a small space is beyond question. General Relativity then fills in the blanks in our observations.
> That's a terrible argument. One is an actual physical process, the other is a mathematical abstraction.
So is General Relativity. But because nature follows the same rules, General Relativity accurately predicts many aspects of reality (certainly not all).
> And accretion disks don't have to be bright BTW ...
Well, yes, they do -- they're giving up a huge amount of gravitational potential energy, and that energy must be conserved -- it's converted to kinetic energy, it becomes heat and light.
Consider a satellite in an elliptical orbit. At the orbital apoapsis, potential energy is highest and kinetic energy is lowest. Not surprisingly, this is the point of smallest velocity. Now consider periapsis -- it's the reverse: lowest potential energy, highest kinetic energy, therefore highest velocity.
In a normal planetary elliptical orbit with no friction, even though the two kinds of energy are constantly changing, they sum to a constant at each point in the orbit, so there's no net dissipation of energy. But as matter falls into a black hole, in order for it to pass through the event horizon, it must give up most of its energy (both potential and kinetic). Most of that energy is converted into heat and light.
Most accretion disks preserve the rotational momentum of the infalling mass, so they're in the form of disks surrounding the event horizon. In theory, mass could fall directly into the BH without any rotation -- in that case, there would still be a huge energy conversion process and much radiated energy. Sp accretion disks are very bright.
Here's a graphic of the imagined BH from "Interstellar", thought to be fairly accurate as movie graphics go:
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/
> Eh? If it never forms a singularity, it has no event horizon.
Yes, and by the same reasoning, because a Calculus limit expression never gets to its limit, therefore Calculus is bunk. My point? Just as (1+1/n)^n approaches e as n approaches infinity (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit+n+-%3E+inf%2C+%281%2B1%2Fn%29%5En), a black hole approaches its final form as mass approaches it from the perspective of a distant observer.
You might as well have argued that, because this classic-physics gravitational equation:
f = (G m1 m2) / r^2
assumes that all the mass is a dimensionless point at the center of the central body, therefore if m1 and m2 occupy the same point in space, the result is infinite, therefore (because infinity isn't a number) Newtonian gravitation is bunk.
Haven't watched Interstellar. But Gravity is a (bad) joke of a movie, both from a scientific standpoint and as a movie in general. It's just a bad space action movie with very cool CGI. You say "there are some issues with" - no, the whole thing is a mess. They're using spacesuit rockets or a fire extinguisher to move between orbits that are extremely far apart, this is a physical impossibility that is central to the plot. But it managed to make me furious from the very first scene, with three people outside the spaceship during an EVA, and Clooney floating playfully around the spaceship, untethered. This is reducing the majesty and terribly unforgiving nature of space to a kindergarten playground.
Same feeling for "The Martian". The Martian base and the spaceships look like youth hostels, the astronauts an unruly bunch, but more than everything, there is no feeling whatsoever that we're looking at people dealing with something alien. It's the usual ingenuous american guy playfully overcoming difficulties that end up looking more or less trivial, like traversing hundreds of kms of Martian desert, growing potatoes (under artificial light!), surviving a Martian night while unconscious with no protection from the cold... Just have a look at the Martian landscape as depicted in the movie:
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/martian-gallery2-gallery-image_0.jpg
(hint: like a holiday destination in a hazy day) and at how it looks for real:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA18614.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/03Q5l.jpg
Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades?
Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera).
Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too).
And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.)
--
> Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard.
Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards.
> Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component
Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense.
And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible...
http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-review.html
It's a interesting question, are anti-science movies like Interstellar, which also make science look cool, better for science or worse.
Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations)
Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.
I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper.
A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
I find it funny that we leave it to the economist to decide the fate of research.
I remember in uni I found EE topics much harder and boring then Software topics. Anything below C is a big nope. Verilog, VLSI, FPGA, anything to do with embedded IoT.
Yeah america wont survive if kids today stop valuing EE topic just due to some misguided economical models/interpretation.
The rockets that will land on mars wont be designed solely by software guys - it will require a lot of EE innovations - if america gives up then some other country will take its place.
Reminds of the movie Interstellar.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what we're doing now, your way only tells us if the unfairness of the past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that.
Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001.
Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?)
If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years.
We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace.
We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians
I agree on "Interstellar" and "Ex Machina", but I think Greg missed the point of "Her". True, it doesn't nearly do justice to the themes of artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction. But that's because it's not meant to--it's really just a romantic little film about human relationships and the difficulty of achieving intimacy and trust in the modern world. It never even attempts to explore, let alone explain, any differences between "Samantha" and actual humans--as portrayed, she's simply a fully human female with the unusual quirk of happening to live in cyberspace. And any sci-fi-heavy exposition regarding her technological nature would only have detracted from the film's very touching, and very human, charm.
I recently saw the movie Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey. It answers the question of what happens if you fall into a blackhole and it involves a bookcase, I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't seen it.
Edit: Seems the people downvoting me are a bit sensitive and don't have a sense of humour. Sorry to anyone who was somehow offended.
> You wouldn't catch many 20 and 30 years old dead in something like Comic-Con 30 years ago.
BayCon has been around for 30 years. Before that, the niche interests just change -- my dad and his friends have been dressing up in 20s garb and driving 20s cars to period events since the 60s. There are Civil War re-enactments and sex clubs and costume parties and all sorts of things.
And anyway, making those things into an indictment of society at large is silly, especially when there are so many trivially easy indictments of society (like the way everyone always thinks this generation is worse than the ones before it).
> Something like "The Searchers" is an order of magnitude more poignant and challenging than Iron Man or Avengers.
Are you being disingenuous, or did you not realize you're cherry-picking here? Spaghetti Westerns and shoot-em-ups and grindhouse films and silent comedies have all occupied a place as entertainment alongside more serious films, and "serious" films, if that's what you're into, are still alive and well.
Try comparing Laurel and Hardy's "A Perfect Day" to The Avengers while comparing The Searchers to, I dunno, Gran Torino or Million Dollar Baby or Interstellar or whatever your poison.
> Just that those kind of movies (and even more naive "action" movies) are prevalent today with the 20-40 demographic, something which wasn't the case in decades past.
And my point is that he's wrong, and history proves it.
This is just a classic rose-colored glasses problem, that's all. People are imagining history as they prefer to imagine it, not as it was.
This page has a picture of the nonexistent 20-40 year olds turning out to see Stan Laurel in 1947: http://www.nwemail.co.uk/memories/stan-at-queen-s-first-royal-variety-show-1.1015949
"When one goes, as I did recently, to a city like Chicago and finds on the South Side, a district equivalent to New York’s Harlem, a two-million-dollar building of a magnificence housing nothing but photoplays, and sees over four thousand people packed in, watching and listening and obviously amused and thrilled, he asks what all this means, and admits, unless he is a Dumbkopf, the coming in of a new order. Particularly is he amazed and bewildered when, in the same city, he witnesses a brilliant spoken farce-comedy, deftly played by distinguished actors, given before half-empty benches – yet in the very heart of the town. What is one to say in the light of such over-whelming evidence? Simply that something has entered the world, suddenly, which grips the people, appeals to them, rivets their attention, and drives them out of the old established theatres."
That was written in 1921.
Context at https://nenaghsilentfilmfestival.wordpress.com/category/friday-facts/
In Interstellar(2014 Movie), Matthew McConaughey chases an Indian Surveillance drone and hacks it through his laptop in which, all the instructions were in Sanskrit (It was a 1-2 second glimpse of the screen so don't know exactly what was there or whether it was in Devnagari).
High quality isn't really an opinion. Their encoding is fantastic. Better than blu-ray re-encodes which were the primary torrent source just a few years ago. They're encoding off raw source so it's exceptionally good.
Easy to use is pretty factual in a relative sense. A mere 15 years ago you had to drive out to store to rent a disc and then take it back. Those asshole rental stores made all their money through exorbitant late charges. There are perhaps user interfaces which are easier to use than iTunes. But with an AppleTV almost everything that is pirated can be found, bought, and streaming in under 3 minutes.
Here's the process for computer:
1) Start menu 2) Type iTunes 3) Hit enter. 4) Click iTunes Store 5) Click search 6) Type 'Interstellar' 7) Click 'Interstellar' 8) Click rent
I don't feel like renting this movie right now because I've already seen it. But from this point forward there's probably a confirm dialogue or two and then it starts streaming. The whole process takes about 15 seconds. On an AppleTV it might take 3 minutes due it being a little slower processor and inputting text being a little slow on the remote.
It's literally never been easier in the history of time to legally acquire content. Even if piracy is slightly easier or a slightly better user experience that's not sufficient justification. Just admit you're a selfish twat and would rather pirate content than pay for it. It's fine. You aren't alone. Tons of people pirate content. Maybe even most people. Just call a spade a spade and say you'd rather get it for free than spend a few bucks.
I dread the day where the only content available is what artists can produce independently. Movies like Interstellar, or the TV show Lost, are by their nature very expensive, and it would be a great loss if this type of content could no longer recoup its expenses. I hope there's a place in the future for both indie work and expensive "blockbuster" content.
Yep. Apple built up a reputation (over a decade) for creating high-quality products. You don't need to know the internals.
The Microsoft ecosystem didn't do this, to put it mildly. Which spyware/adware/bloatware is coming along with your PC purchase? Which plasticky parts? Which underpowered CPU? Which horrible battery life?
People see a Christopher Nolan movie just because he's involved. Interstellar didn't need a typical Michael-Bay style trailer to entice people to go.
It's all about the expectations people have going in. When you don't trust the chef, you want to see all the ingredients.
Reminds me of the film "Interstellar" with dust storm. And this is already happening every year in Beijing and its neighboring towns. Does this "bad" human cultural behavior push our scientific researcher further? It certainly does for the 200 yrs of technological advances.
I haven't watched that movie, but I did look at screenshots, and what I see is the bog standard black hole used by everyone everywhere. And I'm not really surprised - after all, Interstellar invented the black hole image this article was talking about, AFAIR it was for this movie that such rendering was attempted the first time ever - so for your reference to be relevant to my comment, we'd have to be dealing with some really serious time travel stuff. ;).
Interstellar? How about 'black hole'? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078869/
Now that Interstellar brought this image of a black hole into popular culture, I expect many other movies and games adopting it.
At present, the title here on HN is "Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics" -- to which my immediate reaction, and I suspect not only mine, is: what, as opposed to in cookery?
The original article title gives the answer: "... and in the movie Interstellar". Since the article really is about the rendering techniques used in the movie as well as about the physics of rotating black holes, I suggest that the HN title be made to match that of the original article.
I'm happy to pay a subscription fee for a reliable service
This, a million times.
I have Amazon Prime, a NetFlix subscription and an AppleTV.
I'd have happily paid $5-$10 to watch 'Interstellar'. But none of these services offers it in my country. On BitTorrent it was just one click away, so I watched the BitTorrent version.
It goes like this for almost all new movies. I really don't understand why they don't want my money.
I feel like this entire paragraph, to a real physicist, must read the way absurd TV or movie hacking dialog sounds to people in software:
"Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable". This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in Annals of Physics and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter more accurately."
What an absurd article, through and through.
Probably a spider-like robot, with 8 arms/legs would be the ideal. I could also see a dog-like robot with four legs which give twice the traction with a low center of gravity as well. Or novel designs, like what we saw in the Interstellar movie.
That is a cool movie. I've posted a layperson's review: http://guscost.com/2014/12/23/review-interstellar/
If you can't talk about Interstellar with somebody who doesn't understand topology, I will gladly do it for you. Maybe they're below you, but they're my favorite people because they're the people who will get as excited as me about how stars form and what happens when they collapse and how friggin awesome it is that the computer simulations in a sci-fi movie were so accurate that Kip Thorne thinks he can publish a few articles about them[0]. This is SO MUCH BETTER than having to talk to people about What the bleep do we know?
[0] - http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/
It's a dirty little secret. There are two physics, the public-facing one and the actual one. The public-facing one is the one that builds and maintains public interest in physics in the name of maintaining the substantial amounts of money needed to conduct experiments and get research grants.
This physics is very loosely based on the actual physics, which can't be understood beyond a superficial level without an appreciable amount of advanced mathematical training (nothing special: advanced undergrad/basic grad, but way, way, way beyond what 99.9% of people are conversant on).
The result is metaphors that are barely, tangentially related to the math. They are evolved, tested talking points: black holes, string theory, warp drives, dark matter. Any one with any physics training at all has been to umpteen cocktail parties where they were pumped for information about the "God particle" or the movie Interstellar, and has bitten the bullet and done their best.
It is a necessary side effect of a democratic society where funding for the sciences is tenuous, granted by scientifically illiterate half-wits, where the public could care less about anything not on BuzzFeed, and where the level of mathematical literacy maxes out somewhere south of Algebra I.
go watch Interstellar. first movie where it was really, really hard to spot the transitions to CGI.
also, you'd be surprised how much CGI now is being used in TV series. the showreels are on vimeo, some amazing work.
example, game of thrones, season 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK73bCuJXc8
I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out.
I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day.
If I wanted to go to some conference or meetup I'd have to drive at least 4-5 hours since there's nothing here, and we don't have train or anything.
Talking about leisure time, I like surfing, but that's only viable during the Summer, there's not much else to do here other than hanging out with other people; we are lucky to have a cinema, but some movies don't even make it here (I'm still waiting to watch Interstellar).
This would be the perfect place for a lonely writer working on a novel, but definitely not for people like us, who need to be always connected and making the best use of technology possible.
Disclaimer: I've never lived in a city, maybe I'll end up hating it, who knows?
Well as you could see in the movie "Interstellar", once you have left the earth you can just zip around everywhere with your little space dinghy :-)
Its an interesting question: who failed this movie? The director is easy to blame - why are characters changing without motivation? Who is connected to whom, emotionally? What is that grandfather doing there anyhow? How can a father care deeply about his daughter, but ignore his son (and grandson)? If there're reasons, let us know!
As for science: its more than technical details. Its why they are so dumb. Why can a 12-year-old out-guess the plans made by the scientists? (We're in a terrible hurry; lets set down on a time-dilated planet for a few hours and let the masses on Earth rot for a decade or two).
Once decided, why park your interstellar ship outside the time-dilation zone, so you can take your shuttle to the surface? Makes no difference to Earth - they wait either way. But the ship burns half their fuel, just station-keeping for 20 years. If it had been time-dilated too, that wouldn't have happened! Not even to mention the poor sap on the ship, stuck waiting for half his life.
Oh I can go on (have, for hours, to my family's dismay)
Admittedly it's been some time since I watched the full movie, but I don't recall anything in it, other than the highly abstract ending, that would be considered exotic by today's standards. Maybe they were exotic at the time, but they were still quite well understood at the time of the film's production, whereas the interactions near the singularity of a black hole, say, are very much not understood even at the present day.
Did you have some specific examples in mind? I still feel as though 2001, excluding its ending, stayed much further away from speculative topics of theoretical physics than did Interstellar (which in fact has explicit references, in its dialogue, to "the bulk" -- a term from brane cosmology; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).
I totally agree with you but I feel that our discussion is missing a crucial detail here. A bit of philosophical and cultural theory.
Did you notice how lots of people after the movie were like "Wow, I've got an epiphany, I've understood something." Did that something was about physics? No. It was about philosophy.
And damn, Interstellar philosophy is awful. Postmodernism at its worst.
Happy to share why.
Postmodernism is deeply suspicious of academia and academics. Who were the negative characters? Dr. Mann("the best of us") and Prof. Brand. "Do not go gentle in the dying light" A poem written for the poet's father losing his vision. Who was his father? Literature professor.
Postmodernism rejects reason as a epistemological foundation and states that rationalism is just another narrative. Who was right about the planet? Amelia Brand was. What did she say? "Maybe we've spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space".
Postmodernism is dismissive of science. Did Romilly's data that he collected during the years of scientific pursuit help anyone from the crew or humanity at large? No. Scientific method of trial and error was useless, but "magical tesseract pixies" powered by love saved the humanity and the protagonist.
Millions and millions of movie viewers "understood" that science and reason is not as important as love and magic. My hypothesis is when people were watching this movie they had a bit of postmodern values imprinted in their minds. That was their epiphany.
Christopher Nolan made an dystopian world he pictured a little closer. That is if you agree that modernism or super-modernism philosophy is more conductive to development of humanity than a postmodernism one...
But you know what really gets to me?
Nolan knew all of that. His Memento movie is an example of postmodernist film in the Wikipedia! He was perfectly aware what he was doing.
This citation must be included in the discussion.
-- On a deeper level, Jessica Chastain may have said it best when telling Entertainment Weekly that “Interstellar” is a love letter from Nolan to his daughter, Flora. The film’s production title was “Flora’s Letter.” Underneath it all, that's what "Interstellar" really is — a father-daughter story reflected in the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murph (MacKenzie Foy), the two lead characters at the center of the film. --
A love letter. Now the movie makes perfect sense as an educational content for a child. Question the authority. Promote love. Instill hope and faith.
But at what price for humanity at large? For me, a price that was too high. That's why I consider Interstellar to be harmful, irrational postmodernist trojan horse that supposedly promotes science but actually does the opposite.
Thank you, Christopher Nolan for making humanity a little bit less rational, thank you so much.
To be fair, though, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't explore nearly as many exotic phenomena as Interstellar did. It was a lot easier for that movie to remain mostly accurate.
>I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics
I do. At least I think I do. Kip Thorne has published a book named "The Science of Interstellar".
I am sure that book is quite scientific and reasonable. However, the most hyped up attribute of art-science relationship in Interstellar is its "real" physics. If Kip Thorne declares that movie does violate known physics in a direct and unambiguous manner the hype instantly decreases. Lots of sci-fi got science very wrong and Interstellar is considered different in that regard by general public. Less hype -> less sales.
Though, this "interstellar science is real" meme may be a trojan horse and it is ripped apart in the book. I know nothing of that as I haven't read the book.
I am not sure if Interstellar is net benefit to the rational and scientific worldview of an average viewer or not. In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method.
One thing I cannot understand is... Sure, this movie was very "accurate", all these explanations can make sense, the calculations fit but.. why is nobody talking about the major obviously impossible/inconsistent problems in the plot?
INTERSTELLAR SPOILER BELOW
For example, how did he survive inside a black hole, how did he pass through the Schwarzschild radius with his simple spaceship, why was there no time dilation as he approached the black hole, why did his spaceship break down inside the black hole but he was able to eject with his simple spacesuit and survive, how did he realistically survive out in cold space (at the end, yes okay I know this is technically possible but still..)?
When I watched this movie, I saw a lot of problems that made me think "has a physicist ACTUALLY worked on this and said 'yes, this is accurate'?". And those certainly weren't the minor details like the time dilation on the planet, the structure of the black hole and the icy clouds on that one other planet.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, it was a pretty good movie, although I felt that at times the director was pretty much screaming in my face: "SEE? WE ARE SO REALISTIC! LOOK THERE IS NO SOUND IN SPACE, AREN'T WE REALISTIC?" (sorry for caps lock but it's to provide emphasis)
Accuracy aside, from a scientific point of view Interstellar was one of the most interesting movies in a long time, and it really made me think about Physics a lot again.
It's really cool to see how much you can actually learn about the universe of Interstellar by making use of some Physics knowledge and the information given to you in the movie.
An example: The first planet they visit orbits Gargantua (the supermassive black hole mentioned in the movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole) at a distance very close to its Schwarzschild radius (or event horizon). In the movie, they say that the time dilation there is such that one hour passed at the surface of the planet corresponds to 7 years (!) on Earth. Interestingly, with that information alone we are already able to calculate how close the planet is to the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole by using a really simple formula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius (here we have to assume that the black hole is not rotating very fast).
Making some assumptions about the mass of the black hole then allows us to see how large the actual Schwarzschild radius is in fact, and if the time dilation shown in the movie is possible (it is). Similarly, if we use the information they give us about the gravity constant on the planet (about 1.3 times Earth gravity if I remember correctly) as well as an estimate of the height of the tidal waves they find there (maybe 200 meters?), we could even estimate the rotation period of the planet.
There are many more examples of clues like this in the movie, which offer great 'Fermi problems' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) and allow us to learn many things about the universe presented to us in Interstellar.
Of course I also have to mention the absolutely stunning rendering of the black hole, which incorporated the gravitational lensing effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens) that make the accretion disk of the black hole appear like a halo surrounding it. Also, the rendering of the wormhole as a four-dimensional "hole" embedded in three-dimensional space was absolutely gorgeous.
Amazing movie, amazing science, amazing universe.
Absolutely, it is possible to claim accuracy, but then you have the hard task of making that actually true. 2001 was better because of that accuracy, but for many movies it's not a good way of doing it. Interstellar could have worked with complete scientific accuracy, or they could simply not have claimed that it was scientific. Either would have been fine.
I agree on the Matrix movies, but they had much more of a free pass already, because the core concepts are so flexible.
I couldn't agree more. I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics, when it clearly does, just not in the areas he's most concerned with. Planetary dynamics, propulsion systems... but as long as there aren't Na'vi or dragons on the planets, I suppose they consider it realistic enough. On second thought, Na'vi or dragons might be more realistic than some of what's shown.
FTL travel is "possible" too, if quantum gravity provides some loophole for violating GR on scales where GR is currently assumed. It seems like there's a reasonable basis for excluding it from the plot without declaring it impossible: if Earth technology was that advanced, they wouldn't need to travel to Gargantua's system.
I think Nolan's insistence on the extreme time dilation for the first planet in the plot is a mistake, because if they thought about what time dilation would mean for the readings sent back, they never would have investigated that risky planet first.
What's great about Interstellar, though, is that it gets viewers talking and thinking about physics. On that point, it's far better than Gravity.
Surely Kip Thorne himself has to realize that he's grasping at straws. A lot of the things he mentions are of the type "in this precise, extremely rare situation it is possible, if we ignore all the other side effects". For example, I'm sure his calculations will be correct regarding the planet orbiting a black hole close enough for relativistic effects. What it also means is that the planet would pass through the extremely hot accretion disk twice every orbit, killing everything and evaporating all the water. And considering the speed that a stable orbit would require, that would be a very common occurrence.
The point is: don't claim that you're scientifically accurate. Usually, a good sci-fi movie will set up rules for itself, and follow those rules appropriately. If you make your ruleset "real world physics", you have to be extremely accurate if you still want to make it believable. The rules set up expectations, and breaking your own rules is an instant turn-off for science fiction fans.
The movie shows other cases where it doesn't follow its own rules: they have spaceplanes that can get to orbit from a planet with 1.8 times earth gravity, but not from earth without huge boosters?
For the record: I like Interstellar a lot. It was a great film, and I'll definitely be buying it when it comes out on DVD. I just have my gripes with the lofty claims of accuracy that Hollywood films so love to make.
If this is the top of your list of what's wrong with the plot of Interstellar, it feels like you're really nitpicking.
1. It was clearly established he was an ex-pilot for NASA. To describe Coop as just a farmer is horribly misleading.
2. We don't actually know what happens in a black hole. There was certainly some questionable science in the movie, but given that they gave an explanation for what happened in the black hole, and we don't know what really happens to contradict the movie's explanation, this seems like a valid use of artistic license.
3. I'm not even sure what this means.
I would agree, if space exploration was initiated under better terms than the Cold War. We started to send rockets into space in order to become better with annihilation of the opponent. We were really lucky that it turned into something we have today. But that will not last. Privatization of space travel is already underway. That bears the question: Who benefits?
I am afraid that if we invest in space exploration and colonization, we would shift priorities from saving this world to escaping it. Only a few would be able to escape it - those who have the resources.
(It is kind of what the movie Interstellar is about.)
We need to save this world first, before we can allow ourself to "infect" other worlds. If we cannot sustain on this planet, e.g. stop global warming in the next years, we are doomed and it becomes impossible to even think about shooting a single human into space again. If we need to test things in space for that, I'm fine with that. But lets not lose track of our short term problems.
Well, Interstellar would be okay if you removed the plot. Unfortunately all the SciFi bits and special effects were ruined by Hollywood schmaltz.
----- arguably the movie is already spoilt, but spoilers -----
And seriously, NASA couldn't find astronauts apart from a farmer?
Someone falls into a black hole and SURVIVES.
Is given the power by 5 dimensional light beings to alter time?
The list could go on.
You should really go see interstellar, I saw it last night and it is probably the closest thing to a 3hr version of that short video that exists. They are both really fantastic films. I would also add that interstellar is worth seeing in IMAX if you can.
It seems implied that the bulk beings are the descendants of the humans on earth. That said, if we are going to have an Interstellar discussion, there are two things that confuse me about the film. Specifically:
(1) What exact role is faith supposed to play in the film? The underlying message of the movie seems to be that our human struggle to overcome mortality can be a redeeming force that makes mankind divine so long as the scientific effort is guided by love (when guided by egoism or war it becomes unpredictable and destructive). But then there is an awful lot of dialogue about Murph having faith and Tom NOT having faith and Cooper is clearly a Christ figure. So what role does Nolan intend faith to play? Is the film really secular in its message (there is no God but man), or is all of the Christ imagery a metaphor for how the love of God/Christ is hypothesized to actually work, with God as the pearl in the oyster beyond the realm of scientific perception? And if there is supposed to be a God how do we reconcile that with the narrative-level metaphor of the journey into the cosmos as a quest in search of a God who is not there (Wizard of Oz, 2001, etc.).
(2) Mann's view of love is selfish. Brand sees love as a divine cosmic force. And Cooper sees it from the perspective of social utility ("child rearing"), which interestingly mirrors his attitude to the flying drone at the start of Interstellar, where Cooper talks about giving it something "socially responsible" to do. I am confused if the film criticizes Cooper's values and praises Brand's, or whether Cooper is the positive figure who walks a line between the two extremes of selfishness and selflessness....
> "Most people are just looking for some simple thrills"
This is patently untrue. Two of the top films in theaters right now are Interstellar and Gone Girl, neither of which can reasonably fit under the umbrella of "simple thrills". In fact Gone Girl has been widely described as a very difficult film to watch in terms of its emotional impact on its audience - suffice it to say the appreciation of that film goes above and beyond mere entertainment, yet both are "popular art" in the sense that they are widely consumed by the mainstream.
The general public is capable of a substantial amount of artistic understanding, and there are more experts out there than you acknowledge. Appreciation of different types, genres, and subgenres of art change over time as a reflection of culture.
One good modern example of this is the comic book movie - comic books have unique thematic, structural, and aesthetic elements to them that were previously the exclusive territory of comic book nerds. In recent years this has gone spectacularly mainstream - and hundreds of millions of people now better understand stuff that used to be pretty inscrutable.
All art exist in a spectrum between the novice and the expert, mainstream society is quite expert at some (see: music, cinema) but not currently practiced in others (see: postmodernism). To boil the artistic sensibilities of the mainstream down to "simple thrills" is not only grossly cynical, it's grossly incorrect.
"Popular art" is not mere entertainment - and it has never been, and has always been a reflection of the time and place in which it's created. Captain America - popular right now - was a nationalistic symbol created during the midst of WW2 when it was felt that such a symbol be needed. The utopian portrayal of the future in the original Star Trek attracted viewers as an optimistic opposite to the Cold War. Heck, the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons is a direct analogy between the USA and the USSR (and naturally, the Federation always prevails).
And these art forms evolve - just this year we've had two massively profitable films between the X-Men and Captain America where the US government was portrayed as openly malevolent, and one of them directly addressed governmental spying. These works transparently reflect the times in which they were made. With the increasing media attention on drone strikes worldwide, even the RoboCop remake wasn't spared - the movie went from a reflection of 1980s crime anxiety to a reflection of 2010s morality re: drone strikes.
This isn't just movies either - Tupac built a huge mainstream career and long-standing legacy on works that plainly and openly commented on crime, race, and equality in the context of 1990s America. He's far from the only one - the general public is much more capable of expert artistic appreciation than you give them credit.
People seek commentary, understanding, belonging, and even escape from the world and times in which they live, and popular art has provided this, and in this way they are not substitutable. The notion that people can or should subsist on past art exclusively is plainly false, as is the basis assumption that "popular art" is merely entertainment.
For someone who "works" in the film industry, you seem to be gleefully unaware of Hollywood's fondness for dystopia.
Interstellar might be one of the few newer breed of films that actually casts human space travel in some positive light.
In fact one is left wanting for instances of the "techno-optimism" - mindless or otherwise - that you describe of, in Hollywood flicks.
List of dystopian films
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_films
A simple Google search
http://i.imgur.com/hHvy0rN.png
Do you know why the new interstellar movie is on that domain? https://interstellar.withgoogle.com
Even though I liked the article it didn't mean I didn't like the movie. I think Interstellar is a better movie than most films because at least they tried to incorporate some true science into it (as opposed to 100% wrong movies like armageddon, sunshine, etc). So Nolan, Kipp, et al definitely do get the credit for that!
I wrote up some thoughts right after seeing it Friday. I mixed up Mann and Edmund, but otherwise I think I summarized the problems well. http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2lnleu/discuss_the_bad_parts_of_interstellar_spoilers/clwgrzb
pretty cool to see some of the math of this spelled out. I appreciate the effort the author has put into this.
unfortunately, my issues with Interstellar have very little to do with whether or not the black hole was portrayed realistically.
edit: why was I downvoted? for saying I didn't like the movie? come on guys.
I really enjoyed Interstellar. In fact, I'm going to go see it again. The author sounds to me like a movie hipster.
You should go see it.
The author makes the case that the 2007 film Sunshine is a better alternative to the recent release Interstellar. Personally, I couldn't get past the implausible premise of humans attempting to reignite the sun with a giant bomb that's also a ship.
Interstellar is one of the best movies ever made. If you like scify just see it. It's up there with The Matrix, Primer, and Inception.
Here is an article on this
"Interstellar animators make physics breakthrough during work on Hollywood film"
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/interstellar-scientists-make-physics-breakthrough-during-work-on-hollywood-film/
So, Musk is doing PR for the new Chris Nolan movie, now? I don't remember seeing it in the trailers for Interstellar, but did the rockets have the SpaceX logo on them?
"to ensure humanity's future" This guy...unbelievable.
I tend to agree. Shoot, even Hollywood, sees it. Watch this trailer for an upcoming space movie ... it's all scenes from the US's early spaceflight successes, accompanied by Matthew McConaughey saying we shouldn't believe all our best accomplishments are behind us. If this is how smart marketers are advertising the movie, it's a safe bet it's on many peoples' minds.
http://www.interstellar-movie.com/