{"id":9667,"date":"2014-11-09T07:30:57","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T12:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9667"},"modified":"2014-11-09T07:30:57","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T12:30:57","slug":"quick-interstellar-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/11\/09\/quick-interstellar-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Interstellar Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m teaching a Gen Ed course on relativity this term, which means I’m spending the last few weeks of the term discussing black holes. Which, in turn, means there was no way I couldn’t use that story about Kip Thorne calculating the appearance of a black hole for the movie<\/a>. Especially since I have the students reading Thorne’s book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And that, in turn, meant I needed to see the movie. So we got a sitter for the kids Saturday night, and went to the local theater to check it out. And, you know, it’s pretty much what it’s advertised as: A very pretty giant SF movie, with all that implies, both good and bad.<\/p>\n

On the good side, they really did take some pains to get actual science content in there. There’s the black hole from the promo stuff, a wormhole, and even some old-school orbital mechanics. More relevant to my current obsessions is the fact that scientists and engineers are unambiguously the heroes of the piece, and the day is saved by people who stop and think things through in a systematic way. <\/p>\n

On the bad side… well, the failure mode of grand cosmic SF is and always has been mystical twaddle, a narrative force whose attraction is more inescapable than gravity. And Interstellar doesn’t even come close to avoiding that problem. There’s a whole bunch of “fifth dimension” hooey, and that’s even before you get to the Power of Loooove transcending time and space.<\/p>\n

And those flaws are somewhat magnified by the fact that a lot of the science is badly bent for narrative purposes. They fit gravitational time dilation in there, but the degree of time dilation they see is ridiculous, and real gravity isn’t like Angry Birds Space, with effects that cut off a fixed distance from the center of the black hole. And the characters are kind of stupid for not realizing that there was a problem with the water-planet probe, and the Blight doesn’t make any sense, and blah, blah, blah. Many of these questionable elements are also delivered in speeches that strain to rise to the heights of clunky dialogue. If you’re inclined to poke holes in the science and story, there are no end of holes you can poke<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But, to bring it back around to the good side, I don’t think any of those holes are any harder to retcon away than any other SF movie. A lot of them probably should’ve been addressed with an extra line or two of dialogue here or there, but it’s not hard to imagine off-screen conversations (and while it’s a very long movie, there are conversations off screen…) that could plug a bunch of the holes.<\/p>\n

And I greatly appreciate the movie for what it isn’t<\/em>, which is any of the things we saw in the trailers. Which, for our showing, were for the seventh Fast and Furious movie, the third Hunger Games movie, the second Avengers movie, and Ridley Scott remaking The Ten Commandments<\/cite>. (We also got trailers for a MLK biopic and a dreadful-looking Mark Wahlberg movie, but those aren’t relevant here.) For all Interstellar’s flaws, it’s at least got ambition– it’s an original story, not a sequel or a remake or based on something that was successful in another medium. And those are depressingly rare these days. The flaws of Interstellar are, for the most part, present in pretty much every big-budget movie, but at least it’s trying<\/em> to do something ambitious and original.<\/p>\n

So, I’m overall pretty happy with the movie. It also helps that Christopher Nolan’s general directorial style works well for me, making me more inclined to forgive the plot holes and bending of science to serve dramatic purposes– if you’re allergic to the Inception<\/cite> horns, you’ll probably feel less charitable. But it’s a great-looking movie, with spectacular design work, and while it takes liberties with astrophysics, it presents a very positive view of science on the whole. I’m glad I saw it in the theater, and I hope it makes a giant pile of money, mostly so people in Hollywood will keep giving Nolan the resources to make movies that aim high.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m teaching a Gen Ed course on relativity this term, which means I’m spending the last few weeks of the term discussing black holes. Which, in turn, means there was no way I couldn’t use that story about Kip Thorne calculating the appearance of a black hole for the movie. Especially since I have the… Continue reading Quick Interstellar Thoughts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,265,35,7,37,141,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_media","category-movies","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-relativity","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}