Now that a few weeks have passed, it is easier to see what Christopher Nolan created in his film
Interstellar. Beware readers that I may release too many details here, so
Spoiler Alert!
I watched Interstellar when it first came out and was somewhat underwhelmed. The underlying premise was a little hard to swallow - mankind had advanced to the point of secretly developing massive spacecraft to take humans to Saturn and beyond, but had completely failed to resolve a climate adjustment and crop development here on Earth. And more to the point, a secret government-funded space program existed side-by-side with a government denying the Apollo missions. This was more unbelievable than wormholes to another galaxy (and why another galaxy when we have hundreds of billions of potential planets in our galaxy? - even the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine wormhole only went to another quadrant of our galaxy). And why choose planets around a black hole? Billions of potential planets and this is what they have to chose from? It may make for great drama, but it is a dumb plot.
Others agree. David Corn in his Mother Jone's article
"What's Wrong with the Science of Interstellar?" noted that he discussed the film with astrobiologist David Grinspoon, who said:
For instance, they describe this ecological disaster on Earth. I like
the fact they are talking about that and raising consciousness. It's
clear that it's climate change and we screwed up the Earth…That's a good
theme. But the specific things they say about it—they say there's this
blight [attacking all crops] that's building up the nitrogen [in the
atmosphere] and that's going to draw down the oxygen. Anybody who knows
about planetary atmosphere is going to sit there at that point and go,
"That's a bunch of BS." It's not that that ruins the movie for most
people. But why couldn't they have run that by somebody? It wouldn't
change the plot…There are aspects to the planets they get to which also
don't make sense from basic physics. There's a planet with ice
clouds…That's BS…Something like that would fall. Because of gravity! Is
that so crucial to the plot? There's a planet around a black hole…Some
physicists might quibble whether that's even possible or stable. But one
obvious problem is, when they landed there it was daylight. But there's
no sun and a black hole doesn't put out light. So where is the light
coming from?
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
tweeted incessantly about the film, but most were not very helpful and cited things such as the number of female scientists, as if he had not seen Jodie Foster in the earlier film
Contact. He made up for it later with this
video on the film.
Bill Nye the Science Guy had his own view of things in this
video, calling it "charming science fiction." He also challenges us to go to Antarctica before worrying about living on Mars or other planets. Maybe it makes more sense to fix they Earth than run away to another planet hoping it is better (or livable).
My favorite review of the film was Ryan Gilbey's piece in
The New Statesman where he called the robots "sentient filing cabinets" and noted:
It's hard to care about the future of civilization when we meet so few members of it worth saving...
Movie critic David Denby in
The New Yorker probably had the best wrap-up:
...over all, “Interstellar,” a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it.
So many times we hear the book was better than the movie. I hope this is the case with
Kip Thorne's version of events.
