2 ms·

I would argue that the examples don't all apply the same. The successful examples you listed are all about human actions, subtleties about how people are acting

I would argue that the examples don't all apply the same. The successful examples you listed are all about human actions, subtleties about how people are acting and behaving. Humans are just naturally very good at sensing these things, unconscious or not. But something like black holes? The overwhelming majority of people have almost no context and even less intuitive understanding of such an alien thing. I doubt that miniscule details would affect a sense of reality when the subject in question is so foreign from the viewer that it is essentially no different to them than something completely fabricated.

jfengel 5y ago
It's entirely possible. I'm just talking about how I would have gone about it. It's not that the audience wouldn't have appreciated that moment or not. It's rather that the film suffered (in my opinion) from a lot of focus on getting the details right, which meant that the things they got wrong jumped out to me -- not as a physicist, but as a storyteller. They didn't want to tell a story about physics -- which is a fine choice. They wanted to tell a story about love in a sci-fi setting -- again, a fine choice. But it meant that the film looked like "Look here at what we got right, look over there at what we got right, NO DON'T LOOK OVER THERE NOTHING TO SEE." It's a choice every sci-fi film has to make. I think that this film was less successful (artistically) than it could have been because they made the wrong choice there. I think they'd have done better not hiring a physics consultant than having one and not giving them absolute control over things -- which shows up in things like those tiny details. This is, of course, just the way I look at it. I'm not here to say it was a good or a bad film, or whether you should enjoy it. I'm saying, "I didn't enjoy it, and I think this is part of why." Not from a physics standpoint, but an artistic one. You are, of course, free to disagree with that on every level. I just thought it might be interesting to hear how a different director saw it.

jfengel 5y ago

It's entirely possible. I'm just talking about how I would have gone about it. It's not that the audience wouldn't have appreciated that moment or not. It's rather that the film suffered (in my opinion) from a lot of focus on getting the details right, which meant that the things they got wrong jumped out to me -- not as a physicist, but as a storyteller. They didn't want to tell a story about physics -- which is a fine choice. They wanted to tell a story about love in a sci-fi setting -- again, a fine choice. But it meant that the film looked like "Look here at what we got right, look over there at what we got right, NO DON'T LOOK OVER THERE NOTHING TO SEE." It's a choice every sci-fi film has to make. I think that this film was less successful (artistically) than it could have been because they made the wrong choice there. I think they'd have done better not hiring a physics consultant than having one and not giving them absolute control over things -- which shows up in things like those tiny details. This is, of course, just the way I look at it. I'm not here to say it was a good or a bad film, or whether you should enjoy it. I'm saying, "I didn't enjoy it, and I think this is part of why." Not from a physics standpoint, but an artistic one. You are, of course, free to disagree with that on every level. I just thought it might be interesting to hear how a different director saw it.