If this is the top of your list of what's wrong with the plot of Interstellar, it feels like you're really nitpicking.
1. It was clearly established he was an ex-pilot for NASA. To describe Coop as just a farmer is horribly misleading.
2. We don't actually know what happens in a black hole. There was certainly some questionable science in the movie, but given that they gave an explanation for what happened in the black hole, and we don't know what really happens to contradict the movie's explanation, this seems like a valid use of artistic license.
I'm fine with the ending, actually. The laws of physics are supposed to break down in black holes, after all. Of course that also means you can't enter them intact, but for the sake of the story, it's fine. It was certainly interesting.
It's just: why would you make the point that you need a big rocket to take off from Earth, and then immediately abandon that point when you reach another planet? I guess the only explanation is really that the story transitions from a real world setting to a space SF setting. Different setting, different laws of movie physics.
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.
[Warning: Spoiler] The most direct criticism I have is that it's a slightly modified Contact with Interstellar's visual style and time-travel plot twist.
I think the movie suffers from overly liberal use of creative license. Sure, I t’s science fiction but there needs to be some sense in most of a movie’s events. For example, why did a hulking huge space based invasion force need to show up to a ground village of a few, basically, organic farmers? I figure Zack thought it’d look cool. And it does, but the story becomes less believable. I can’t help be feel that a ‘high quality’ team of creative writers should have been able to make that particular event work and make sense. I think this is a common problem in a lot of movies that try to be bigger than they are.
One thing I cannot understand is... Sure, this movie was very "accurate", all these explanations can make sense, the calculations fit but.. why is nobody talking about the major obviously impossible/inconsistent problems in the plot?
INTERSTELLAR SPOILER BELOW
For example, how did he survive inside a black hole, how did he pass through the Schwarzschild radius with his simple spaceship, why was there no time dilation as he approached the black hole, why did his spaceship break down inside the black hole but he was able to eject with his simple spacesuit and survive, how did he realistically survive out in cold space (at the end, yes okay I know this is technically possible but still..)?
When I watched this movie, I saw a lot of problems that made me think "has a physicist ACTUALLY worked on this and said 'yes, this is accurate'?". And those certainly weren't the minor details like the time dilation on the planet, the structure of the black hole and the icy clouds on that one other planet.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, it was a pretty good movie, although I felt that at times the director was pretty much screaming in my face: "SEE? WE ARE SO REALISTIC! LOOK THERE IS NO SOUND IN SPACE, AREN'T WE REALISTIC?" (sorry for caps lock but it's to provide emphasis)
I enjoyed some of Interstellar, but disliked the anti-scientificism. When they need to pick planet, probably humanity's last hope, you know there will be two options -- the scientifically sensible option and the "go with your heart" one -- and of course the latter is the right one. When scientists follow the scientific method they end up making a mistake, because science is cold and uncaring but nothing can stop the power of the heart, I guess.
I would really like a scifi movie that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" mislead you, and sometimes you just have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
I don't think the movie had many scientific "errors" per se. Error implies that they mad a mistake or didn't understand the science and got it wrong as a result. But in this movie, most of the inaccuracies were intentional breaks from reality, not unintentional mistakes.
> Probably too far-fetched and better suited as material for a scifi story, but the idea is interesting
M. Night Shyamalan directed a terrible movie from 2013 that is a version of that premise. After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith. Solid idea for a sci-fi movie, they botched it unfortunately.
"In the future, an environmental cataclysm forces the human race to abandon Earth in search of a new habitable planet, eventually settling on the planet Nova Prime" ... "A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, a millennium after events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help."
There have been plenty of (non-aweful) movies with more unprobably plots than that, that weren't in a dream of any kind.
I think that stating that the entire plot is a dream just because the main plot is not realistic is akin to denying the film's right to being science fiction!
Visual and practical effects were nicely done. Really liked the depiction of the Saturn colony at the end. It's a proposed style from the 60's that has never gotten a proper cinematic representation.
The bad parts of the movie were mainly editing, non rational emotionalism (main characters making obviously bad choices for shallow emotional reasons), and a giant paradox.
With editing, the drone scene was interesting but did nothing to advance the story. School scene was ok but too long.
The entire "power of love" scene was just dumb. People in that situation would not act like that.
The biggest problem was the paradox. Earth is becoming uninhabitable. Future humans must influence the past to save humanity. But there are no future humans in the first place since the Earth is dying. This is the biggest plot hole in the movie and it's the size of a black hole. Even slightly changing the story so that humans do survive, then are reaching back to make the survival process easier would be fine. Kind of a Redemption of Christopher Columbus type of story.
Interesting perspective, but it sounds far-fetched and contrived. HAL's malfunctioning was clearly posited as an AI alignment issue, at least in the novel.
It's been a very long time since I've seen the movie, but I was going to make the same point that the director does: it was never intended to be realistic, just a fantasy which captured the right feelings. It's probably not a good movie for other reasons, but I think it was successful at doing that.
I've heard similar criticism of William Gibson's work, that his 1980s-flavored cyberpunk makes no sense scientifically now. And that's true. But it still completely works as a fantasy world.
reply