Interstellar, the movie... Spoiler alert?

I don't think the ship was supposed to be in orbit of the planet. It was orbiting Gargantua (with the planet or system) farther out to stay out of the high effect area.

This was one of the areas that they stayed vague with, which is probably good because it might come out silly. Realistically, the distance involved are huge. The ship may have been super advanced, but it would likely have been hard to justify the time / distances if they went into it more. Even the movement between the various planets would likely have been immensely long distances. It wasn't even clear if the planets were orbiting the black hole, or there were systems (with the planets in them) orbiting the black hole.

I just saw it. I was not super impressed with the ending (from the black hole on). Also I was not expecting Matt Damon.

Watched it last night, loved it.

The science involved was pretty good, and unlike other films, they didn't go overboard trying to explain the effects like the inside of the black hole and left them unexplained.

Probably the only thing I didn't get was when TARS dropped from their manual burn slingshot around the black hole. When he disconnected, his ship shot backward... was the main station still under heavy accel at this point?

I'm going to go see it again some time. I'll watch for some of the issues raised.

Watched this last night while flying home from Arizona. Loved it, up until the black hole bit - McConnaghey as the ghost and sender of the original NASA coordinates was too convoluted for me to get my head around... but overall a very thought-provoking film. I felt soooo sorry for the poor bastard who waited 23 years for them to come back.

I watched it a couple weeks ago, I thought it was great. Not exactly a hard sci-fi movie with the "5th dimension" in the black hole and very questionable relativistic effects going on around it, but a great movie anyway.

Here's an interesting bit about the Tesseract.

http://nerdist.com/go-inside-the-tesseract-from-interstellar/

Did Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit make an appearance?

In reply to SyntheticBlinkerFluid:

that was a very interesting video SBF. Thanks for the heads-up.

The whole thing with the tiny astronaut floating behind the bookcase just made me say...huh? And you can fly off to the furthest reaches of space and communicate through wormholes, but you can't see 1000 foot waves on a planet's surface? There was a lot of god acting IMHO, and the special effects were pretty good, but overall I wish I had my two hours back. I think that is less a knock of the movie, and more an admission that it was just over my head. The explanation of a black hole as a sphere for instance made my frontal lobe hurt a little.

The issue with the wave was that from 'normal' space it would look like a water mountain. Time on that planet was ultra slow compared to the outside universe. They were there for a few minutes and many years passes on the outside. The water would easily appear stationary from orbit.

I believe the waves on that planet were actually just the gravitation tidal bulge from being so close to the black hole. Kind of like how the moon moves the water on earth, but MUCH more extreme. Like this:

It would not be likely be terribly obvious from orbit, but it would also be MUCH more gentle then shown in the movie, essentially unnoticeable other then the water rising (tide).

aircooled wrote: I believe the waves on that planet were actually just the gravitation tidal bulge from being so close to the black hole. Kind of like how the moon moves the water on earth, but MUCH more extreme. Like this: It would not be likely be terribly obvious from orbit, but it would also be MUCH more gentle then shown in the movie, essentially unnoticeable other then the water rising (tide).

So, from the above drawing, the waves don't move around the earth, but the earth actually spins inside a giant bulging water droplet?

Mind blown.

-Rob

Just finished watching it, loved it!

The resurrection of this thread caused me to read the response to my last post, and wow. We have some really smart people here! Very interesting, but I still liked The Kingsman better.

I identified right away with McCanaughey's character on a parental level. I put myself in his position wondering if I could leave my kids to try for a 1/1,000,000 chance of saving humanity (nope). Then when he was gone I empathized with what he was feeling. I'm really good at the whole suspension of disbelief thing.

When they said it was a 2 year trip to Saturn I did the mental math and (putting myself in his position) figured he'd be gone for a bit over 4 years total. When they revealed that 23+ years had been lost I said berkeley aloud. I can't fathom leaving my kids in that kind of situation and then never seeing one and only seeing the other just before she dies. Holy E36 M3, no way!

I was waiting for him to be ripped apart by the tidal forces when he passed the event horizon and it lost me a bit there, then again when he's manipulating the strings of the extra-dimensional tesseract construct to send the messages to his daughter, but overall it really drew me in and took me for a ride.

Great movie!

Saw this over the Thanksgiving weekend and really liked it. I survey/study near death experience and alien abduction narratives as a hobby. I used to study French Philosophy (Derrida, Lacan, etc). I enjoy contemplating science I do not fully understand. All of those things seem to come together in this movie. Everything is happening at the same time.