Technofiction index ... Movieland Index
by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright November 2014
Christopher Nolan has done some impressive movies, sadly Interstellar isn't one of them. The lofty ambitions are held down by a tangle of inconsistencies in setting and story telling. Sadly, this movie ranks right along side Ridley Scott's Prometheus as an example of really bad internal consistency, leading to a whole lot of head-scratching while watching the movie.
What the movie does handle well is heart-stroking about caring about family members. If you want to see lots of drama about family, this will be good for you.
The first cliche of the movie's story is that humanity is losing the battle for survival on earth because resources are running out, specifically food. The inconsistency is this is portrayed in a setting that is a 1930's-style Dust Bowl farm, not anything near future. The farm house and its furnishings are 1930's Dust Bowl, the automobiles are not driverless, there are few computers in the home, and the old folks being interviewed are contemporary. In fact I think the Nolans were inspired to create this setting by the way contemporary documentaries talk about the Dust Bowl. In sum, this is not a future setting.
If the Nolans had really wanted to show near future rural poverty:
o the driverless cars and light trucks the family used would have been beat up, run down, and not showing up when needed because the solar car charger is on the fritz.
o the house would be a very simple modular plastic design, sun bleached, and with a twisted and bent dish antenna on top. Gramps complains that the 3D printer can't keep up with the house repairs.
o Murph could be complaining that the dust storm has twisted the dish antenna so she can't upload her school assignments or download lessons. Then Gramps can tell her to learn lessons by reading a book, and then that musty old library, kept as the family's luxury hobby, would make some sense.
These are some ideas for portraying an impoverished near future farm -- ironically, doing things the 1930's way, as the movie portrays, would be too expensive for poor folk of the future era.
Next, the super secret NASA base makes no sense. If you're building something big, you need supplies. If you need supplies, people and trucks loaded down with stuff are constantly coming and going. There will be busy roads leading to it, and GPS's and Google maps of the place. This place can be disguised as something else, but it can't be a place no one knows about.
When they get into space the inconsistency continues. The space ship interiors are right out of the 1960's Apollo missions -- a few displays and lots and lots of manual switches. Further, the hot-shot human pilot can out-maneuver the robotic auto-pilots on routine maneuvers such as docking the spacecraft with another spacecraft. This isn't going to be what the human pilots do in the near future, the auto-pilots will do this much better.
Related, the robots in this story are cute, and a new style that I haven't seen before, but they aren't practical -- they don't have arms and hands. It's not clear what they do that helps humans, other than relieve their tensions by wisecracking.
I won't go into details, but the new worlds they visit are just as bad in their inconsistency. And, as in Prometheus, the explorers don't send scout satellites ahead to get the big picture of the world, or watch the weather after they have landed.
When the story starts talking about twisting space and time, the head-scratching gets even worse.
What the story does handle well is drama. If you're into caring about family and want to see your movie characters caring about family, this movie will stroke your heartstrings nicely. At this it is much better than Prometheus.
If you're into family caring movies, this one will feel nice. If you like neat visuals of space shown in Imax, this will awe. If you're into interesting visions of our future, this will not satisfy. (If you want a more interesting and consistent vision of interstellar space travel and exploring, try my Honeycomb Comet story.)
Update: A 14 Nov 14 WSJ Weekend Interview story, Finding Our Place in the Stars The physicist who kept the ‘Interstellar’ science sharp talks about black holes, space travel and his optimistic vision of human possibility. by Sohrab Ahmari, talks more about the man behind the science in the movie.
From the article, "On Oct. 28, a cargo rocket carrying supplies for the international space station exploded seconds after launch. Three days later, a Virgin Galactic spaceflight test vehicle broke apart in midair, killing a copilot.
One step forward, two steps back. For renowned physicist Kip Thorne, such tragedies are par for the course—and no reason to give up. “I’m very much an optimist,” ...
First stop, Hollywood. Mr. Thorne served as executive producer and scientific consultant for “Interstellar,” director Christopher Nolan ’s riveting new science-fiction epic. “It’s a movie in which the science is embedded into the fabric of the film from the very beginning,” Mr. Thorne says, “and in which we aspire to the guideline that nothing violates well-established physical laws.” Yes, the movie does include “plenty” of “wild speculation,” he says, but that too “springs from science rather than from the mind of a screenwriter without any science ties.”"
-- The End --
Technofiction index ... Movieland Index