Overall I'd say it was worth seeing, especially on big screen, the effects were great and the exploration of relativistic time dilation was generally really cool in a mass market movie, but there were a number of absurdities.
SPOILERS:
1. Thousand foot high waves don't move across 2ft deep water without breaking. Also, lame camera tricks prevent the astronauts from simply scanning 360d and realizing there's a huge wave bearing down on them. Also, there was no reason whatsoever for Doyle to die on the water planet.
2. Too emo. Too much bawling and crying, too much emotional decision making, the actors weren't convincing as trained scientists or disciplined test pilots. The audience actually burst out laughing when Mann and Cooper got into the fight on the ice planet, and when Cooper just let Mann bash his helmet in a couple times instead of pulling away like normal person would. See 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff for how such people should be portrayed. Artistic integrity sacrificed for artful, faux emotional appeal, SOP for Hollywood these days.
3. When Mann crashed the shuttle into the mothership, then Cooper and Brand saved the mothership, one second it was over a planet, and not the first planet they visited that was really close to the black hole but the next one out. The next instant they were in danger of falling into the black hole. Months or years worth of distance traversed in seconds.
4. Cooper saved Brand by dropping both TARS and himself into the black hole, giving Brand on the mothership enough velocity/lack of mass/whatever to escape the black hole. The time dilation effects of him dropping into the black hole should have meant he and Brand diverged greatly in age, yet the end of the movie showed him taking off to go find her, same age.
5. The premise of the movie is that future, advanced, five-dimensional humanity was using its power over gravity, time, and higher dimensions to help humanity of the past survive the dying and 'Marsification' of the earth. But the paradox was never resolved - if humanity of the past couldn't survive on its own, how did it ever become humanity of the future? I suppose they did that on purpose to let the audience have fun debating it afterwards.
There were a few others I can't remember atm, but you get the gist. Some of these, like #3, I suppose have to be done to cram the whole story into a 2hr45m movie (another cool thing about it - nice and long), but others were just annoyingly pointless.
But again, overall it was good, worth watching, and having Kip Thorne co-produce helped a lot. Just don't expect perfection, even with his name in the credits.
1. It was a largely uniformly flat planet. It was only 2ft deep due to the tidal wave borrowing water ahead of it. See videos of Tsunamis doing the same thing
4. I thought this one was explained by the baseball scene at the end as the ball falls upwards when it crosses some sort of mid point.
5. You are thinking of time linearly moving forward, cause and effect. I think the library scene and their explanations of the 5th dimension aimed to explain that time is another dimension that can be altered. "Whatever can happen will happen".
The ball scene at the end happened because the ball hit the 'escape velocity' of the spherical habitat, which allowed it to break the gravitation pull of centrifugal force and get caught by the other side. I don't see how this references the fact that being sent near and even into the black hole didn't cause some massive time differences between the two scientists as it did earlier in the film.
my understanding was the station at the end had true localised gravitation, thanks to the 'quantum data' TARS collected, rather than psuedo gravity induced by centrifugal force
with the baseball the ball left the gravitation of the field's surface and entered the gravity on the other side of the column station's interior surface that held the house
Interesting, it certainly gives an explanation to the not very clear "Why do we need this equation to get people off the planet" question, but then why build the ship as a cylinder (which by design takes advantage of centrifugal force) if they're going to use localized gravity to keep things on the ground? I assumed they had taken advantage of gravity manipulation to save on immense fuel costs of getting the giant payload out of Earth's gravity well, and used centrifugal force while en route.
though unable to answer explicitly a hypothetical of a hypothetical of a fiction.. it is a fun, and arguably healthy'productive exercise to dream on it..
from the perspective of the film makers it seemed like a shout out to the colony art nasa published a while back(i), similar to the shout out to event horizon: 'your explanation opened my mind, bending space time like a piece of paper and passing through it like a pencil.. i'll take it to the next level, what is a hole in three dimensions? open the paper and look at the hole as a circle forming a sphere' fun stuff
if we want to examine the practicality of a cylindrical colony i think we could come up with something.. maybe as a safety measure from space debris? maybe as an engineering consideration: it was easier to build an accommodatingly sized colony like this? easier to maintain a controlled climate? maybe as a lighting'photosynthesis consideration?
perhaps it's a 'so preoccupied with whether they could' punchline? perhaps the other side of the column is also utilised space: imagine almost doubling the surface area of the planet by colonising both the surface and the interior of the planet with an inverted zenith; and the film only showed us inside the column, again, as a wink at the audience
if it had artificial "true" gravity then why was it shaped like a cylinder? typically the cylinder shape is used to take advantage of rotation for centrifugal force "fake" gravity.
i tried to address this concern in the reply above, but i wanted to mention i like your use of ""s,
i felt dirty, and considered and reconsidered multiple times the verbage, saying 'psuedo gravity'
i like the idea of gravity perhaps being an effect of inertia due to centrifugal forces, caused by the spinning and orbiting and expanding and mass of objects in space, stead it being it's own agnostic 'force'
in which case setting centrifugal force and gravity as separates would be incorrect, and the ""s wholly necessary
#3: I remember it being mentioned that both those planets were orbiting the black hole, Mann was probably on the opposite side of the black hole that Miller was on. Only Edmunds was further. They went to Mann via the farside to avoid the black hole (as they did with Miller), but perhaps the explosion and spin pushed it to the side of the planet that was closer to the black hole.
My understanding is that the water planet was closest to the black hole, as it was the only one they had to be super careful with re time dilation. Eg, every hour on the planet is 7 years on Earth, and some amount longer even just back on the orbiting mothership - Romily aged 23 yrs while he waited up there. That wasn't a problem with Mann's planet, further away from the black hole.
sure. I didn't elaborate in my first post because its slightly off topic considering the article posted is about the science of the movie rather than the writing of the story.
that's where my problem is. I think its a kind of poorly written story. hollow characters, implausible social explanations, and a bit too much deus ex machina. I understand that the deus ex machina elements of the story are at least partially explained by the conclusion, but they are also largely unexplained and creates a premise that we are forced to accept on faith. that harms my suspension of disbelief.
unfortunately, my issues with Interstellar have very little to do with whether or not the black hole was portrayed realistically.
edit: why was I downvoted? for saying I didn't like the movie? come on guys.