> Caine's character withholding physics advancements for years
But he didn’t do that. He and Mann had determined there was way forward and they were right. Without the new data from the black hole physics had gotten as far as it ever would.
EDIT: and Hathaway’s character didn’t intend to sacrifice humanity. One option was as good as any other. She even turned out to be right and most of the crew would have survived if they listened to her from the start.
Hathaway's Brand didn't want to sacrifice humanity, she just had a conflict of interest around a decision in a VERY information-limited environment. Her non-love-related argument about the black hole capturing things that would be needed to create planets more capable of supporting life - that Cooper thought was probably just rationalization - made sense and would have led them to a better decision than going down to Mann's planet did. Where we got exactly the sort of sterile environment she was predicting, like the water planet before.
Brand-on-earth's "withheld physics advancements" was sorta the reverse - he withheld his failure because his math hadn't enabled the advances NASA hoped they would and so releasing them would've been telling everyone on earth they were doomed. He decided to put the fate of the species ahead of releasing useless results that he believed would ruin the only chance the species had. (Even without that, not publishing negative results is common anyway!)
Not sure about your complaint with Murph, since you aren't specific, but both kid Murph and adult seemed consistent to me.
I HATED the magic black hole deus ex machina on first viewing, and still don't love it, but found everything up to that amazing. I think a bleaker story of founding a colony on a new planet without the magic trip back to earth at the end could've been even better, though.
> I couldn't forgive the fact that Will Smith flew up to the alien mother ship and plugged in a USB key (containing the virus which destroyed the ship (er, spoiler)).
Only that this is not what happened in the movie. Jeff Goldblum tried to get out of "his" satellite links that pirate signal (= alien communications hijacking) that distorted the TV transmissions. He found and partly reverse engineered its line coding between his arrival at the TV station and his lunch break, identifying a recurring pattern that he (correctly) identified as a countdown.
Later at Area 51 (that scene is only found in the extended edition) he's shown a piece of alien tech in the crashed ship the A51 scientists can make no sense of, but turns out to transceive (and display) the same pattern as the pirate signal used by the aliens.
Eventually he arrives at the idea of engineering a signal pattern that, when injected into the aliens' communications network will (temporarily) shut down the ships' shields, simply by glitching the responsible controllers. It's never stated how that signal pattern is generated, but if it makes you feel better, assume it was some kind of fuzzing method.
When they go up to the mothership they don't "plug in" a USB storage device. Watch that sequence again. Goldblum is first running a program on his computer that synchronizes with the aliens' communication network's signal pattern and then uses that link to inject the glitching signal.
----
Yes, the timeframe is more than optimistic short. But it's not something that's logically impossible. In fact it's one of the better parts of the movie IMHO. And all the people who complain about "how did he do this without knowing their computer architecture?" definitely never looked into, or did reverse engineer a completely black box piece of computation equipment. It's definitely possible; yes it takes a lot of patience, but it can be done.
"In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method."
It's worse than this! Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I got a strong anti-scientific, anti-rational vibe from the movie.
Consider this: the movie's two top scientists are scheming liars. The professor who ran the whole show lied to everybody because he's smarter than all the dummies on his team. And the guy from the second planet is the most brilliant scientist among the astronauts, and turns out to be an egocentric asshole who develops a sinister plan that endangers the whole mission for his personal gain. Lesson learned: never trust a scientist, they're up to no good!
Second: Rational decision making is for the birds. Our hero decides on an order in which to visit the planets based on the available evidence. Meanwhile, the girl who's allegedly a scientist but who uses "love" as her compass had intuitively favored the "right" planet all along. In fact, things don't start going right until people start doing crazy things based on fuzzy hunches. Lesson learned: Love is a better basis for decisions than evidence and reason.
I get the impression this attitude is "trending" in the US, and it worries me. There's a worrisome anti-science sentiment afoot, apparent in denial of evolution and global warming, opposition to vaccination, a hysteric fear of various foods and distrust of "conventional" medicine.
> I interpreted all of the things you listed as indications that statistics and scientific analysis have limitations and can't predict success or failure, not as indications that he would fail and die in the end.
I did so for the "heart beats". But every other point has nothing to do with statistics or scientific analysis. I really can't say definitively that he died on his way to titan, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming. It wouldn't have been hinted at so much in the movie and the movie would not have ended with that quote otherwise.
> And again, a major theme of the story is that the two men are more capable of achieving great things together than apart.
That's a bit of a reach but you are entitled to the view.
> You seem to have a thesis that the film is a tragedy and are working backwards from there.
No. I watched Gattaca as a kid and loved it and saw it as an inspirational movie. Everything you believed, I believed. Then I got older and watched the movie a few more times. My thesis changed from inspirational to tragedy. As I said, my view of the movie changed. And I love the movie more now because it is richer, deeper and more consequential than a good simplistic feel good inspirational movie.
> And remember that neither Vincent nor Eugene (Jerome) were in a good place prior to meeting each other.
They weren't in a good place at the end either.
Anyways, you are entitled to your view. I used to view it like you and I suspect it's most people's first impressions when they first watch the movie. But after repeated viewing, it's hard to watch someone burning himself to death and a man's looking into space and "going home" as inspirational. There are inspirational aspects to the film, but I don't think that's what the movie is really about. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
That’s a very good point. I think in his own way Clarke made it into a bit of a joke. HAL is quoted multiple times saying no computer like him has ever made a mistake or distorted information. Perfection is impossible even in a super computer so this quote alone establishes HAL as a liar, or at the very least a hubristic fool. And the people who gave him control of the ship were foolish as well.
I think the better lesson is; don't assume AI is always right, even if it is AGI. HAL was assumed to be superhuman in many respects, but the core problem was the fact that it had administrative access to everything onboard the ship. Whether or not HAL's programming was well-designed, whether or not HAL was correct or malfunctioning, the root cause of HAL's failure is a lack of error-handling. HAL made determinate (and wrong) decision to save the mission by killing the crew. Undoing that mistake is crucial to the plot of the movie.
2001 is a pretty dark movie all things considered, and I don't think humanizing or elevating HAL would change the events of the film. AI is going to be objectified and treated as subhuman for as long as it lives, AGI or not. And instead of being nice to them, the technologically correct solution is to anticipate and reduce the number of AI-based system failures that could transpire.
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.
I'm fine with the ending, actually. The laws of physics are supposed to break down in black holes, after all. Of course that also means you can't enter them intact, but for the sake of the story, it's fine. It was certainly interesting.
It's just: why would you make the point that you need a big rocket to take off from Earth, and then immediately abandon that point when you reach another planet? I guess the only explanation is really that the story transitions from a real world setting to a space SF setting. Different setting, different laws of movie physics.
> And ultimately the protagonist selfishly endangers his entire crew because he refuses to accept his physical limitations.
I think we watched different movies. Sure the scene on the treadmills showed that he could barely keep up, but he still kept up. To say that he "selfishly endanger[ed]" his crewmates is a bit hyperbolic.
I enjoy re-interpreting the movies by taking them at face value and assuming what happened happened but not for the reason we were told. This can sometimes mean burning things: a character is wrong about the gravity of a planet. It can also have more interesting results: Kowalski didn’t have to die and he knew he didn’t have to die and chose to die anyway while encouraging Stone to keep going.
> The trisolarans use a device that meddles with the results of particle experiments, to make the results super unexpected, so the scientists will commit suicide out of desperation.
you are combining to different things here. One aspect is that they use the sophons to stimy research into particle physics so that humans can't advance into understanding higher dimensionality, etc.
The second, unrelated aspect is using the sophons to effectively terrorize scientists in non particle physics fields into either submission or suicide by gaslighting them about the nature of the universe. The purpose of the countdown timer and blinking the universal background radiation from the main character's perspective was to make his life a living nightmare until he agreed to stop his nanoparticle research.
I thought the whole point was that the main character got into space on merit, even though all the fancy genetic screening predicted that he wouldn't be able to. The human spirit of an individual triumphs over a short sighted and capricious society.
You mention the heart defect. In the movie, the heart defect is only genetically potential, it is implied that if the character had it they would be dead before the events of the film.
While mostly glossed over, I believe there was some small nod to Watney being one of the psychological anchors of the original team (at least in the film, I don't recall if that was in the book). Him being an optimist that doesn't give up is just as important to his survival as his specific scientific skill sets that come into play. That said, I believe a lot of his sanity was preserved by hope. He believed in a non-negligible chance that he could be rescued. People that signed up and are living a situation where there's no real hope it will change might have a vastly different reaction over time. Then again, they would also have company, and that can make a huge difference.
How HAL dealt with the antenna and his secret orders could be considered delusional, but HAL murdering the crew was just as sane as Dave disabling HAL.
The story provides the same situation to both the crew and the computer. The crew sees HAL acting erratically, considers it a threat to the mission and their lives and decide to disable it. HAL sees the crew acting erratically, considers them a threat to the mission and a threat to his life, and decides to disable the crew.
Nobody thinks twice about the crew's decision, but HAL's choice is viewed as insane because of human bias towards the meatbags in the movie.
Keep in mind that (SPOILERS) the scientists were aware that their results were being manipulated. That's what the suicide note said, and that's also seen in the countdown that was clearly the result of an intelligent being.
But he didn’t do that. He and Mann had determined there was way forward and they were right. Without the new data from the black hole physics had gotten as far as it ever would.
EDIT: and Hathaway’s character didn’t intend to sacrifice humanity. One option was as good as any other. She even turned out to be right and most of the crew would have survived if they listened to her from the start.
reply