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.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
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.
The fact that people jacking in can die is not treated as an open technical problem to be solved, but gamps rules of transformation. Warp cores are not nessisarily fully understood, but they are actively trying to test out and improve them. In the Matrix they don’t treat things as a theory they just notice stuff and slap a name on it. At the same time they built a loading program to bring guns into the system. Which is why I am saying it’s even a close call between science fiction and fantasy.
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.
It’s not that it’s a rule it’s that it’s an undefined rule. If they had said nothing then you don’t know, perhaps they are taking photos and uploading avatars off camera, or perhaps the Matrix keeps track of this stuff, or perhaps the Matrix downloads the data from your mind. Residual self immage does not answer the question.
Characters are not omnipotent. Character X explaining the rule does not mean Rule X actually applies. For example character says you need to use a plug to jack into the Matrix and need a hardline to get out. Later on you break those rules and that’s fine the character does not know what they are talking about.
But, the Sci-fi fantasy devide is not the lack of technology, as cellphones work just fine in Dresden Files and other Urban Fantasy. It’s the type of rules that exist and how they can be broken without destroying the suspension of disbelief. The cold equations is a good low budget film based around some very hard rules. The Matrix fails this, you can come up for explanations for anything that happen, but doing so is not bound by any rule in the world.
Further, it frames things in non technical terms perhaps the character just noticed he has a modem up his bumb. Perhaps he can wirelessly hack an alarm clock rather than setting the snooze button. Or maybe he has psy powers and can cause EMP’s. Undefined major plot elements under the control of the protagonist or antagonist is the hallmark of Fantasy. What can and can’t Gandalf do?
As far as 2001 is concerned it’s basicly highly advanced Starfish Aliens. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens Which seems like the most likely contact with extraterrestrials we will see. Motivation and reasoning are not going to be obvious, is this some major effort on part of their civilization or some 6th graders high school science project we just don’t know.
Again though, the Aliens are mostly irrelevant, it’s HAL human relations that’s driving things.
It's (partly) a story about uplifting a species. Our species ...
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.
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.
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.
"excrement" comes to mind!
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.
Sure, I'm dismissive of the films, but, by asking for opinion, don't I implicitly assert that that's subjective?
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.
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.