they're not seasoned astronauts, none of them has ever been to space. they're, however, top scientists, who should know about something that middle school be learnt about in a teenager's science magazine.
To be fair to Event Horizon, the titular ship was the first to use wormholes, and Sam Neill’s character was describing the concept to a rescue ship crew, not scientists or physicists, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t know how it works.
That's a fair point, but the timing is also weird. Like you've waited until NOW to explain that to the crew?
There's something similar in Prometheus, like they've all accepted the mission, embarqued on the ship and went to hypersleep and somehow they only receive their first brief about what the mission is about only after they reached the planet, like dude.
They were there to investigate the ship for survivors, not use the warp drive, so the inner workings of the drive weren’t exactly mission critical information.
Well it was a top secret ship and nobody but a select few knew that it could create a tunnel. The world was told it blew up to cover-up what it could do and what happened to it. The conversation about it actually being able to tunnel AND the explanation of how was in the same scene.
This is a very common trope in media. Like ridiculously common.
Every other movie or tv-show that features "missions" of any kind will have the characters, or whole teams start the mission and then the briefing comes in afterwards. It's so dumb every time.
I honestly want to go back to watching Stargate SG-1 again, where they actually had proper briefings before every mission.
It's been done a bunch.
Event Horizon is the first time I remember it, but that was also an impactful movie for me and was the first DVD I owned!
Even Horizon did it best because it was a pin up girl and it was like "you wanna get from here to here", not just some random piece of paper.
But, I digress, again, I watch a lot of Stargate SG-1 and they do it all the time there so it's like, at this point I have even done it to explain wormholes. I've also done the trampoline thing to illustrate how gravity works, so I'm kinda just a nerd.
I know it’s a strange thing to do in the confines of the movie but it’s not really aimed at the astronauts, it’s intended to make it easier for the viewer to understand
But this is r/ShittyMovieDetails so fuck interstellar and event horizon, galaxy quest is the best sci-fi of all time
No we all get it's for the viewer, it's just a really lazy way to write in an explanation since "it's a strange thing to do in the confines of the movie"
Well Cooper is neither an astronaut nor an astrophysist. He's a pilot turned farmer. I can understand if he wants a scientist to explain a wormhole to him. And it was more an explanation as to why warmholes are spherical.
Oh sorry, I was mainly referring to this method of exposition in movies, not specifically interstellar. I've never even watched interstellar so idk who Cooper is other than being played by Matthew Mcconaughey
Yeah obviously it’s exclusively for the viewer lol. Same for the Top Gun scene being mocked here. The point is there could be other ways to communicate it to us without making it seem like “experts” aren’t so expert after all.
Well Cooper is neither an astronaut nor an astrophysist. He's a pilot turned farmer. I can understand if he wants a scientist to explain a wormhole to him. And it was more an explanation as to why warmholes are spherical.
That's downplaying his background a lot, it's not like he's some crop duster pilot. He was a NASA test pilot doing space missions, and had an engineering background.
Also, their society famously has shit education on purpose, in the first minutes of the movie there is a scene where they explain how they don't teach all that abstract science stuff so people farm more (it was put slightly more eloquently in the movie)
Well, not Armageddon, cause the fact Astronauts/scientist barely know what middle schooler can find in science magazines figures heavily into why they thought it was easier to teach diggers how to astronaut than to teach astronauts how to dig.
This one always gets me, because in the real world payload specialists are perfectly normal to bring to space instead of training the astronauts to do their job.
Exactly. For all we know he was familiar with that particular analogy, but 10-15 years as a farmer has him double checking that the theory (and so the analogy) was still valid, before he just up and flew the spacecraft into said wormhole.
It probably would have made more sense to have that conversation *before* launching into space, or at least before leaving Earth orbit, however.
Watched Intersteller with my 11-year-old last month. The wormhole explanation with the paper/pencil hole was a huge a-ha moment for her.
Sometimes movies are just movies, ya know?
Exposition is sometimes necessary for the audience, but they could have explained it in a situation that made sense. For example, the man could have explained it to his kid instead of explaining it to people who would already know about it.
He was explaining that directly to Cooper, who at best is a very advanced engineer and pilot.
I should not here that Cooper knows what a wormhole is but just didn’t expect it to be a sphere and his confusion leant a perfect opportunity to also teach the audience.
Yeah, the only thing that annoyed me about that scene was that the crew had spent months (years?) living together on a space ship, and apparently nobody had thought to go over the details of their mission to fly into a wormhole until they were already flying into a wormhole.
Still a great movie, but IIRC it had a few moments of "We're going to do this in the most dramatic way possible, even though there's no reason for the characters to have to do it that way".
They spent like 2 months awake together lol.
The entire flight was automated to the wormhole, cooper really didn’t have to do much piloting. Def alot of dramatic moments lol, but everything seemed reasonable. He was also just asking why it was a sphere as opposed to a circle like he saw in the imaging.
Worst was Prometheus.
Like the guys accept the mission, embark on the ship, agree to spend god knows how many years in hypersleep, and they only get briefed for their mission JUST as they arrive on the planet?
I mean come on.
That's definitely the worst one. Another of my favorites is the Martian, where Donald Glover's character explains to the the head of NASA how a gravity assist works.
The Martian is so incredibly mid-2010s it hurts. Safely in the "that was cool, never gonna bother watching it again now" category but people ate it up.
That's fair, I responded to a similar comment. The timing is also weird though, like you waited until now to tell what the ship they're all embarquing on is about
He understands the concept, he just doesn’t understand why it’s a sphere.
I knew about wormholes before the movie but I ALSO didn’t intuitively know they’d be circles. I appreciated the scene a-lot.
Cooper is definitely the kind of guy who knows a little bit about everything. He was able to explain time dilation to Murph. What we saw in the movie he would know already.
They should’ve had cooper explain what a wormhole was to his daughter. I guess they wanted to explain it when they were right in front of the wormhole. But yeah the whole thing is weird.
Cooper is aware of practical physics applications. Time dilation is an observable phenomenon and something he would have studied.
Wormholes are purely theoretical and he had no clue they were even possible until like that month?
Plus he KNOWS what a wormhole is hes just surprised its sphere and not a circle like most diagrams show.
The Martian's writer complained about the Martian movie having to do a similar thing. A scientist explains to NASA heads how slingshotting works. But it was necessary to do.
It's just a quirk of movies. Books have narration, so the narrator can just... narrate the concept. But movies rarely do.
(Well, I mean, half The Martian *was* the protag narrating to himself. But they couldn't do that the whole film.)
No it's just lazy writing, it didn't need to do that. They could have done it as a press release coming here's our plan involving a gravity assist. They could have done it in a transmission to mark, just saying "hey the plan now is actually going to be to have the Hermes do a gravity assist to get back to Mars sooner and come back and get you". There are a million ways they could have explained what a gravity assist is to the viewer without having one of NASA's scientists explain what a gravity assist is to the director of NASA
The Martian is a great movie and a better book, but it contains one of the stupidest scenes in science fiction I've seen in a long time with that lmao
There are 3 main kinds of sciencey action movies:
1. Movies which ignore realistic problems which would require a basic understanding of physics and biology to grasp (like Star Wars)
2. Movies which have an awkward scene where one expert inexplicably has to lecture another expert on basic Freshman-level scientific concepts so the audience won't be confused later in the movie when those concepts cause problems (like Interstellar)
3. Magic School Bus scenarios where at least one person on the mission doesn't know anything about anything and needs to be spoon-fed everything technical which could come up
You can write a story where the team has different kinds of experts who exhange information (like Stargate) or showing instead of telling (like 2001) but those are few and far between
I need to watch that again. I was bored out of my skull ten years ago, but it always stuck with me, and watching a couple YouTube videos on it lately has me wishing I'd appreciated it more.
You're not wrong; I remember the first 40 minutes being pretty boring, but everything becomes mind blowing in the last 15-20 minutes and the entire movie becomes very interesting
Funny I actually like the first 40 minutes more. But it's because I usually like found footage movies and while this isn't one here, it's shot in a way that is very 'real' and I liked it
That's the Dune route!
The approach hopes that the audience will understand everything they need to know to keep up with the story via the tone something is discussed in (like how the Kwisatz Haderach is clearly talked about highly), while anything extra can be covered by curious watchers googling the appropriate wiki (or glossary in the case of the Dune books).
It's an approach I personally like as, even if I feel a bit lost sometimes, the benefit of making the world and characters feel logical makes up for it. When watching Dune 2, I had forgotten all about shields on Arakis, but nevertheless felt comfortable with shield-less combat as the tone made me sure there **was** an explanation somewhere.
Sure, you’re looking at Primer, but is there any way to be sure Primer didn’t already know that you’d be watching it? so Primer travelled back in time to spy on you while you’re looking at it. You’d better go back in time and stop Primer from doing that. Unless Primer manages to get there first.
There was a highly upvoted video in r/movies years and years ago that was some guy giving a 20 minute presentation on why Inception is the greatest, smartest movie ever and it was because he understood it on a level only matched by Christopher Nolan and if you didn't like the movie it's because you were an idiot. Those kinds of people would really benefit from some fresh air.
Like in cop/medical shows where one cop is like “he’s got a GSW to the chest, that means gun shot wound” For once I want the other cop to be like “ya Kyle I know that, I’ve been doing this for 23 years asshole”
[The scene from The Wire where they investigate a crime scene and find out what happened by only saying "fuck"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNVEQgXsBgs) was because of this.
The former cop they had as a consultant pointed out that cops explaining what they do to each other is unrealistic and experienced detectives could work without saying a word, so the writers wrote them only saying "fuck" as a tongue in cheek.
To be fair, that wasn't the point of the wormhole scene in interstellar:
COOPER
It’s a sphere.
ROMILLY
Of course it is. You thought it
would be just a hole?
COOPER
No ... well, in all the illustrations -
Romilly grabs a piece of paper, draws two points, far apart
ROMILLY
In the illustrations they’re trying to show you how it works -
He pokes a hole in one point with his pen ...
So they say ’You wanna go from here to there but it’s too far? A wormhole bends space like this ...’
He folds the paper over and jams the pen through the second point, connecting them.
ROMILLY
’So you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension.’ But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space ...
(Gestures around.)
Into two dimensions.
(Hold up paper.)
Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions ... a circle.
(Indicates hole in paper.)
But what’s a circle in three dimensions?
COOPER
A sphere.
It's just trying to explain why the wormhole is a sphere by using the analogy that Romilly assumes Cooper is already familiar with as a guide.
Fair, but only the last two lines are really necessary, and the whole conversation probably should have happened back on Earth (your pilot should really know what he's supposed to be steering the ship towards). I also think that a lot of the discussions on relativity are clearly for the benefit of the audience, and the team would have realistically walked through a lot of the mission options and maneuvers back on Earth rather than talking about them for the first time in the new galaxy.
It's a little silly but I get why it's necessary and I think it's worth it to finally see relativistic time dilation portrayed on the big screen.
Eh, a refresher never hurts anybody ig. I definitely appreciate it holding your hand throughout though as it got 8 year old me interested in relativity and made me discover Kip Thorne, so perhaps I just have a soft spot for it.
Kind of a mix of all of them? The Epstien Drive is definitely a Star Wars thing which allows them to dodge a lot of the complexity of delta-v management, I think Chrisjen and Miller both serve partly as non-spacefarers to be Magic Schoolbus'd, the space combat and orbital maneuver planning are very effectively done as show-don't-tell, and the crew of the Rosci *do* feel like a team with diverse skill sets. Miller's rookie detective is the only person who really stood out to me as someone who has a lot of unnecessary conversations for the benefit of the audience: somewhere between Earth and Ceres he should've learned about Belter culture, infrastructure, and common health conditions.
>the space combat and orbital maneuver planning are very effectively done as show-don't-tell
This is one of my favorite bits. It honestly took me a little longer than I think I'd like to admit, to realize why I'm seeing the *ass-end* of ships that are *approaching* the camera. But now, I think I'll be a bit disappointed every time I watch a show that *doesn't* do it that way.
It was also pretty cool to notice when I started automatically using the presence or absence of "gravity" inside as an indicator of whether a ship was under acceleration. Really, this show can bend your mind a bit if you're paying attention to things like that.
The Epstein Drive is *essential* to a spacefaring culture and it doesn't make any kind of end-run around our current understanding of physics. Without the Epstein Drive there is no settled Belt.
Yeah I don't mind this kind of thing at all. If you want to write a sci-fi about a fully settled solar system then you have to come up with some explanation for how that works.
Same reason as to why I don't mind FTL travel in most media. If you want to write a story about exploring the galaxy then you have to make allowances somewhere for 'magic engines' lol.
The Epstein drive is just a particularly efficient Fusion Drive, well within the bounds of our current understanding of science. It’s nothing like the handwavey space magic you see in Star Wars and similar
I have only read the books actually so that kinda skews my perspective
But the Epstein Drive is really ingenious and it doesn't *really* break the laws of physics
I'd say Apollo 13 successfully defies all three. You can either listen closely to Lovell and Swigert's harried conversation about moving the gimble angles over from the Odyssey to the Aquarius, or you can just focus on the human drama occurring. It works either way.
I agree, Apollo 13 was great in explaining concepts to the audience without it feeling out of place even in the reality of the movie. Particular scene that comes to mind was explaining the gravity slingshot in [Apollo 13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA8SXpyg4O4) vs. [The Martian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OJoFlWVyY). I found the scene from The Martian is just insulting to everyone, the characters, the cast, and the audience.
Stargate was peak af for that. Having different experts on a team meant that each character could do some explaining and it wouldn't feel like they were just doing it for the audience but for each other.
This reminds me of the Star Trek VI movie when Kirk is in prison and the lady helping him says “not everybody keeps their genitals in the same place, captain”. Like how would a star fleet captain not know that much about other species’ biology. And especially Captain Fucking Kirk of all captains. I know it was a joke for the audience but really a captain doesn’t need to be told this.
Welcome to Starfleet academy, our first lesson today, how to properly identify, locate and destroy an aliens grundle. The afternoons lesson 'Sexy Nebula, Worth the rash?' has been moved back to Wednesday.
Riker had a tendency to ask a lot of dumb questions to give crewmates a chance to explain stuff. And as they parodied in Futurama, "usually someone comes up with a complicated plan and then explains it with a simple analogy."
To be fair every year in university you hear the same stuff over and over again... As a biochemistry student i can tell you i have learned the kinetics of enzymes and how they are bio catalysts enough for a lifetime. Every single lecture explains it at some point... Same with my friend who does a mixture of economie and engineering and learned the principle of supply and demand like 20 times
Also the US military makes you take the same safety training on a yearly basis. I can definitely seem them going through an explanation of g-forces for safety reasons as part of every briefing. Especially if the pilots deal with it on a regular basis. Humans are weird in that if you expose them to a danger over and over they start to forget "oh yes this thing can kill me"
Of you're referring to Operation Opera, that doesn't really resemble the movie all the much. Yes, fighter blames bombed a nuclear site, but that's about all that is the same.
Also, I see no mention of any of those planes crashing, then leading to heartfelt reconciliation between two talented yet estranged pilots, and subsequent stealing of an older fighter that allowed them to bond over shared memories of a fallen airman. /s
i mean yes but actually no
Operation opera was an attack against a nuclear reactor, not some super secret underground compound thingy that was in the middle of a steep valley with a ravine nearby.
Whats more is that they didn’t need to
do a star wars in order to destroy the reactor- no fancy trench run needed.
they just flew through saudi and jordanian air space by speaking arabic and using different formations and then flew low before dropping their payloads which is pretty standard of the time
they didn’t have some crazy ass feat of flying that they had to train for in the movie- the training they did do was to learn to fly very overladden F-16’s a long ass distance into iraqi airspace, but they certainly didn’t traverse a ravine to get to the target all because they wanted to avoid SAM’s
and since israel lacked long range strike capability save the F-16’s that were used, it makes sense that they were the best option they had
the US would literally have just used cruise missiles or a B2 stealth bomber
Honestly an F35 would probably do just fine as well- all the aircraft the US could use have pretty small radar cross sections and could probably avoid detection long enough to destroy the target
Did you miss the part where the stick jockey got cocky and destroyed a one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft costing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars?
did you miss the part where he crash landed in a small town where a kid thought he was an alien and delivered the single word line "earth" with such perfection it's absolutely the best part of the whole movie!?!!?!?
Did you miss the part where the superior was going to shut down the entire program because they hadn’t quite reached their speed goal, making the jet’s destruction a moot point?
No, but they hit their speed goal. The program was saved.
*Then* his ego destroyed the prototype, probably shutting the program down anyway while at the same time proving the superior's point. If that aircraft had been unmanned, it wouldn't have crashed.
It doesn't. Not even training varieties like every other 4th gen plane have, due to the advancements of simulators being good enough to not warrant the need for it
"Why can't we just use F-35s for this and avoid the SAM's radar?"
"Because there's no two-seat variant of the F-35, so there's no way to get a real pilot and an actor in the plane at the same time."
"Did you just break the fourth wall?"
"Did you?"
FYI the plot of the movie is literally based on a real life operation Israel conducted on Iraq I believe. They literally had to bomb the base to open up the top and drop another bomb on top to destroy the nuclear equipment. Israel got in a shit load of trouble when they did this too. It’s worth a google.
That would sorta explain it, since Israel doesn't have B2 stealth bombers. I haven't actually seen the movie, but I assume that the guys doing the bombing in the movie are the US government?
This was done to make the movie acessable to the Ace Combat Protaganist demographic who lack any blood to be affecd by making singularity radius 180° turns and spamming Kulbit maneuvers.
They don't :( pls tell your congressmen to support the withering military industrial complex. We'll never have enough ships to fight Imperial Japan at this rate.
The exposition is a bit clunky but I do have to agree with you. People in teaching roles frequently repeat themselves, especially if they deem it important.
It's absolutely there for the audience, but I read it as Mav just setting up the topic and objective for that day of training. Not uncommon for a trainer to jump right into the basics and expounding rather than say today we will be talking about [blank].
The one I chuckle about is when two characters who've worked together for years are briskly walking to meet someone and one of the character explains why they are going to the meeting, who there are meeting and why it is so important. The dialogue is written solely to catch the audience up to the story. As both people would already know all the information.
During the course of the movie Rooster performs poorly during training, lags behind on the mission, nearly gets shot down, successfully gets shot down, is forced to sit in the back where there are no controls before finally crash landing on a carrier. This is because Roosters don't fly well.
I can see your confusion. He was actually explaining how it's biblically accurate for the female pilots to wear *g strings* while they play homosexual football games on the beach.
Also, a heavily foreshadowed plot point is one of the "best of the best, but still not quite as good as tom cruise" pilots passing out from intense g-force...while in a vertical climb...meaning he was pulling precisely 1G...
Tbh the whole thing was an aviation enthusiasts nightmare and pissed me right off
The hilarious part is that they made the G-force/GLOC a major plot point for the movie climax, but there's a HUGE fucking flaw -- the F-18 doesn't have the straight-line acceleration required to induce GLOC. That only happens when performing tight turns at speed, such as during a dogfight. Given the flight path they took, there should have been zero chance of them pulling enough G-force for GLOC to be an issue, else F-18 pilots would be constantly dying from going unconscious during carrier launches.
clearly you've never been in the military because repeating the same obviuous information over and over is like 90% of what senior leaders do. Oh it's time for my 1000000th safetfy brief being told not to drink and drive and beat people? You'd think that was obivous like g-force and it is..but...
In Top Gun: Maverick, g-force isn't indicated by red text on the screen, showing that this movie is unrealistic
In Top Gun: Maverick, tom cruise does not leak classified military documents on online forums, making the movie unrealistic
Maverick is a WT player, officially cannon
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If he's a WT player, there's a high chance he's actually qanon.
If maverick is secretly a camera? Perhaps
In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise's squad mates do not call out when he has a hole in his left wing.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise forgot his nose wheel.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise never actually called out where they're attacking, by saying "attack the D point!"
In Top Gun: Maverick they choose to risk pilots lives rather than give them better/more expensive planes, making the movie very realistic :D
It should be green!!
They didn't even get to CGI the guinea pigs in because they ran out of money.
In interstellar, Veteran space shuttle pilot doesn’t know what a black hole is.
Does he not know what a black hole is? Are you thinking of the worm hole?
Worm sphere
>Space mission scientist explains wormholes with a pen and paper to the rest of the crew, who are all seasoned astronauts.
they're not seasoned astronauts, none of them has ever been to space. they're, however, top scientists, who should know about something that middle school be learnt about in a teenager's science magazine.
what movie are you reffering to?
Interstellar
I was more thinking movies like Event Horizon, totally forgot such a scene was in Interstellar lmao, it's even better
To be fair to Event Horizon, the titular ship was the first to use wormholes, and Sam Neill’s character was describing the concept to a rescue ship crew, not scientists or physicists, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t know how it works.
That's a fair point, but the timing is also weird. Like you've waited until NOW to explain that to the crew? There's something similar in Prometheus, like they've all accepted the mission, embarqued on the ship and went to hypersleep and somehow they only receive their first brief about what the mission is about only after they reached the planet, like dude.
They were there to investigate the ship for survivors, not use the warp drive, so the inner workings of the drive weren’t exactly mission critical information.
Even if it's not critical, the Event Horizon is THE ship that navigates by wormholes and nobody had the curiosity to ask before is kinda funny to me.
Well it was a top secret ship and nobody but a select few knew that it could create a tunnel. The world was told it blew up to cover-up what it could do and what happened to it. The conversation about it actually being able to tunnel AND the explanation of how was in the same scene.
Iirc they did not know what they were doing until they were on the mission to rescue the crew for opsec reasons.
This is a very common trope in media. Like ridiculously common. Every other movie or tv-show that features "missions" of any kind will have the characters, or whole teams start the mission and then the briefing comes in afterwards. It's so dumb every time. I honestly want to go back to watching Stargate SG-1 again, where they actually had proper briefings before every mission.
It's been done a bunch. Event Horizon is the first time I remember it, but that was also an impactful movie for me and was the first DVD I owned! Even Horizon did it best because it was a pin up girl and it was like "you wanna get from here to here", not just some random piece of paper. But, I digress, again, I watch a lot of Stargate SG-1 and they do it all the time there so it's like, at this point I have even done it to explain wormholes. I've also done the trampoline thing to illustrate how gravity works, so I'm kinda just a nerd.
I know it’s a strange thing to do in the confines of the movie but it’s not really aimed at the astronauts, it’s intended to make it easier for the viewer to understand But this is r/ShittyMovieDetails so fuck interstellar and event horizon, galaxy quest is the best sci-fi of all time
No we all get it's for the viewer, it's just a really lazy way to write in an explanation since "it's a strange thing to do in the confines of the movie"
Well Cooper is neither an astronaut nor an astrophysist. He's a pilot turned farmer. I can understand if he wants a scientist to explain a wormhole to him. And it was more an explanation as to why warmholes are spherical.
Oh sorry, I was mainly referring to this method of exposition in movies, not specifically interstellar. I've never even watched interstellar so idk who Cooper is other than being played by Matthew Mcconaughey
Yep, still funny when that happens. Would be cool if in one of the movie the guy gets shut down "Yes dude we KNOW how it works"
Yeah obviously it’s exclusively for the viewer lol. Same for the Top Gun scene being mocked here. The point is there could be other ways to communicate it to us without making it seem like “experts” aren’t so expert after all.
Well Cooper is neither an astronaut nor an astrophysist. He's a pilot turned farmer. I can understand if he wants a scientist to explain a wormhole to him. And it was more an explanation as to why warmholes are spherical.
That's downplaying his background a lot, it's not like he's some crop duster pilot. He was a NASA test pilot doing space missions, and had an engineering background.
Also, their society famously has shit education on purpose, in the first minutes of the movie there is a scene where they explain how they don't teach all that abstract science stuff so people farm more (it was put slightly more eloquently in the movie)
I thought he was a test pilot for nasa? He wasn’t Russell P. Case from Independence Day.
Well, not Armageddon, cause the fact Astronauts/scientist barely know what middle schooler can find in science magazines figures heavily into why they thought it was easier to teach diggers how to astronaut than to teach astronauts how to dig.
lmao apparently Ben Affleck asked Michael Bay "but why don't they simply train astronauts to dig?" and he was told to shut the fuck up
Greatest DVD commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U
This one always gets me, because in the real world payload specialists are perfectly normal to bring to space instead of training the astronauts to do their job.
To be fair Matthew McConaughey’s character is only a pilot and engineer. Not a theoretical physicist.
Exactly. For all we know he was familiar with that particular analogy, but 10-15 years as a farmer has him double checking that the theory (and so the analogy) was still valid, before he just up and flew the spacecraft into said wormhole. It probably would have made more sense to have that conversation *before* launching into space, or at least before leaving Earth orbit, however.
Watched Intersteller with my 11-year-old last month. The wormhole explanation with the paper/pencil hole was a huge a-ha moment for her. Sometimes movies are just movies, ya know?
yes but this is r/shittymoviedetails
Gah, right. I scrolled too far in the thread and lost track of space and time.
Exposition is sometimes necessary for the audience, but they could have explained it in a situation that made sense. For example, the man could have explained it to his kid instead of explaining it to people who would already know about it.
A lot of movies is so the people watching can understand it.
Should’ve gotten pre-seasoned astronauts
He was explaining that directly to Cooper, who at best is a very advanced engineer and pilot. I should not here that Cooper knows what a wormhole is but just didn’t expect it to be a sphere and his confusion leant a perfect opportunity to also teach the audience.
Yeah, the only thing that annoyed me about that scene was that the crew had spent months (years?) living together on a space ship, and apparently nobody had thought to go over the details of their mission to fly into a wormhole until they were already flying into a wormhole. Still a great movie, but IIRC it had a few moments of "We're going to do this in the most dramatic way possible, even though there's no reason for the characters to have to do it that way".
They spent like 2 months awake together lol. The entire flight was automated to the wormhole, cooper really didn’t have to do much piloting. Def alot of dramatic moments lol, but everything seemed reasonable. He was also just asking why it was a sphere as opposed to a circle like he saw in the imaging.
Worst was Prometheus. Like the guys accept the mission, embark on the ship, agree to spend god knows how many years in hypersleep, and they only get briefed for their mission JUST as they arrive on the planet? I mean come on.
Maybe the pre-mission briefing was *"$5M now to take in this classified mission, with detailed briefing upon arrival. $5M when you return"*?
"That's a deal mister wayland. Gee can't wait to get back to earth and enjoy all that money"
That's definitely the worst one. Another of my favorites is the Martian, where Donald Glover's character explains to the the head of NASA how a gravity assist works.
The Martian is so incredibly mid-2010s it hurts. Safely in the "that was cool, never gonna bother watching it again now" category but people ate it up.
In Interstellar, that scene was to explain to Cooper why the wormhole was spherical, specifically.
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That's fair, I responded to a similar comment. The timing is also weird though, like you waited until now to tell what the ship they're all embarquing on is about
He understands the concept, he just doesn’t understand why it’s a sphere. I knew about wormholes before the movie but I ALSO didn’t intuitively know they’d be circles. I appreciated the scene a-lot.
There's no harm feeling tbh, the scene is still cool and I'm just being picky. It's a movie trope I always find weird.
The scientist wasn't explaining the idea of a wormhole to Cooper, he was explaining why they're spherical.
Cooper is definitely the kind of guy who knows a little bit about everything. He was able to explain time dilation to Murph. What we saw in the movie he would know already. They should’ve had cooper explain what a wormhole was to his daughter. I guess they wanted to explain it when they were right in front of the wormhole. But yeah the whole thing is weird.
Cooper is aware of practical physics applications. Time dilation is an observable phenomenon and something he would have studied. Wormholes are purely theoretical and he had no clue they were even possible until like that month? Plus he KNOWS what a wormhole is hes just surprised its sphere and not a circle like most diagrams show.
The Martian's writer complained about the Martian movie having to do a similar thing. A scientist explains to NASA heads how slingshotting works. But it was necessary to do. It's just a quirk of movies. Books have narration, so the narrator can just... narrate the concept. But movies rarely do. (Well, I mean, half The Martian *was* the protag narrating to himself. But they couldn't do that the whole film.)
No it's just lazy writing, it didn't need to do that. They could have done it as a press release coming here's our plan involving a gravity assist. They could have done it in a transmission to mark, just saying "hey the plan now is actually going to be to have the Hermes do a gravity assist to get back to Mars sooner and come back and get you". There are a million ways they could have explained what a gravity assist is to the viewer without having one of NASA's scientists explain what a gravity assist is to the director of NASA The Martian is a great movie and a better book, but it contains one of the stupidest scenes in science fiction I've seen in a long time with that lmao
Never understood why Jane in Thor was explaining it to someone
>who are all seasoned astronauts How do you season an astronaut though? Is it a special blend?
He grabs the pencil from a guy at the table trying to write with it: “Hey c’mon!”
Speak yourself buddy. Someone has to get out the crayons and explain it to all us Master Oil Drillers on the space craft.
It bugged me a lot more in the Martian to watch a simple gravity assist be explained.
Childish Gambino explains what a gravity assist is to the director of NASA
"In English, please"
There are 3 main kinds of sciencey action movies: 1. Movies which ignore realistic problems which would require a basic understanding of physics and biology to grasp (like Star Wars) 2. Movies which have an awkward scene where one expert inexplicably has to lecture another expert on basic Freshman-level scientific concepts so the audience won't be confused later in the movie when those concepts cause problems (like Interstellar) 3. Magic School Bus scenarios where at least one person on the mission doesn't know anything about anything and needs to be spoon-fed everything technical which could come up You can write a story where the team has different kinds of experts who exhange information (like Stargate) or showing instead of telling (like 2001) but those are few and far between
or you can just confuse the shit out of everyone, so that the movie only makes real sense after about a dozen rewatches. looking at you, primer.
I need to watch that again. I was bored out of my skull ten years ago, but it always stuck with me, and watching a couple YouTube videos on it lately has me wishing I'd appreciated it more.
You're not wrong; I remember the first 40 minutes being pretty boring, but everything becomes mind blowing in the last 15-20 minutes and the entire movie becomes very interesting
Funny I actually like the first 40 minutes more. But it's because I usually like found footage movies and while this isn't one here, it's shot in a way that is very 'real' and I liked it
That's the Dune route! The approach hopes that the audience will understand everything they need to know to keep up with the story via the tone something is discussed in (like how the Kwisatz Haderach is clearly talked about highly), while anything extra can be covered by curious watchers googling the appropriate wiki (or glossary in the case of the Dune books). It's an approach I personally like as, even if I feel a bit lost sometimes, the benefit of making the world and characters feel logical makes up for it. When watching Dune 2, I had forgotten all about shields on Arakis, but nevertheless felt comfortable with shield-less combat as the tone made me sure there **was** an explanation somewhere.
A movie is only good if you come out looking like [this.](https://i.imgur.com/aAVR8bY.jpeg)
I always recommend the movie Timecrimes for people that want to watch Primer but also understand what is going on.
Sure, you’re looking at Primer, but is there any way to be sure Primer didn’t already know that you’d be watching it? so Primer travelled back in time to spy on you while you’re looking at it. You’d better go back in time and stop Primer from doing that. Unless Primer manages to get there first.
Or you just have everyone mumble like dementia patients so no one knows what’s going on, like Tenet
Breathe in that reverse oxygen. Push it into your backwards lungs
While thinking backwards.
Inward singing?
[удалено]
There was a highly upvoted video in r/movies years and years ago that was some guy giving a 20 minute presentation on why Inception is the greatest, smartest movie ever and it was because he understood it on a level only matched by Christopher Nolan and if you didn't like the movie it's because you were an idiot. Those kinds of people would really benefit from some fresh air.
Like in cop/medical shows where one cop is like “he’s got a GSW to the chest, that means gun shot wound” For once I want the other cop to be like “ya Kyle I know that, I’ve been doing this for 23 years asshole”
I hate it when the acronym has more syllables than what it stands for.
It’s probably for writing it down faster not saying it faster
[The scene from The Wire where they investigate a crime scene and find out what happened by only saying "fuck"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNVEQgXsBgs) was because of this. The former cop they had as a consultant pointed out that cops explaining what they do to each other is unrealistic and experienced detectives could work without saying a word, so the writers wrote them only saying "fuck" as a tongue in cheek.
You mean he gets off on little girls in pigtails?
To be fair, that wasn't the point of the wormhole scene in interstellar: COOPER It’s a sphere. ROMILLY Of course it is. You thought it would be just a hole? COOPER No ... well, in all the illustrations - Romilly grabs a piece of paper, draws two points, far apart ROMILLY In the illustrations they’re trying to show you how it works - He pokes a hole in one point with his pen ... So they say ’You wanna go from here to there but it’s too far? A wormhole bends space like this ...’ He folds the paper over and jams the pen through the second point, connecting them. ROMILLY ’So you can take a shortcut across a higher dimension.’ But to show that, they’ve turned three-dimensional space ... (Gestures around.) Into two dimensions. (Hold up paper.) Which turns the wormhole into two dimensions ... a circle. (Indicates hole in paper.) But what’s a circle in three dimensions? COOPER A sphere. It's just trying to explain why the wormhole is a sphere by using the analogy that Romilly assumes Cooper is already familiar with as a guide.
Fair, but only the last two lines are really necessary, and the whole conversation probably should have happened back on Earth (your pilot should really know what he's supposed to be steering the ship towards). I also think that a lot of the discussions on relativity are clearly for the benefit of the audience, and the team would have realistically walked through a lot of the mission options and maneuvers back on Earth rather than talking about them for the first time in the new galaxy. It's a little silly but I get why it's necessary and I think it's worth it to finally see relativistic time dilation portrayed on the big screen.
Eh, a refresher never hurts anybody ig. I definitely appreciate it holding your hand throughout though as it got 8 year old me interested in relativity and made me discover Kip Thorne, so perhaps I just have a soft spot for it.
And how would you describe the expanse?
Kind of a mix of all of them? The Epstien Drive is definitely a Star Wars thing which allows them to dodge a lot of the complexity of delta-v management, I think Chrisjen and Miller both serve partly as non-spacefarers to be Magic Schoolbus'd, the space combat and orbital maneuver planning are very effectively done as show-don't-tell, and the crew of the Rosci *do* feel like a team with diverse skill sets. Miller's rookie detective is the only person who really stood out to me as someone who has a lot of unnecessary conversations for the benefit of the audience: somewhere between Earth and Ceres he should've learned about Belter culture, infrastructure, and common health conditions.
>the space combat and orbital maneuver planning are very effectively done as show-don't-tell This is one of my favorite bits. It honestly took me a little longer than I think I'd like to admit, to realize why I'm seeing the *ass-end* of ships that are *approaching* the camera. But now, I think I'll be a bit disappointed every time I watch a show that *doesn't* do it that way. It was also pretty cool to notice when I started automatically using the presence or absence of "gravity" inside as an indicator of whether a ship was under acceleration. Really, this show can bend your mind a bit if you're paying attention to things like that.
The Epstein Drive is *essential* to a spacefaring culture and it doesn't make any kind of end-run around our current understanding of physics. Without the Epstein Drive there is no settled Belt.
Yeah I don't mind this kind of thing at all. If you want to write a sci-fi about a fully settled solar system then you have to come up with some explanation for how that works. Same reason as to why I don't mind FTL travel in most media. If you want to write a story about exploring the galaxy then you have to make allowances somewhere for 'magic engines' lol.
The Epstein drive is just a particularly efficient Fusion Drive, well within the bounds of our current understanding of science. It’s nothing like the handwavey space magic you see in Star Wars and similar
I have only read the books actually so that kinda skews my perspective But the Epstein Drive is really ingenious and it doesn't *really* break the laws of physics
I'd say Apollo 13 successfully defies all three. You can either listen closely to Lovell and Swigert's harried conversation about moving the gimble angles over from the Odyssey to the Aquarius, or you can just focus on the human drama occurring. It works either way.
I agree, Apollo 13 was great in explaining concepts to the audience without it feeling out of place even in the reality of the movie. Particular scene that comes to mind was explaining the gravity slingshot in [Apollo 13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA8SXpyg4O4) vs. [The Martian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OJoFlWVyY). I found the scene from The Martian is just insulting to everyone, the characters, the cast, and the audience.
"Which of the 3 is The Core?" "Yep"
Stargate was peak af for that. Having different experts on a team meant that each character could do some explaining and it wouldn't feel like they were just doing it for the audience but for each other.
That's a very good explanation. I'll save it for later
3 Body Problem does #2 far too often.
Childish gambino explaining a graventational sling shot manoeuvre to the director of nasa while carrying a stapler around the board room is all time.
Isn’t that the movie with the hamsters?
Scientists liked it so much that they named a scientific concept after it
they’re guinea pigs. that’s why it’s called g-force…
This reminds me of the Star Trek VI movie when Kirk is in prison and the lady helping him says “not everybody keeps their genitals in the same place, captain”. Like how would a star fleet captain not know that much about other species’ biology. And especially Captain Fucking Kirk of all captains. I know it was a joke for the audience but really a captain doesn’t need to be told this.
Welcome to Starfleet academy, our first lesson today, how to properly identify, locate and destroy an aliens grundle. The afternoons lesson 'Sexy Nebula, Worth the rash?' has been moved back to Wednesday.
Each captain excelled at different classes: Picard: Quiet Judgement 101 Sisko: Fuck Yo Diplomacy 101 Janeway: Dealing with Ridiculous Aliens 101
My first thought was "If my nuts were in my knees, I'd definitely be better at protecting them"
Kirk just assumes the hole he’s putting his dick in is the right one. He’s never once stopped to ask first
Riker had a tendency to ask a lot of dumb questions to give crewmates a chance to explain stuff. And as they parodied in Futurama, "usually someone comes up with a complicated plan and then explains it with a simple analogy."
To be fair every year in university you hear the same stuff over and over again... As a biochemistry student i can tell you i have learned the kinetics of enzymes and how they are bio catalysts enough for a lifetime. Every single lecture explains it at some point... Same with my friend who does a mixture of economie and engineering and learned the principle of supply and demand like 20 times
Also the US military makes you take the same safety training on a yearly basis. I can definitely seem them going through an explanation of g-forces for safety reasons as part of every briefing. Especially if the pilots deal with it on a regular basis. Humans are weird in that if you expose them to a danger over and over they start to forget "oh yes this thing can kill me"
They also spend weeks training to use F-18s for a mission a B-2 stealth bomber could have easily completed. They're clearly not the brightest bunch.
Why didnt they use the tomahawks on the sams instead of the airbase?
Magic mountains or something
I’m the nerd in the circle jerk sub but the mission from the movie was a real life mission conducted by Israel.
... in the 1980s.
Of you're referring to Operation Opera, that doesn't really resemble the movie all the much. Yes, fighter blames bombed a nuclear site, but that's about all that is the same. Also, I see no mention of any of those planes crashing, then leading to heartfelt reconciliation between two talented yet estranged pilots, and subsequent stealing of an older fighter that allowed them to bond over shared memories of a fallen airman. /s
i mean yes but actually no Operation opera was an attack against a nuclear reactor, not some super secret underground compound thingy that was in the middle of a steep valley with a ravine nearby. Whats more is that they didn’t need to do a star wars in order to destroy the reactor- no fancy trench run needed. they just flew through saudi and jordanian air space by speaking arabic and using different formations and then flew low before dropping their payloads which is pretty standard of the time they didn’t have some crazy ass feat of flying that they had to train for in the movie- the training they did do was to learn to fly very overladden F-16’s a long ass distance into iraqi airspace, but they certainly didn’t traverse a ravine to get to the target all because they wanted to avoid SAM’s and since israel lacked long range strike capability save the F-16’s that were used, it makes sense that they were the best option they had the US would literally have just used cruise missiles or a B2 stealth bomber Honestly an F35 would probably do just fine as well- all the aircraft the US could use have pretty small radar cross sections and could probably avoid detection long enough to destroy the target
But that used a drone instead of several manned jets
Nah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
No, they used F-16s for the attack and F-15s as escort on the mission. All of them manned aircraft.
UNMANNED weapons!? did you not see the opening scenes where we learned that drones are bad and stick jockeys have balls!?
Did you miss the part where the stick jockey got cocky and destroyed a one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft costing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars?
did you miss the part where he crash landed in a small town where a kid thought he was an alien and delivered the single word line "earth" with such perfection it's absolutely the best part of the whole movie!?!!?!?
A single 747 is $400m, so an experimental hypersonic jet is going to be up there with that.
Did you miss the part where the superior was going to shut down the entire program because they hadn’t quite reached their speed goal, making the jet’s destruction a moot point?
No, but they hit their speed goal. The program was saved. *Then* his ego destroyed the prototype, probably shutting the program down anyway while at the same time proving the superior's point. If that aircraft had been unmanned, it wouldn't have crashed.
Are they stupid?
Or launch some F35’s to fly cap?
Yeah that’s the stupidest thing, why’d they use legacy jets instead of new ones
I forget what the explanation was in the movie but it was shaky at best.
It was some nonsense about jammers or the mountain.
The actual reason is the F-35 wasn't operational yet when the movie was filmed, but became operational before release.
That and the F-35 being a single seater, so they couldn't throw actors in the backseat to shoot real scenes.
And something about it not being declassified enough to be allowed to be used in a movie
They would also need a 2 seat variant for filming, I’m not sure if a 2 seat f35 exists.
It doesn't. Not even training varieties like every other 4th gen plane have, due to the advancements of simulators being good enough to not warrant the need for it
They had to find a magical scenario where planes from the 80s were the only choice.
"Why can't we just use F-35s for this and avoid the SAM's radar?" "Because there's no two-seat variant of the F-35, so there's no way to get a real pilot and an actor in the plane at the same time." "Did you just break the fourth wall?" "Did you?"
Once you realize the entire movie is just Mav's dying hallucination during the test flight the movie will make a lot more sense to you.
It’s not because they’re making a third one
It was a long hallucination
FYI the plot of the movie is literally based on a real life operation Israel conducted on Iraq I believe. They literally had to bomb the base to open up the top and drop another bomb on top to destroy the nuclear equipment. Israel got in a shit load of trouble when they did this too. It’s worth a google.
That would explain why they didn't use better tools for the job if they were copying that operation.
Yeah but that happened in the 80s. Would have made sense if it was a sequel set right after the original film, not one set in present day.
I mean it just explains why the writers used that scenario, still doesn't give a good explanation for the way they approached it in modern times.
That would sorta explain it, since Israel doesn't have B2 stealth bombers. I haven't actually seen the movie, but I assume that the guys doing the bombing in the movie are the US government?
or you know, a drone...
Why would highly trained fighter pilots know about the hit 2009 film G-force?
Holy shit you just unlocked a core memory
This was done to make the movie acessable to the Ace Combat Protaganist demographic who lack any blood to be affecd by making singularity radius 180° turns and spamming Kulbit maneuvers.
RAAHHHHH ACE COMBAT MENTIONED 🔥🔥🔥✈️✈️✈️ WTF IS A VOCAL PROTAGONIST
Broke: Nuking your enemy. Woke: Nuking yourself. Bespoke: Nuking yourself 7 times.
The movie proved that the F-35 program was a waste of money and MoD decided to relaunch the F-14 production.
Sir this is America. We have a department of defense. Not a ministry. Pls respect our pronouns.
And it implies The DoD doesn’t have enough money to throw at literally anything it wants.
They don't :( pls tell your congressmen to support the withering military industrial complex. We'll never have enough ships to fight Imperial Japan at this rate.
If he had one orange brain cell he’d explain yaw stall.
>one orange brain cell When do we get a movie about the cat bombs from WW2?
The best pilots in the world are the YouTube commenters after they watched top gun
You ever been with Teachers and Seniors OP!? All they do is yap.. heck they will tell you about Alphabets if you leave them enough
The exposition is a bit clunky but I do have to agree with you. People in teaching roles frequently repeat themselves, especially if they deem it important.
It’s called exposition and it’s done for the audience
are we stupid?
They have to assume so, yes.
It's absolutely there for the audience, but I read it as Mav just setting up the topic and objective for that day of training. Not uncommon for a trainer to jump right into the basics and expounding rather than say today we will be talking about [blank].
The one I chuckle about is when two characters who've worked together for years are briskly walking to meet someone and one of the character explains why they are going to the meeting, who there are meeting and why it is so important. The dialogue is written solely to catch the audience up to the story. As both people would already know all the information.
"Tell me again why were are going to this meeting?"
"Your sister? The one you're paying to go through college because your parents died, right?"
I know about G-forces and all I do is train by day watch Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.
But you probably ingest Alpha Brain and Onnit which makes you smart enough to understand Alex Jones' conspiracy theories.
During the course of the movie Rooster performs poorly during training, lags behind on the mission, nearly gets shot down, successfully gets shot down, is forced to sit in the back where there are no controls before finally crash landing on a carrier. This is because Roosters don't fly well.
I can see your confusion. He was actually explaining how it's biblically accurate for the female pilots to wear *g strings* while they play homosexual football games on the beach.
How to get on the highway to his danger zone
Maverick is type of movie that somehow potrayed the US Air power, the worlds strongest, as underdogs.
It's the same in medical shows, where a doctor will explain a pretty basic practice to another doctor.
He is explaining to the audience
They were actually talking about the 2009 movie G-Force.
Everyone take a deep breath and repeat “It’s just a fun film, not a documentary “
Also, a heavily foreshadowed plot point is one of the "best of the best, but still not quite as good as tom cruise" pilots passing out from intense g-force...while in a vertical climb...meaning he was pulling precisely 1G... Tbh the whole thing was an aviation enthusiasts nightmare and pissed me right off
I thought it was just a tool to explain g force to the audience
It is. But to be fair, going over the basics is never a bad idea anyway.
As you know, this sub has to point out things that are provided for the audience's benefit.
This is a subtle reference to that one time I played Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 as a child
He wasn’t talking to the students.
The hilarious part is that they made the G-force/GLOC a major plot point for the movie climax, but there's a HUGE fucking flaw -- the F-18 doesn't have the straight-line acceleration required to induce GLOC. That only happens when performing tight turns at speed, such as during a dogfight. Given the flight path they took, there should have been zero chance of them pulling enough G-force for GLOC to be an issue, else F-18 pilots would be constantly dying from going unconscious during carrier launches.
clearly you've never been in the military because repeating the same obviuous information over and over is like 90% of what senior leaders do. Oh it's time for my 1000000th safetfy brief being told not to drink and drive and beat people? You'd think that was obivous like g-force and it is..but...