Interstellar: A Visual Masterpiece with Disappointing Writing and Physics

[hankaaron]

Man. I must be in a parallel universe. Interstellar is a woefully written film.

 

[jshrager]

I have to agree that it's a terrible movie. There's about ten minutes of good effects, and 170 minute of stupidity. I lost my suspension of disbelief at about 5 minutes in - I'm okay with making up unknown physics, but not getting known physics so badly muddled up. And the emotional subtext thudded like lead. I'm going to watch 2001 again sometime soon to clear my nausea.

 

[hankaaron]

I'm going to watch 2001 again sometime soon to clear my nausea.

I had the same idea last night. And I would have if the LSU-Alabama game wasn't on last night (which btw, was another classic).

 

[OmCheeto]

Perhaps we should put Plait and Thorne in a boxing ring, and let them duke it out:

Plait
The real problem isn’t with the science, it’s with the story. I’m sure Thorne knew the science was (way) off, but I can guess that director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan chose to ignore those issues in order to advance his story.

Wait, what? The real problem isn't with the science, but the science was (way) off? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Thorne
Science: Is there anywhere the moviemakers strayed outside your guidelines?

Thorne: Not seriously. The one place where I am the least comfortable is on [a] planet where they have these ice clouds. These structures go beyond what I think the material strength of ice would be able to support. But I’d say if that’s the most egregious violation of physical law, they’ve done very, very well. There’s some artistic license there.

Ice clouds. He didn't like the ice clouds.

hmmmm...

Phil has a PhD in astronomy.
Kip has a PhD in physics.

I'm leaning towards Kip at the moment.

Also, Kip's description of the images of black holes, and the tesseract sounds really interesting.
Does anyone have an image of the black hole from the movie?
The ones I've seen on the internet always struck me as a bit wrong.

Never mind. google google google

What's this?

Followup: Interstellar Mea Culpa
Phil Plait
Every now and again, I screw up. Sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s big, and I try to admit it when I do. It helps you, the reader, understand things better when I ‘fess up, and it keeps me honest. Also, after all, science is all about admitting mistakes and learning from them!
...
Spoilers ahoy! I have to reveal critical plot points about the movie, so if you haven’t seen it and wish your viewing experience to remain pristine, then you should stop here.
...

Ok. I stopped reading. I should go watch the movie.

ps. Does anyone know what "mea culpa" means?

 

[OmCheeto]

Wow.



Kip still uses, chalk...

 

[Bandersnatch]

Does anyone know what "mea culpa" means?

Latin for my fault. It's from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiteor

 

[Algr]

I liked Interstellar. If you went in expecting a physics textbook, that is your fault, not the movies.

The only problem I found with it is that they ought to have been able to see from space that the first planet was uninhabitable, and so there was no need to land there. The stuff about Earth culture in decline was disturbingly real to me, and I liked the characters. I'll address other posts below.

 

[Algr]

1. Being anywhere near a few billion miles of a black hole- much less surviving one.

Physics doesn't suddenly change like a knife's edge near the event horizon.

2. Escaping a black hole.

In another discussion on this forum, I was told, to my annoyance, that you basically aren't allowed to even THINK about what is happening inside an event horizon. Given that, it seems to me that neither can you criticize a movie's speculation about same.

3. They need a Saturn V rocket to escape Earth's gravity. But have no problem leaving in a small shuttle craft from the surface of a planet (on the other side of the wormhole) with 130 percent of Earth's gravity.

The Saturn V rocket was needed to reach the wormhole in the outer solar system. The three planets near the black hole were much closer together.

4. In the movie NASA is a stealth organization. People have been led to believe that the moon landings were faked and that NASA had been disbanded decades ago. However this stealth NASA has no problem launching Saturn V rockets in the middle of populated areas. There's even a scene where Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) family watches the launching of his rocket from their farmhouse.

NASA's location was so remote that they disbelieve anyone could randomly find them. The scene you described isn't in the actual movie, just the previews.

5. Apparently during Cooper's training no one bothered to ask if he knew anything about wormholes.

It is the nature of the medium that someone has to play cabbagehead for the audience. I don't like it either, but a movie that only PF members could understand would bomb at the box office.

6. The movie has one of those chicken or the egg plot devices where Cooper (near the film's end) uses gravity to move books and manipulate dust to send coded messages to himself and his daughter. But wait, that’s not the worst part.
One message is “Stay”. It’s a message for him not to accept the mission and leave Earth and his family. But the other message is the coordinates to the secret NASA base. But he wanted to send messages to stay on earth, then why the hell would he also send himself the location to NASA.

Human beings have emotions. Also, Cooper was unsure what the rules were and was trying different strategies. Was he dead and a ghost? Could history be changed?

7. A wormhole is barely just outside of the planet Saturn’s orbit. Just on the other side of the wormhole is a supermassive black hole. Why the gaseous planet isn’t sucked into the wormhole is a question Kip Thorne should answer.Cooper

Hint: Why isn't the Earth sucked into the sun? A man-made wormhole is not the same thing as a black hole.

There’s a lot more than that. Including one of the worst lines in a Hollywood movie since “Love is never having to say you’re sorry”.

What line is that?

 

[GTOM]

Those who liked it, so didnt you think, the conversation lines was so forced, as the Plait review wrote?

(Well about the inside of the event horizont, i surely don't expect anything but Hawking radiation to come out, i don't expect time travel or things like that neither, but in an SF you can speculate about such stuff.)

 

[Algr]

Those who liked it, so didnt you think, the conversation lines was so forced, as the Plait review wrote?

Given the context of who and where they were, it mostly seemed realistic. The only exception was when Cooper asks about the shape of the wormhole and gets the folded paper explanation. Cooper should have been telling this to his kids, not learning about it on the ship - but that would have made the movie even longer, so I guess the nature of the medium needs compromise.

(Well about the inside of the event horizont, i surely don't expect anything but Hawking radiation to come out, i don't expect time travel or things like that neither, but in an SF you can speculate about such stuff.)

We don't know enough about black holes to expect anything from them. For example, Phil Plat makes a big mistake assuming that the hole is cold in one "flaw" but hot in another. The wormhole, and perhaps the black hole itself, are manufactured, and thus can have all sorts of properties that would be highly improbable in a naturally forming hole.

 

[atyy]

It's a great movie! Better than 2001, for sure. Maybe even better than Freaky Friday, possibly even as good as Star Wars or LOTR, but am not sure yet. Interstellar gets better the more I think about it. High recommended!

 

[Fredrik]

Those who liked it, so didnt you think, the conversation lines was so forced, as the Plait review wrote?

There were some really bad moments, in particular when Anne Hathaway talked about love, and when Matt Damon talked about evolution. But I think most of the remaining dialogue was OK.

the folded paper explanation. Cooper should have been telling this to his kids, not learning about it on the ship - but that would have made the movie even longer, so I guess the nature of the medium needs compromise.

You have a point there. I've been thinking that it's not obvious that a pilot would understand that the entrance to a wormhole is spherical, but this particular pilot must have been told what to expect.

 

[Fredrik]

In another discussion on this forum, I was told, to my annoyance, that you basically aren't allowed to even THINK about what is happening inside an event horizon.

I've seen comments like that from time to time. I strongly disagree with that view. The same solution (of Einstein's equation) that describes the exterior also describes the interior. If that's somehow completely invalid, then there's no reason to trust what the solution says about the outside either, since this is part of the same solution.

The Saturn V rocket was needed to reach the wormhole in the outer solar system. The three planets near the black hole were much closer together.

Didn't they ditch the rocket much earlier? Like, as soon as they had escaped Earth's gravitational pull? This thing does seem like a plot hole to me. Also, if the planets are so close together, how is one of them so close the the event horizon that time is dilated by a factor of more than 8000, and the others have negligible gravitational time dilation?

Hint: Why isn't the Earth sucked into the sun? A man-made wormhole is not the same thing as a black hole.

Earth doesn't fall into the sun because even though it's falling towards the sun, it has such a high speed in the "sideways" direction that it keeps missing the sun. Earth isn't broken into pieces which are then sucked into the sun, because the tidal forces from the sun are negligible.

I think the movie is suggesting that everything we saw, except that planet with the waves is far enough from the black hole for tidal forces and time dilation to be negligible. I would also assume that the other end of the wormhole is in a circular orbit around the black hole. This may prevent the gravitational pull of the black hole from affecting anything on this side.

I don't think it matters if it's man-made. It still has to satisfy Einstein's equation, or at least a similar quantum gravity equation.

 

[Algr]

Didn't they ditch the rocket much earlier? Like, as soon as they had escaped Earth's gravitational pull? This thing does seem like a plot hole to me. Also, if the planets are so close together, how is one of them so close the the event horizon that time is dilated by a factor of more than 8000, and the others have negligible gravitational time dilation?

When they ditched the rocket, they may have been close to Earth, but they still had built up lots of speed. Alternatively, the rocket was cheaper than the fuel that the shuttle uses. [/QUOTE]

 

[Pete Cortez]

Phil Plait recently took Interstellar to task for a purportedly fantastical depiction of black holes. He's since issued a complete correction.

To summarize.

1. Plait assumed a non-rotating geometry for Gargantua.
2. Plait underestimated the mass of Gargantua by 8 orders of magnitude.

He's still incredulous about the capacity of an accretion disk to heat orbiting planets

 

[phinds]

Very cool. Thanks for posting.

 

[Bandersnatch]

Probably the most talked about movie in the history of PF.

 

[jtcapa]

IMAX was great visually. Visually, its stunning. But the sound was a mix bag. Great for loud passages and effects, awful for dialog. It may still be worth seeing. I kind of expected to be disappointed- just not to the extent that I was.

The sound was horrible. Way too loud, and it drowned out the dialog. This movie needed a bunch more editing, there was so many poorly created scenes with sounds effects that overshadowed the movie. My wife and I had to wear ear plugs to make it watchable.

 

[jshrager]

MASSIVE SPOILERS!

I have of complains, but there seem to be glaring physical contradictions:

1. Okay, so it's our future selves doing to our past selves, and in the future we can fold space time blah blah. So if we can do all that, why can't we just send a complete message down to our past selves to tell our past selves ... well, pretty much everything. Either you can communicate or not, and if you can't, fine, but if you can, and you can create wormholes, and control the inside of black holes, and so on, why do you have to communicate at 10 bits per century?!

2. Either the black hole destroys what goes into it, or not. So, we see BOTH a huge lava-flow of the accretion disk, which is presumably mashed and superheated ... everything in the area ... but somehow Coop's ship (not to mention Coop!) manage to ride the wave through the event horizon. If it was just black, that would have made more sense; as was, it was both hell and not hell. And if you want to use "we learned to control blah blah blah", see above.

3. Whereas I completely LOVED the David Bowman homage where Matt Damon blows himself, and the space station to smithereens, I thought that the whole "save" was ridiculous. Maybe you can match the spin of the station, but something with that much inertial could never ever even be stopped by the fine nav jets on the shuttle. It should have torn the air lock right off the top of the shuttle (or v.v.).

4. Why, in whatever future year this is, is everything still being done on Lenovo laptops, fer k's sake!

5. The robots were, not to put too fine a point on it, mechanically ridiculous, not to mention that they (and everything else) had 24x80 green screen on them dumping linux whatnot for no reason at all.

Okay, I wasn't going to complain about high level plot, but I will:

6. If you're thinking of asking M. Night Shyamalan remake 2001...don't! (Yes, I know it was Christopher Nolan, nit MNS, but the stupid "ghost" plot device was so utterly transparent, just like every stupid MNS movie, that I almost laughed aloud in the theater...or perhaps groaned aloud, because they basically gave the plot away in the first five minutes. At least in The Sixth Sense, MNS hides the reveal fairly well. CN just basically wrote "It's your father sending you messages from the future." in giant red (gravitational) letters on the screen! totally ruined the whole thing for me!)

Coincidentally, the surprisingly excellent Edge of Tomorrow just came out in DVD. Highly recommended! Doesn't even try to be accurate (thank god!), but hella fun!

 

[aleazk]

I liked the movie. But I enjoyed it more as an adventure film rather than as a hard-core science fiction film.

Spoiler alert.

Let me explain. One of the most important (to me, at least) aspects in a hard-core science fiction film is the way in which the plot is developed in a very realistic and convincing way. And that's because hard-core science fiction is realistic: the movie wants to show what would happen in the real world in such situations. When you see these films (like, e.g., 2001, Contact, etc.), you really find the way in which things develop believable. Also, because of this, often they have a solemn tone. An example of all of what I'm saying can be the scenes in 2001 when Floyd travels to the moon, the monolith is discovered, etc. I found that very credible, almost like if I were there, in the future, experiencing all that.

In Interstellar, (leaving aside some clichés, cheesy dialogue, etc.) in most places I found the way in which things develop, the actions of the characters, etc., as utterly absurd, not credible. At every moment I was conscious that I was seeing a movie, something unreal, made up. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the action scenes, the crazy twists related to time dilation, the visual effects, etc. All this is more typical of adventure films rather than a hard-core science fiction film. And I think what I mentioned is what sets the tone for these films, not so much if the science is 100% accurate or not.

Anyway, that was my impression. I actually found the absurdity quite amusing, and I think most of it was deliberate (I really laughed at many scenes; in one, they are talking in some office full of books, suddenly one of the walls moves and behold! a Saturn V rocket ready for launch!). Of course, you lose that very powerful realism and solemnity of hard-core science fiction. I think the science part got too much press, and some people (me included) were expecting something different. The contrast between the detailed gravitational science and the absurd plot is very bizarre, certainly not what I was expecting!

 

[DaveC426913]

i don't expect time travel or things like that neither, but in an SF you can speculate about such stuff.)

This is not without precedent, though they have interpreted it rather broadly. It has been conjectured mathematically, that in the presence of certain configurations of black holes, the axes of space and time can be turned 90 degrees. This means, essentially, you can literally turn left or right and physically travel forward or backward in time.

 

[DaveC426913]

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would y'all describe this story as formulaic? A 1 being a wtf storyline, and 10 being utterly derivative.

I found it to be VERY unformulaic. I really did not anticipate anything that was going to happen, nor did I find they resorted to tired cliches. (That's not to say that sutff didn't happen here that happens in other films, simply that they handled it originally)

I would give this a 3. I found it a refreshingly original story, especially for science fiction.

 

[hankaaron]

I would give it a 3 out ten too as far as the story and script being fomulaic. But the screenplay is overall is awful. Please DaveC42693, tell me why they would need to use a Saturn V rocket to overcome Earth's gravity, but a simple shuttle leaves a planet with 130% Earth's gravity.

If NASA is supposed to be a secret organization, why are they launching Saturn V rockets in the middle of a midwest populated area?

Why is it that Prof. Brand (Michael Caine) seemly doesn't age.

Why is it apparently easier to build a space station in outer space than it is to build bio domes on earth.

Those three things simply highlight much of the problems I had with the film. And those are the easy to point out lapses in basic science.
There's a lot more on the artistic side of the story that are just a troubling.

On the artistic side Nolan introduces concepts and themes and you never hear from them again or they are concepts that are mis-applied. We hear so much about Murphy's law, but we really don't see Murphy's law applied in an intelligent way.

Nolan consider's Matt Damon destroying the spaceship Endurance as Murphy's law. The theme of anti-science was introduced, but never fully followed. Speaking of which, that theme goes against the grain of every sociological observance of cultures that have rejected science.

Every culture which has rejected science has brought cultures which lag in math, science and engineering. You need a significant portion of the population actively pursing those areas in order to succeed in those areas.

How could that culture, as portrayed the movie, have accomplished space travel we can only dream about (even without the use of wormholes and black holes).

This is simply not a thought out script. If this was Nolan's 2nd or may 3rd movie and he needed the studio to give their stamp of approval, their's no way in hell this script gets a pass.

 

[MattRob]

When they ditched the rocket, they may have been close to Earth, but they still had built up lots of speed. Alternatively, the rocket was cheaper than the fuel that the shuttle uses.

Actually, this is pretty spot-on. The trajectory for Saturn took them 2 years. A hohmann transfer to Saturn takes about 6 years. They weren't doing a Hohmann at all. The delta-vee to leave Earth orbit must've been enormous to make the flight only 2 years. So, yeah, it makes sense.

Also, according to this [I highly, highly, highly recommend that link! Very relevant, here], that was an SLS, not a Saturn-V. Not sure where the boosters went, though. But the thing had 3 engines on the bottom in the scene where Cooper first finds out it's NASA. Can't help but wonder if those were M1's or something...

I would give it a 3 out ten too as far as the story and script being fomulaic. But the screenplay is overall is awful. Please DaveC42693, tell me why they would need to use a Saturn V rocket to overcome Earth's gravity, but a simple shuttle leaves a planet with 130% Earth's gravity.

If NASA is supposed to be a secret organization, why are they launching Saturn V rockets in the middle of a midwest populated area?

'cause they don't have any alternative way of getting up there. Presumably, their other launches were from other places, but as the last launch, they must've dropped the secrecy.

Also, the Rangers were SSTO's, but couldn't carry any additional payload up.

[Just finished reading the thread - Algr answered this better]

NASA's location was so remote that they disbelieve anyone could randomly find them. The scene you described isn't in the actual movie, just the previews.

Why is it that Prof. Brand (Michael Caine) seemly doesn't age.

Why is it apparently easier to build a space station in outer space than it is to build bio domes on earth. [...]

1) Because people look similar enough in-between 70-90 that they didn't want to get a new actor for the role, and you had to recognize the character. You can say; "they should've made him look older then!," and, they did. But maybe it looked so natural you didn't notice.

2) The dust was everywhere. The dust contained the blight. It probably would've been impractical to try to keep an entire farm in a cleanroom-type environment, when many people would have to work there and a tremendous amount of goods and supplies would constantly have to move in and out regularly. Going through a cleanroom-type environment once, though, is a lot easier. And building a space station isn't too hard when you've discovered how to manipulate gravity to your advantage.

Given the context of who and where they were, it mostly seemed realistic. The only exception was when Cooper asks about the shape of the wormhole and gets the folded paper explanation. Cooper should have been telling this to his kids, not learning about it on the ship - but that would have made the movie even longer, so I guess the nature of the medium needs compromise.

Actually, it kinda made sense to me... The clock was ticking, and they were clearly in a rush. For once, a movie with astronauts has them acting very poorly for a justifiable reason: they were last-resort pickings, not "the right stuff." (Note, Gravity was another exception. Mostly. Because of Matt Kowalski - I loved to see a real astronaut in a fictional movie for once). That, and the two-year trajectory seeming to indicate that they took a less-than-ideally-timed flightpath, seem to indicate they were really pushing it for time. As one line in the movie put it; "I was trained for this and I didn't even know it?" That right there explains why we don't see a long training sequence or anything. He'd "already been trained." His dialogue with Brant near the start seems to solidify that they hadn't done any further training.

But, his training was on flying the Rangers, not on GR...

So, yeah, I really loved it. Saw it once, going to go with some friends to see it again at the nearest IMAX - more than an hours' drive away. I found it that good (though it certainly doesn't hurt that it's at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, so lots of neat things there, anyways).

I wish I could get a model if the Endurance or a Ranger... Neat crafts. I've long wanted to see some hard sci fi tackle the SSTO-shuttle problem for exploring Earth-like worlds. Cameron's Avatar's shuttles came close, but the aerodynamic shape was bad for re-entry, so I couldn't like them too much...
Back on-topic, this is very relevant.

And to re-iterate, it's[/PLAIN] very, very relevant.

I mean, not even relevant, but very important. Read it.

 

[GTOM]

This is not without precedent, though they have interpreted it rather broadly. It has been conjectured mathematically, that in the presence of certain configurations of black holes, the axes of space and time can be turned 90 degrees. This means, essentially, you can literally turn left or right and physically travel forward or backward in time.

Well I am not an expert of this. I just can't imagine time travel is more possible than you cremate a human, and recreate him based on a photo you saw about him. Ok so in case of high speed or gravity, changes slow down, but even if they were reversed, you won't really get back the past... or at least my limit of understanding is that.

But anyway that is SF.

 

[DaveC426913]

MattRobb covers a lot of it but I"ll reiterate.

I would give it a 3 out ten too as far as the story and script being fomulaic. But the screenplay is overall is awful. Please DaveC42693, tell me why they would need to use a Saturn V rocket to overcome Earth's gravity, but a simple shuttle leaves a planet with 130% Earth's gravity.

This is an over-simplistic viewpoint.

You think the only reason for choosing propulsion systems is based on their thrust?
You think, in a movie almost three hours long, they should have taken time out to explain the rocket equation, and how the initial stages of a rocket are 99% fuel?
They can build a small command ship with new technology. Does that mean they can (and can afford to) build an entire launch vehicle using that new technology? Where does the money come from? There are a host of configurations for interplanetary missions. How much screen time should they spend it?

I could go on, but my point is none of these are implausible, they're simply not explained in the film.

You are holding high court, and expecting the film to deliver. No film, when viewed through the yes of the critic, will survive. It is a cooperative thing.

If NASA is supposed to be a secret organization, why are they launching Saturn V rockets in the middle of a midwest populated area?

Not "launching Saturn V rockets", launching THE rocket. The ONLY one. This is the culmination of NASA's mission. Time for secrecy is done.

Why is it that Prof. Brand (Michael Caine) seemly doesn't age.

Reaching for straws.

Why is it apparently easier to build a space station in outer space than it is to build bio domes on earth.

The blight.

This is simply not a thought out script.

It's a story that asks questions, leaves some unanswered. The best stories don't spoon-feed you every concept, then wrap it up in the nice bow and roll the credits.Like I said before, this film takes risks. For some they will not pay off. It touches on things that people will find hard to accept. (love can cross space and time??) It doesn't spoon-feed you solutions. It doesn't pander to armchair critics, trying to hit every note that couldn't get played in a ~3 hour film. It requires a thoughtful mind to connect some of the dots.

(...I wonder if today's audience has gotten lazy, placated with processed, refined sugar stories like Independence Day and Godzilla...)

Anyway, people are going to love it, people are going to hate it. But you shouldn't miss it.

 

[DaveC426913]

Back on-topic, this is very relevant.

And to re-iterate, it's[/PLAIN] very, very relevant.

I mean, not even relevant, but very important. Read it.

You're right. It is. Before offering an opinion on the physics of the black hole in the film, you should read this. It points out two critical aspect that change everything:
1] it is a spinning black hole
2] it is a supermassive black hole

 

[Rive]

When they ditched the rocket, they may have been close to Earth, but they still had built up lots of speed. Alternatively, the rocket was cheaper than the fuel that the shuttle uses.

What's bugging me about this is the Δv necessary to cover the 'distance' of the 60000 factor time dilation. Compared to that the Δv cost of the SSTO launch of the ranger would be practically negligible. So it was like rowing on the sides of a carrier to start on it's way across the ocean.

By my view: some parts of the relevant science was clearly sacrificed on the 'small side', so they were able to show us some 'big side'. It's an acceptable compromise. Good movie.
However, it would be a waste if one stop discussing the scientific accuracies and inaccuracies in the film. What's makes this film worth to view is that there is much to discuss afterwards.

Ps.: that last was a bit rude maybe. Let's say, what makes it more than just another average SF movie :)

 

[DaveC426913]

However, it would be a waste if one stop discussing the scientific accuracies and inaccuracies in the film. What's makes this film worth to view is that there is much to discuss afterwards.

Agreed.

 

[Algr]

1. Okay, so it's our future selves doing to our past selves, and in the future we can fold space time blah blah. So if we can do all that, why can't we just send a complete message down to our past selves to tell our past selves ... well, pretty much everything. Either you can communicate or not, and if you can't, fine, but if you can, and you can create wormholes, and control the inside of black holes, and so on, why do you have to communicate at 10 bits per century?!

The film as a whole takes on the form of a causality loop. (The opposite of a paradox.) Communication to the past may be possible, but how could we today possibly know what the rules are to maintain such a thing? Say the wrong thing and you negate your existence. It seems likely that there would be complex and strange limits to what you can do. Imagine explaining to a caveman why we can fix a broken leg, but not cancer.

2. Either the black hole destroys what goes into it, or not. So, we see BOTH a huge lava-flow of the accretion disk, which is presumably mashed and superheated ... everything in the area ... but somehow Coop's ship (not to mention Coop!) manage to ride the wave through the event horizon. If it was just black, that would have made more sense; as was, it was both hell and not hell. And if you want to use "we learned to control blah blah blah", see above.

The bright spots are hot, the dark areas are cold. The caveman would understand that part.

3. Whereas I completely LOVED the David Bowman homage where Matt Damon blows himself, and the space station to smithereens, I thought that the whole "save" was ridiculous. Maybe you can match the spin of the station, but something with that much inertial could never ever even be stopped by the fine nav jets on the shuttle. It should have torn the air lock right off the top of the shuttle (or v.v.).

The presentation of time can be strange in movies. They might have spent hours slowing down that station's rotation. But would showing it have made the movie better?

4. Why, in whatever future year this is, is everything still being done on Lenovo laptops, fer k's sake!

True, they ought to be Macs.

5. The robots were, not to put too fine a point on it, mechanically ridiculous, not to mention that they (and everything else) had 24x80 green screen on them dumping linux whatnot for no reason at all.

Beats another Robby the Robot clone.

Okay, I wasn't going to complain about high level plot, but I will:

6. If you're thinking of asking M. Night Shyamalan remake 2001...don't! (Yes, I know it was Christopher Nolan, nit MNS, but the stupid "ghost" plot device was so utterly transparent, just like every stupid MNS movie, that I almost laughed aloud in the theater...or perhaps groaned aloud, because they basically gave the plot away in the first five minutes. At least in The Sixth Sense, MNS hides the reveal fairly well. CN just basically wrote "It's your father sending you messages from the future." in giant red (gravitational) letters on the screen! totally ruined the whole thing for me!)

Trying to out-guess the film is just going to ruin it for you. You know it is the father because you've seen the previews. The characters in the movie haven't. In another kind of movie it could have been Cooper's wife warning him that the secret organization was making zombies and blight.