Interstellar may well be the worst “serious” and “major” science fiction movie ever made. It’s
certainly the most pretentious (True, there was Battlefield Earth [2000], but that was a flop, and I don’t think anyone
but Scientologists ever took it seriously, or thought that it was a major
motion picture. Earlier this year, there was Luc Besson’s Lucy, which was way over the top, and did a lot better at
the box office, but it doesn’t seem to be have been taken any more seriously.).
Based on mixed reviews, I was
ready for Interstellar to be a
disappointment. The capsule descriptions suggested it might be a mish-mosh, an
uneasy juxtaposition of the disaster and space travel sub-genres. Yet
Christopher Nolan, the director, had come off a series of cinematic triumphs as
varied as Memento, Insomnia, The
Dark Knight, The Prestige and Inception. He was a wunderkind, and even if his latest movie was flawed it was sure
to have something good about it,
beyond the razzle dazzle of special effects essential to a Hollywood
blockbuster (It did well as such its first weekend – although not as well as
Disney’s animated Big Hero 6.).
Well, it has some great special
effects, all right, but a lot of them don’t make any sense. None of the story
makes sense, either. If Interstellar had
been a low-budget film by some unknown director, it might have been compared to
Plan 9 from Outer Space, the
atrocious movie by Ed Wood that became a camp cult phenomenon decades after its
1959 release when Michael and Harry Medved dubbed it “the worst movie ever
made.” Only Wood never took himself seriously, whereas Nolan obviously does. Interstellar isn’t the first example of auteur hubris in sci-fi films, but it may be the
culmination of that sort of hubris. Science fiction is supposed to be about
ideas, but the people who make movies, unlike the best sf writers, don’t really
know or care much about science.
What they do know all about, or
think they know all about, is the Meaning of Life, of Human Existence. Their
movies are full of Deep Thoughts, and they don’t seem to realize these are the
sort of things that Jack Handey sent up on Saturday Night Live (“If trees could scream,
would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all
the time, for no good reason.”) and later turned into a series of books
(He still has a website.). In Interstellar, Nolan turns clichés into pretended great insights (“Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.”)
or indulges in pretentious posturing (“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never
meant to die here.”).
So here we are in a near-future
America where some sort of blight has killed off all the food crops but corn,
and the countryside is ravaged by dust storms. Does this have anything to do
with, say, global warming? The early scenes of Interstellar don’t give us a clue. For that matter, neither do
later ones. But what we see doesn’t make any sense on its own terms. There are
endless fields of corn, but nary a sign of any barren expanses that dust would
have to come from. People seem to be healthy eating nothing but corn – the only
hazards seem to be lung conditions from all that dust. Civilization has
supposedly broken down, and high tech is suspect (the official government line
in schools is that the Apollo moon landings were faked: “I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda, that
the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other
useless machines,” says a teacher.), but everybody still drives cars and
trucks, even if tires are hard to come by – fossil fuels must be coming from
somewhere.
Cooper, a widowed former NASA
pilot, lives with his son Tom and daughter Murphy on a farm somewhere in the
Midwest. Murph is in trouble at school because she has an old book about how
there really were moon landings. She also thinks the house is haunted, which
turns out to be the key plot point. In another scene, Cooper chases by car
(with a flat tire) after a stray Indian (intelligence?) drone – which he can
take control of by laptop and bring down next to a pristine lake (It hasn’t
dried up, like all those lakes and reservoirs recently in California; what about that
drought?) and scavenges some solar cells from it (Guess those are as hard to
come by locally as tires.). This is all before he discovers the “ghost” Murphy
believes in is a secret message, encoded in gravitational waves (!), and he
manages to decode it as directions to the secret headquarters of NORAD, which
seems to be just a short drive away.
Nobody there expects him, but he discovers that he’s found the remnants of NASA and he is
welcomed by his old professor. Dr. Brand is now in charge of a project
to find a new home for humanity on the other side of a wormhole that has
conveniently appeared near Saturn – and leads, it seems, to another galaxy (as if there couldn’t be any potential planets in
our own!). Manned missions have already been sent through, and messaged back
about three target planets, but nobody has heard anything further from the
astronauts involved.
After a minimum of soul-searching
(and, seemingly, without the need for any further training), Cooper agrees to
lead a more ambitious follow-up mission as pilot of the Endurance, an experimental spacecraft that looks more like the
space station from 2001, and –
leaving his family behind, much to the distress of Murph – sets off with
Brand’s daughter Amelia and others (a physicist, a geographer and a robot). A
huge two-stage booster launchers a Ranger, which carries them to the Endurance. Just how NASA managed to build and launch the Endurance itself is never clear. Not only that, but it turns
out that the Ranger (and a smaller shuttle) can land on and take off from
planets on its own, so why couldn’t it do so from Earth?
Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne
is credited with having developed the rationale for the wormhole, a gigantic
black hole, and the exposition of the theories of relativity and quantum
mechanics. But reality seems to have been lost in translation to the screen. A
classic situation in science fiction, for example, is that people traveling in
a starship at nearly the speed of light will experience time dilation: in what
seems to them to be just a short time, many years can have passed back on
Earth. Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars (1956) is one of many sf classics to deal with this paradox. Only, in Interstellar, that paradox doesn’t apply, because the explorers
travel through a wormhole rather than normal space, where the speed of light is
an absolute – the crew of the Endurance can even exchange messages with Earth.
But Nolan wanted to get in a time dilation effect by other means, and (as reported by Dennis Overbye in The New York Times) prevailed on Thorne to come up with a planet to close to a super-massive black hole that time would be speeded up by a factor of 60,000 – an hour there is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth; 23 years go by during a brief visit, and even on the Endurance (Does that compute?) during their brief visit to Miller, first of the potential colony sites. The bottom line is that the black hole called Gargantua was written into the story purely for the sake of a plot contrivance. One would think that any worlds orbiting it might be torn apart by tidal forces or, in any case, be too deadly to even visit, let alone colonize. In any case, there are a lot of other really ludicrous elements, including references to a Plan B: if it isn’t possible to send shiploads of colonists to a new world, send fertilized eggs instead and have them raised… somehow. One Meghan O’ Keefe takes on that absurdity, and there is also a website devoted to other gaping plot holes:
But Nolan wanted to get in a time dilation effect by other means, and (as reported by Dennis Overbye in The New York Times) prevailed on Thorne to come up with a planet to close to a super-massive black hole that time would be speeded up by a factor of 60,000 – an hour there is the equivalent of seven years back on Earth; 23 years go by during a brief visit, and even on the Endurance (Does that compute?) during their brief visit to Miller, first of the potential colony sites. The bottom line is that the black hole called Gargantua was written into the story purely for the sake of a plot contrivance. One would think that any worlds orbiting it might be torn apart by tidal forces or, in any case, be too deadly to even visit, let alone colonize. In any case, there are a lot of other really ludicrous elements, including references to a Plan B: if it isn’t possible to send shiploads of colonists to a new world, send fertilized eggs instead and have them raised… somehow. One Meghan O’ Keefe takes on that absurdity, and there is also a website devoted to other gaping plot holes:
Whatever. Cooper and Amelia and
the others get where they’re going, but the worlds they encounter are as
implausible as anything else in the movie, and so are the plot contrivances.
Miller is a planet covered
entirely by water, but where the shuttle lands, it’s very shallow water –
barely ankle deep. But suddenly our explorers are menaced by a huge tsunami;
one of them is killed, and Amelia (who is trying to retrieve wreckage from the
first ship to land there) has to be rescued by the robot. Mann, the second
planet they visit, is no prize, either: it’s all frozen. For some reason, there
are huge icebergs hovering in the air, rather like the floating mountains in
James Cameron’s Avatar. Also, the ice
fields the explorers tread aren’t really the “surface,” whatever that means to
the original explorer, Dr. Mann, who has managed to survive by zipping himself
into a suspended animation pod, like those used on the Endurance for the journey to the wormhole. And he’s a real
piece of work; he had lied about the habitability of his world in a message to
Earth; now he tries to kill Cooper and steals the shuttle to make his escape.
Amelia comes to our hero’s rescue
in the Ranger, but the Endurance is so
short of fuel (not to mentioned seriously damaged by Mann’s attempt to dock
with it) that they decide to use Gargantua in a slingshot maneuver to free the
ship for a further journey. They’ve known about Gargantua all along, of course,
and known that the worlds Miller and Mann were close to it – not exactly a
Goldilocks zone. Amelia, indeed, had favored Edmunds, the third planet, but only because she was in love with Edmunds and
love is the best way to find the truth. Cooper had balked at that. Now, in an
act of seeming contrition, he decides to reduce the mass of the Endurance, and thus
give her a better chance of survival, by taking the shuttle, heading it into
the black hole. Only he ejects at the event horizon.
Suddenly
he finds himself in five-dimensional space, through which he is linked
to the past – and through which he becomes the “ghost” who sent the
gravitational wave message decades ago in Earth time (There’s also something
about using wristwatches to communicate across dimensions… or whatever.). It’s
a circle-in-time plot: Cooper is the first cause of everything that’s happened,
and there were never (as NASA had thought) any aliens tipping us off about the
wormhole. It is the future humanity in the colony on Edmunds that will reach
back in time to create the wormhole, and will thus make it possible for
humanity to survive. Deep stuff, all about the power of love. Also about the
power of raging against “the dying of the light” – Brand likes to quote Dylan
Thomas.
In a final bit of
prestidigitation, Cooper is somehow found by NASA and brought to a space colony
orbiting Saturn, modeled on the country around his old home – which has been
transplanted there. He is briefly reunited with Murph, now an old woman on her
deathbed – that’s supposed to be touching. But the conclusion of the movie
doesn’t touch on how Earth managed to build that space colony, which seems to
be about the same size as Babylon 5 in the TV series, and can’t have that great
a population. Is it the only one of its kind? Does anyone still survive on
Earth, and have a chance to emigrate? How happily can we take this ending,
knowing so little?
The website devoted to plot holes
in Interstellar includes a link to
Tyson’s tweets, which refer to a book by Thorne. I remember that there was a
book about the science of The X-Files, but that left out anything from the TV series that wasn’t scientific.
I may be wrong, but I get the feeling that Tyson may be relieved/impressed that
concepts like relativity are “real” in the movie, regardless of how the details
may be represented or misrepresented.
Below, I’m including links to
accounts of several other sci-fi movies that seem to bear on the issue of
cinematic pretentiousness.
Ridley Scott, who directed the
classic Blade Runner (1982) has since
gotten into religion – his next movie is a Biblical epic, Exodus:
Gods & Kings. Prometheus (2012), a follow up to his Alien (1981), may have been a step in that direction; he
was so obsessed with the idea of humanity being created by and then threatened
with destruction by the alien gods there called Engineers that he didn’t seem
to notice the idiot plot elements in his screenplay.
Avatar (2009), the much-praised New Age sci-fi epic
directed by James Cameron, likewise suffered from an idiot plot (As Darrell
Schweitzer pointed out in The New York Review of Science Fiction, those Big Bad Earthmen could have simply nuked the
natives if all they wanted was the unobtanium.). The natives themselves were
too good to be true – and then there were the silly visual details like the
floating mountains (with waterfalls, even!), Cameron and Scott are bosom
Hollywood buddies, who influence each other a lot – there are sure to be
sequels to Avatar and there might
be one to Prometheus.
Brian de Palma, who isn’t in the
same league as Scott or Cameron (a friend of mine once quipped that he was “the
world’s oldest film student” for having borrowed shamelessly from Alfred
Hitchcock and other directors) was just as pretentious in his Mission to
Mars (2000), which turns on the Big Idea
that we are actually descended from ancient Martians. Compared to Interstellar, it is otherwise very pedestrian; it seems to take
forever to get past the scenes of everyday life on Earth and into the mission.
M. Night Shyamalan is a
once-promising director whose career seems to have gone steadily downhill since
he wowed critics and audiences with The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000). I don’t think I have to add anything to what
Wikipedia has to say about his alien menace movie Signs (2002), with the entry’s references to the silly
business of the baby monitor and the baseball bat.
But Interstellar still takes the cake.
