You know, the biggest sin a sci-fi or fantasy story can commit is to fail in inducing a sense of awe or wonder in its audience. I definitely think that Interstellar succeeded in making its world interesting, though I would suggest that it was a marginal success: a victory won with compelling characters and a not-so-entirely-off-the-wall threat of global agriculture failure. That’s by no means a bad thing, but I honestly felt the story “at home” was so very much more compelling than anything that happened in the black.
The movie was, frankly, misnamed.
I don’t have any issues with movies that make up BS science for the sake of story. I do have issues with movies that make up BS science for no good reason (there are few things more aggravating for me, when watching a movie, than seeing writers make up pure nonsense that’s really just background noise), and Interstellar is guilty of that in places, but its bigger crime is just the glaring inconsistencies.
Like the Ranger, for instance. It required a two stage rocket to lift the thing off of a 1g world, but on a 1.3g world it just space-planed itself into orbit. That whole Apollo-esque rocket launch was rendered obsolete.
Oh, and the test pilot not actually checking that it was safe to land on that first world? Ugh. That’s almost worse than a planet with a 2 foot deep ocean generating waves that were hundreds of metres high. Especially when that planet is in a gravitational field strong enough to slow time by a factor of 2500, meaning that almost all of that water should be located in two massive tidal bulges (one on the black hole side of the world, and one opposite to the black hole). Even if it were possible for waves that large to occur (and it was a good, dramatic scene, so I’m willing to make allowances for them), they would have been visible from orbit. I guess they would have appeared to be “frozen”, and so appear as mountains, but I walked away from that whole encounter feeling like everyone was incredibly reckless, and I’m not convinced that was the point of that adventure.
If it was, then my issues with this planet basically boil down to “who thought a planet on the inner edge of a black hole’s orbital stability zone was going to be hospitable in the first place?” I mean, that world is going to be bombarded by high energy radiation from the accretion disk and debris falling in toward the black hole! Better yet, why would you start at the deepest part of the gravitational well? If one of the outer planets had been habitable, there would have been no need to go closer in, and they would have had fuel to spare.
Well, that and the space plane thing.
Believing there could be life on the icy world was a joke. I mean, the clouds were frozen. That’s one of those times were you just yell “nope”, and fly away. I get that they wanted to believe Dr. Mann, especially since they basically bet their fuel reserves on his beacon, but really… You have to figure that A) someone realized that black holes don’t produce a whole lot of heat, so getting farther away from one than that watery death trap they started on wasn’t going to end well, or at least B) the guy left on their space station there would have done a quick, back of the envelope calculation about the surface temperature of that world during the two decades he spent alone doing jack all.
There are some real questions about whether those planets – particularly the innermost one – could actually exist at all. If the black hole isn’t rotating, that inner planet isn’t in a stable orbit, and would have long ago spiralled in to its doom. If the black hole is rotating, the planet’s orbit is fine, but the magnetic fields associated with the black hole would bathe the entire planetary system in the type of high energy radiation fields that would retroactively sterilize those astronauts ancestors going back about a thousand years.
Oh, and cook them to jerky before they could blink. But mostly the sterile ancestors thing.
You know, if I hadn’t heard nothing but hype about the science in this movie for the two weeks leading up to the premiere, I probably wouldn’t care so much, but the the science was hyped. It was supposed to be a selling point! And it failed to live up to that hype. Plus, I don’t care what the typical movie-goer will pick up on. It hampers my enjoyment of the movie when writers and directors pull this crap. I mean, seriously: They could have just space-planed off of Earth, and I’d be like 60% less irked right now.
On top of that, Nolan really went out of his way to invite comparisons to 2001, which felt really, really awkward.
So no, I didn’t think the movie was “awesome” or “fantastic”, and I’m more than a little puzzled by people who do. But that’s their business. No amount of apologetics for what the movie did wrong is going to change my opinion on the film, either.
It was alright. I’m not upset I paid to see it.