Author Topic: Interstellar [spoiler thread]  (Read 3730 times)

Chairman Goodchild

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on: December 12, 2014, 03:17:13 PM
First: it's been over a week since I've seen this, so my memory is a bit foggy on the exact details.

But I really wasn't impressed with this one.  It was trying to be this really awesome epic grand-scale science fiction movie, but it just failed competely for me.  

First of all, what the hell was wrong with the world?  There's some sort of virus that's destroying crops, and I don't remember exactly which, except it destroyed okra crops.  Maybe it infected soybeans first, then jumped to okra?  And then somehow people knew that it would infect corn next, and then the world would starve because there wasn't enough corn, and that the virus or fungi would flood the world with nitrogen gas after infecting the corn crop killing all humans, and Michael Caine knew that's exactly what would happen, because he's Alfred from Batman.  

So, why not just stop planting corn and switch to wheat?  I suppose the virus would conveniently switch to that as well.  So, it's a super-virus that affects all cereal grains on Earth as needed to advance the plot.  And there's also some sort giant dust storms that blow over the plains states, but never actually damages the fantastically healthy corn crops that our protagonist has planted.  If the movie wanted to show a world where all crops were failing, maybe they could show diseased crops failing as a result of the dust storms or virus/fungi/whatever.  Nope.  All we got to see were super-healthy corn fields as far as the eye could see.  And then later on in the film, people started burning corn, for apparently no reason.  If it was all infected with the supervirus, why did it still look perfectly healthy?

And there's also some background information about the US government apparently failing and massive population decline, but that once again is both never explained and also completely contradicted by what the audience sees onscreen.  Everyone looks perfectly healthy, and the whole town turns out for a high-school baseball game on a perfect baseball field.  Except there's a massive dust storm and everything looks normal again after that happens.

And so our protagonist follows a secret code written in dust along with his daughter to a top-secret NASA base, and within an hour of being detained after giving no explanation as to how he got there, Matthew McConaughey is offered a chance to pilot the secret last mission to the stars.  Wow.  Good thing he happened to just show up when he did, when Michael Caine was in need of a spaceship pilot, and McConaughey just stumbled into the base by complete coincidence even tho NASA was very obviously in the last stages of mission preparation.  But all of this is explained at the end of the movie, when McConaughey falls into a black hole that leads into, out of all of the places in the entire universe, his daughter's bedroom when she was a child so he send the code back to himself and complete the paradox.  

And just a thing about launching rockets.  If you're planning on launching a rocket, at all, try not to put mission control literally in the same silo that you're launching out of.  Because your launch will not only destroy all of the computers that are needed for telemetry, the launch will kill everyone working at ground control.  Seriously, launches are incredibly destructive.  That's why launches are way the hell away from ground control.  I don't know the exact distance.  More than a kilometer.  Certainly more than in the next room over.  Also, Michael Caine was trying to turn the entire mission control area into a space station once he'd invented anti-gravity?  Whaaat?  And nothing ever comes of this.  

So, Matthew McConaughey is launched into a distant galaxy via singularity once his crew has reached Saturn.  OK, that's fair enough.  Some alien intelligence has detected life on Earth is failing, and has opened up a portal to another galaxy, because they're inscrutable aliens.  Sure.  I'll buy it.  So, once mankind has detected this wormhole, we send thru unmanned satellites to explore the other side of the wormhole and send back detailed scans of the solar system, because there's super-advanced AI computers that can easily make the kinds of maps that humanity needs, right?  Yeah, of course not.  They send a whole bunch of manned missions.  Without any kind of guidance or maps whatsoever, even after Matthew McConaughey's expedition makes it thru the wormhole.  Was there even a half-assed explanation for this?  I forget.  

So the crew blindly follows the first signal they come to, which is a planet that has oceans about 70 centimeters deep and waves 200 kilometers high.   But hey, maybe that's a good planet after all, because you've only landed on one really small region of it, and it has temperate oceans?  Why don't you investigate the planet more?  Maybe it has lots of continents?  It'd be like landing in the Pacific Ocean and taking off again because Earth is only a water planet.  What's going on here?  

And then there's the Matt Damon ice planet.  "Sorry I've lured your entire expedition to my planet, but I was afraid to die.  So, now that you're here, take me back with you and we'll explore the solar system together.  Or maybe I'll try to kill you all instead."  So, guess what he does.  

And as for the whole solar system that Matthew McConaughey's team went into, it's a neutron star orbiting a black hole!  It's one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable.  The radiation would kill everything in the entire solar system, full stop, period, end of story.  

And then Anne Hathaway's doing something on another planet in one scene after the movie's already over and I forgot about her and thought she'd died or something, and that's the final shot of the movie.  

This is one of those movies where there's so much wrong with it, I get tired of typing out how much there's wrong with it.  And there's probably much more that's wrong with it that I forgot about or didn't pick up on.

And I really don't want to be bitchy about the movie, but none of it made any kind of sense for the kind of movie that it was trying to be.  
« Last Edit: December 12, 2014, 03:36:39 PM by Chairman Goodchild »



FullMetalAttorney

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Reply #1 on: March 30, 2015, 01:57:49 PM
Yeah, it's easy enough to pick up on all the problems in a movie. I can mostly overlook those, especially when a movie is as gorgeous as this one. But even its strengths were weak. How time dilation affects human relationships is a cool idea . . . but this is a pale reflection of either The Forever War or Hyperion (both of which I'd read within a year before this film came out).

But honestly, the only review you'll ever need of this is from Roderick on the Line. http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/ep-146-science-farmer.html It's impossible to care about a character played by Matthew McConaughey.