Interstellar, anyone?

This is the movie I've been waiting for for a very, very long time. It's one of the few truly science-positive movies that Hollywood has produced in recent years. It's one of the few science fiction movies that is both honest and positive about human nature. We're awesome, but we're not innately special. Brand's "Love transcends everything" theory was given the weight it deserved (Read: None whatsoever) and the theme of how life was about more than just survival was well played. Turns out, Mann's diatribe about the survival instinct was one of the most important

Scientifically, the movie was pretty solid. The orbital maneuvering had some holes, and there was one time where they really screwed up with the centripetal gravity. Down to Earth, there were some nitpicks to be had, like combines harvesting unripe corn or a drone with solar cells that could power a whole farm. None of this rose to the level where it bothered me. I feel that the movie delivered on 98% of everything it promised, from cutting-edge CGI of an accretion disk to slow, beautiful shots of spaceships docking in silence.

Something that struck me as I was leaving the theater was the idea that something similar might have happened on Earth before. Micheal Caine's character said that the blight breathed nitrogen, a trait that (among others) would let it outperform oxygen-breathing life. This is just like how blue-green algae developed on Earth and quickly drove anaerobic life to near extinction. All that remains of that lost chapter in evolutionary history is a few microbes that thrive in absence of the toxin oxygen. Botulism, for example.

If humanity had died, the dust storms would have erased our presence from the Earth. A billion years from now, nitrogen-breathing multicellular life might arise. Native metals would have been replenished by then, as well as the deep wells of hydrocarbons we've done our best to deplete. But any intelligent life that arises would have a hard time of climbing out of the stone age. Hard to burn hydrocarbons without oxygen.

10/10, we need more science fiction like this.

PS: Does anyone else think that Christopher Nolan has a weird love for scratchy voices?
PPS: Cooper meeting his daughter again brought tears to my eyes. Him going the extra mile to resurrect TARS almost had me bawling.

loved it

I really enjoyed the film. My only complaint is that at times, I had trouble hearing some of the people speak when music or loud sounds were occurring at the same time. This wasn't always a problem, just occassionally. I don't know if it was just some audio mixing on the film's part or the theater I saw it in, but I'm inclined to go with the latter.

Anyways, I'd recommend it to any who want to see good sci fi.

I've heard from several people that they had trouble hearing the dialogue over the other noises. I'd lean towards it being the film maker's fault, not the theater's.

Agreed about the dialogue part. Honestly I found it to be really boring up until the last bit when they tried to go home. Maybe it bored me cause I dont get a boner over the science fiction stuff like some people do. And just too many things "missing" from the story. Like what exactly happened after the blight? Is there still a government? Whats left of the human population? What happened to the military? What YEAR is it even (although they might have said and i just wasnt paying attention)? Stuff like that that I like knowing.

Ascendant Justice wrote: Like what exactly happened after the blight?  Is there still a government?  Whats left of the human population?  

If you're talking about the state of Humanity during the movie, before everyone left Earth, I think the answers are as follow:

-The blight is ongoing, and is slowly driving oxy-aerobic life to extinction. Efforts to cure the blight, as we saw in the NASA compound, proved futile. The only way to grow a healthy crop is to raise blight-free seeds in a controlled environment, such as a space station or an underground bunker. Of those two, the space station is going to remain blight-free longer because it has zero contact with a blighted environment.
-The US government has all but collapsed. Large parts of it, like military and intelligence departments, have been disbanded to focus on agriculture. Other governments are in similar shape. The Indian government, for example, can't keep track of its old surveillance drones.
-What's left of the human population probably numbers in the hundreds of millions. Billions must have starved or been killed in food riots by the present day.

Ascendant Justice wrote:What happened to the military?  

They explicitly said that there are no militaries left. Everyone is just too busy growing food and trying to survive.
There's probably militias to protect crops from vagrants, but those are mostly the farmers and farmhands.

Ascendant Justice wrote:What YEAR is it even (although they might have said and i just wasnt paying attention)?  Stuff like that that I like knowing.  

At a guess, it is at least 2060.