[keiferski]

Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.

[eigenstuff]

I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.

[dmos62]

I agree with these criticisms on Interstellar and Inception. I wonder, if there's people who enjoyed them, what did they like about them?

[zoul]

Pro tip: If you really want to hear opinions different from yours, do not sound like you are ready to dismiss them anyway.

[bshimmin]

I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!

In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.

Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.

[virusduck]

Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.

[veridies]

I love Tree of Life, but I’ve tried and failed to get into 2001 several times. The thing I love in Tree of Life is the humanism: I can see people sorting through their feelings through their memories in real time, and the characters feel absolutely real. 2001 is more interested in “philosophy” than people, and to be honest if I want that I’d rather just read a nonfiction book.

[mongol]

I once saw Tree of Life, totally on a whim, no knowledge at all, bought a ticket when passing the cinema during an evening walk.

I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.

[bshimmin]

Definitely give The Tree of Life another go, and watch Malick's older films too - they are wonderful. Avoid all of his most recent films unless you're feeling very, very meditative (I slept extremely peacefully through the last third of Knight of Cups, I will say).

[veridies]

Give it a shot, at least! A lot of people feel about it the same way I feel about 2001, though, so it may just not be your thing. I think if you can be immersed in the visuals and empathize with the characters then you're good; otherwise, it probably won't do anything for you.

[asianthrowaway]

> what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!

"excrement" comes to mind!

[dmos62]

I don't see my post having any hostility or dismissiveness towards others' points of view.

Sure, I'm dismissive of the films, but, by asking for opinion, don't I implicitly assert that that's subjective?

[BenoitEssiambre]

2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.

The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.

There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.

Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?

Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.

[dmos62]

Yeah, that's a funny aspect of realistic accuracy, where, if you're doing it in one place, you have to do it elsewhere as well, else you'll ruin the immersion.

[philwelch]

I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.

Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]

The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]

I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.

[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.

[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.

[asianthrowaway]

They're both well made, well paced, engaging movies. I especially liked inception due to its unique premise.

[Retric]

The problem is inception crossed the line into fantasy. Antigravity paint or whatever mcguffin you want to name is explicitly changing some rule. Inception went the magic wand route.

That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.

[Lio]

I may be misunderstanding this but isn't the point in Inception that what they are experiencing is explicitly not real?

That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.

[Retric]

That I don't have a problem with. You can have people see all kinds of crap while tripping on LSD without issue.

It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.

[jessaustin]

In what sense did "Matrix" cross that line?

[Retric]

The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results. If it’s a simulation then him picking up a rock and turning it into a spaceship is viable. Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world, though again same deal.

But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.

[philwelch]

> The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results.

Neo's hardware implants allow him to wirelessly interface with the machine world, which he has root access to. This is even better established when he seems to fall into a coma and ends up being in the Matrix. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to anyone else.

> Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world

Wireless connectivity isn't undefined or mystical!

> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.

I don't think it actually counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules, which is where "residual self-image" comes from.

Also, just as a fun fact, in one of the earlier revisions of the script of the first movie, Switch was supposed to be a transgender character who was one gender in the Matrix and the opposite gender in the physical world. This was dropped for some reason.

[dragonwriter]

> but that means he could have arbitrarily results.

Well, he could have, if he understood the simulation well enough; even in the overt simulation, which he was coached on, he had more constrained apparent ability. He clearly goes through an awakening over a period about the nature of the “real” world and his ability within it, that in some way parallels (without the coaching) his earlier awakening to the Matrix, but at it's most advanced point (as far as his externalized use of abilities, at least) it is still obviously less complete than the point he reaches with the Matrix at the end of the first movie.

> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean

That everything the humans “know” about the Matrix is curated material that is part of the system of control revealed later in the series, and is often misleading, and frequently incoherent under careful examination, which is discouraged by the quasi-religious framework of belief that is itself part of the system of control.

[jessaustin]

Oh, sure, the sequels were problematic. I actually interpreted the real world shenanigans as something of a Gurren Lagann-style wink at the audience. I misunderstood the post above.

[kibibu]

2001 did exactly the same. Some magical fantasy space obelisk made monkeys kill each other. It's stupid.

[swish_bob]

Use tools. The tool use was the point.

[kibibu]

It was a large, black, magic rock.