what's wrong with Interstellar?

[calimac]

Mind you, I haven't seen the movie. This is more of an explanation of why I'm disinclined to see it - a decision that has to be made, by necessity, in the absence of the knowledge that comes from actually seeing it. But this is based on articles by people who have seen it. Anybody here who has seen it is welcome to correct any erroneous assumptions here, and to convince me it's better than that. Remember, I hadn't been planning to see Star Wars until someone talked me into it by persuading me it wasn't as bad as all the hype from the studio had convinced me it would be. (It wasn't, until years later when I realized that, actually, it was.)

I have two problems with the plot of Interstellar as I understand it. The first is the wormhole.

Wormholes are, or at least were when I was studying cosmology, a purely theoretical concept. It's possible that the matter absorbed by a black hole could be ejected in some other location, providing a way to transport between far-flung galactic-scale distances. The only catch is that it wouldn't be that much faster than light, if at all, as it would take hundreds of years in exterior time to be absorbed by the black hole and who knows how much longer to come out. Oh yes, and you'd be pulverized into individual subatomic particles in the process.

Ever since wormholes were theorized, they've been used in SF as a replacement for the purely imaginary hyperspace of earlier works, one with a possible actual scientific basis to it. Writers use it as if it were like the London Underground: you go in this station here and come out a few minutes later at that one there, with no idea of where you were in between. It's a time-saver shuttle with no interference with anybody who happens to be going in the other direction.

And that's fine for routine run-of-the-mill SF. The only thing that ever bothered me about that was the pretense that, as an actual method of transport, this was any more believable than hyperspace. The problem with it here is that Interstellar purports to some sort of real scientific plausibility. It has Kip Thorne as a consultant! It talks about Stephen Hawking! But it's no more seriously scientific than Babylon-5.

There's another problem, even if you grant the wormhole. The reason the astronauts are traveling through the wormhole is that Earth is becoming uninhabitable - OK, that unfortunately is very believable - so we need other Earth-like planets. Previously such planets' existence was pure guesswork based on lack of evidence, but recently we've acquired some evidence, and they may well be abundant. But stars are still interstellar distances apart - that's why it's called that - and without advanced equipment of the kind we don't have, you can't just mosey around checking them out for planets, like they do in, say, Dark Star, the way you'd run around to various grocery stores looking for elusive foods like bean sprouts or peanut sauce mix (two items I have had to look for this way). You'd have to use the same painstaking telescopic techniques we're using now, and once you found something that way, you'd have to mount a massive expedition to travel several light-years through regular space to check it out to see if it's really suitable. Wormholes are not like the Underground in the sense that you can pick your station from a list already knowing what you'll find when you get there.

And if you did do all this, you could still do it just as easily from here as from the other end of a wormhole. There's no need to go that far to look for other Earth-like planets, and they won't be much closer together anywhere else than they are here. (Even galactic clusters are not that compressed.) Unless you already knew there was a specific one right there by the other end of the wormhole, for a sufficiently interstellar-scale value of "right there," in which case how would you already know that? And on a plot-planning level, it's not necessary to include a wormhole to postulate a planet you can get to that easily, for a sufficiently cheap SFnal value of "easily."

I wouldn't bring any of this up except that reports by those who've seen the movie include the feeling of being scientifically ripped-off by the lack of actual plausibility, and this is what concerns me.

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I had similar thoughts but glad you have brought it up. I have not seem the film as yet and maybe not bother now.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

Interstellar finally allowed me to get the foul taste of Gravity out of my system. I give it about a B or a B-minus. You're right that the science is only believable using some suspension of disbelief but there is a lot of award-winning science fiction prose that's also that way.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

To follow up on what rwl said, my suspension of disbelief was able to swallow the implausibilities (and I agree with his grade), but I *am* irritated by the PR campaign that's trying to promote the scientific credibility of the film. The New York Times website is running an article called "Interstellar: The Cinema of Physicists, with the subhead: "If the movie 'Interstellar' requires a 324-page book to explicate it, can it be considered a totally successful work of art?" No, it doesn't require a 324-page book to explicate it, rube; they just released a 324-page book to promote their damned movie.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I didn't bother to see Gravity, but that was because I've spent enough time with near-Earth space movies based on real events to feel that I wanted one that was entirely fictional. I've seen mild grumbles that it wasn't quite realistic (from, e.g., actual astronauts), but your "foul taste" is the first real negative reaction to it I've read. Expand, please?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The movie 2001 required a 256-page book to explicate it (the novel version, which explains what's going on in the movie), but it was still a great movie without the explanation.

As I intimated above, the irritating aspect of Interstellar isn't the SFnal handwaving, it's the pretending that they're not doing it.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's anything in Interstellar as enigmatic as the stargate and star child sequences in 2001. 2001 also has more of a satirical edge to it, which isn't surprising in a Kubrick film. Interstellar is more earnest. That said, I find parts of 2001 pretty dull too.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's weird. So much of what I liked in the 60s-70s seems dull and plodding to me now. Even Butch Cassidy, a movie that used to seem pretty snappy, has these overlong, dragging horse-riding sequences and some pretty slow cutting.

But 2001, which was never intended to be snappy, still holds up for me. I find it as captivating now as I ever did.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I do like 2001 and find much of it absolutely majestic (last time I saw it, on an enormous screen, the scene of Frank's body tumbling across the starfield practically reduced me to tears), but there are bits here and there that seem to be out of, say, an overly-detailed lunar travel brochure. That aspect of it actually reminds me of Destination: Moon, which attempts an almost documentary approach.

BTW, an interesting attempt at a scientifically credible Solar System space film in recent years was Europa Report, which is about a scientific expedition to that moon in search of life. It's low budget, but I thought it was very well done. Didn't get much of a theatrical release, so I watched it online.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I also really liked Europa Report, and even though it couldn't garner enough nominations to be a Hugo finalist I consider it the best science fiction movie of the year. And it didn't require much, if any, suspension of disbelief, other than disregarding the hazard that the radiation belts around Jupiter presents that would make such a mission un-doable.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

[warning: spoilers lurk within response]

Where to start? For one thing, even the non-scientists and non-engineers are aware now, from all the space shuttle missions, that you can't just jet-pack your way across hundreds of miles of space to get from one place to another. Orbital mechanics is way more complicated than that. Then there's the rather glaring inaccuracies that the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station are depicted as orbiting at the same altitude (they don't - the telescope orbit is about 140 miles higher) and same orbital inclination (they don't, not even close), they also orbit practically next to each other. You might recall that one of the problems that nearly caused cancellation of the final space shuttle mission to service the telescope was that there was no way the shuttle could seek refuge at the ISS if heat shield damage occurred during launch. It was drummed into us so often in the run-up to that launch that the movie claiming otherwise is an insult to our intelligence.

The premise of the movie is that a collision of two satellites cause a space debris storm that obliterates everything in its path, including the space shuttle mission our brave two astronauts are part of. But, as Douglas Adams informed us, space is really big! Such a swarm, even if it were created, would quickly disperse and not form an angry bee-like swarm. And, since it somehow miraculously ended up in the exact orbit the telescope and ISS are in, how could it crash past them, then do a complete orbit and catch up to them again?

I think what makes Gravity such a dumb movie is that the science is not just implausible, it's stupid. What's this mysterious force that drags an astronaut away from a refuge? And how can someone, not conversant with the Chinese language, push exactly the right buttons in the right order to manage re-entry?

I will grant that Gravity is a gorgeous movie to experience from a special effects standpoint. And, no doubt, that's why it won a Hugo Award. All the people who voted for it had drunk that most potent of beverages, the CGI Kool-Aid. It's visually spectacular, but the plot and premise are as smelly as a fresh pile of dog doo.

Just think of the movie they could have made if they had hired an actual science fiction writer such as Allen Steele to develop a believable plot. What a waste.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Remember that I haven't seen the movie, and what I'd read about the plot had baffled me: how could so many things be in the way of this swarm? Was I misunderstanding something? Now I see I was not.

The treatment of space as some tiny realm (evidently they've forgotten the lesson of HHGG: "Space is big. Really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.") reminds me of a similar clanger in B5, where Sheridan reveals how he won a battle against the Minbari in the late war. "I hit on the idea of mining the asteroid field," he says in gratingly mock-humble tones, specifying the one "between Jupiter and Mars." This is rather like defeating the Japanese fleet in WW2 by hitting on the idea of mining the Pacific Ocean. You know, the one between Japan and California.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to unpack my responses to the film in detail here. But I will share some of my conclusions and experiences.

Interstellar is the first science fiction film made since 2001: A Space Odyssey that is worthy of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The second time I saw Interstellar, I was with two men who in the last year earned their Ph.D.'s in physics from Cornell University, and they, like me, were blown away by the film; neither man felt there were any ruinous errors, scientifically or otherwise, in the film, though I will check with them to see if, on further thought, they've changed their minds. Nolan recontextualizes events and information throughout, on large scales and small, and if you don't get the recontextualizations then the film fails. I got most of them the first time, and more of them the second time, and for me the film succeeds brilliantly. Much as I liked it the first time I saw it, I liked it even more the second time, and even started to fall in love with it. I hope to see it a third time on the big screen.

The first time I saw interstellar, coming out of the theater afterwards I said to the IT man I was with, who like me liked the film very much, "This film is best seen as fable, but it's a fable that makes pretty smart use of physics."

This is the first movie by Nolan, by the way, that I really like and maybe even love -- I've had trouble with the other films of his I've seen, though I've admired his ambition, his willingness to take big risks. In the case of Interstellar, for me the risks he took paid off in all the most important respects.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

You may wish to consider my conclusions about and experiences with the film described in a longer comment below, but in brief, I found it to be more than worthy of close attention and that good as it was on a first viewing, it's even better on a second.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am 3 for 4 on Nolan movies so far. (I will not go and see films about superheroes.)

Memento impressed the heck out of me. It finally proved that movies are not tied to telling stories in chronological order with nothing out of place but an occasional clearly-marked flashback. And the ending was genuinely tantalizing.

Insomnia was a good solid thriller, though I enjoy my memory of my first viewing more than I did my second.

Inception I thought a completely brilliant film, an exceedingly complex story told with the utmost clarity. Except for the opening, which is deliberately confusing, I was at no moment puzzled as to where we were or what was going on, and nothing that others have criticized as plot holes bothered me for a moment.

I hated The Prestige. Hated hated hated it. The first reason was that the character motivations and behavior were entirely unbelievable and totally preposterous, and the attempts made to justify this didn't even begin to do the job. That was also the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth through ninth reasons. The tenth reason was that I couldn't make out a word that Michael Caine said. Speak up, man!

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Enjoyed reading your comment on the other Nolan films you've seen. I've already decided to re-watch his entire ouevre, though it will take me a while. But my thought is, given your 3 for 4, maybe he's provided you with enough interest, intrigue, and satisfaction for it to be worth your taking a risk on seeing Interstellar; perhaps my own comments on that film might even tip the balance in its favor.