While I was on holiday I decided to watch Interstellar. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, but at least you’re getting what is hopefully a reasonably entertaining blog post out of it. Needless to say, though, this post is going to spoil the hell out of the film, so don’t read if you haven’t seen it yet.
Interstellar is the worst science fiction film I’ve seen since Prometheus.
To understand my particular problems with Interstellar you have to know about the difference between hard science fiction and soft science fiction. Soft science fiction is mainly concerned with telling a story, and using “science” to enable that story. It doesn’t particularly care how its science works — hence the quotation marks — and if it knows what’s good for it it won’t even bother with an explanation unless it’s directly relevant to the plot, instead presenting objects and concepts that outright break the known laws of physics as a fait accompli. This is an approach that works, and works well; it’s the story that matters to soft science fiction, and nobody is going to care about the precise physics behind lightsabers or artificial gravity unless you make the very poor decision to point it out to your audience. Soft science fiction requires lots of imagination and very little actual scientific nous to write, and so it’s not particularly surprising that soft sci-fi encompasses the vast, vast majority of science fiction. Pretty much every single sci-fi film, television show, and 95% of sci-fi books released in the last fifty years are soft science fiction.
I say this because I want to make it clear I’m not about to brutally suplex Interstellar through a table just because I like nitpicking. I’m very capable of enjoying sci-fi stories that screw established science up into a little ball and throw it into the dustbin, because if they’re written well enough and don’t go out of their way to draw attention to it I can suspend my disbelief and just accept it as something that’s necessary to the story. Prometheus was soft sci-fi, and my issues with that largely stemmed from the fact that it involved the most imbecilic group of movie scientists I’ve ever seen rather than any of its actual “science”. Soft science fiction is fine, in principle. If Interstellar was soft sci-fi it would still have problems, but those problems would be that it is terribly written and nonsensically plotted, not anything to do with its science (or lack of it).
Unfortunately Interstellar is not soft sci-fi. Or at least, on the outside it doesn’t look like soft sci-fi. Instead, Interstellar is masquerading as hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi differs from soft sci-fi because the science in hard sci-fi does matter. It might take a few liberties, or rely on one or two big assumptions about future science (the possibility of FTL travel is the usual culprit), but otherwise hard science fiction is written to be as faithful to current real-life scientific knowledge as possible. It’s effectively the reverse of soft sci-fi in that the stories it tells are now all about the how of the science that soft sci-fi just ignores; most hard sci-fi tries to come up with plausible solutions to near future problems such as the colonisation of another planet, and the draw of the story is either the science itself, or how human beings would react when confronted with the stark reality of certain modern scientific concepts. Because it’s actively relying on the science as the central support of its story hard sci-fi is consequently much harder to write well than the soft stuff, which is why you don’t often see hard sci-fi in the cinema. Not only do you have to be really up on your science, but if you’re faced with a choice between “something cool happening on screen” and “obeying the laws of physics” you usually have to choose option B, which doesn’t exactly make for a high-grossing summer blockbuster.
Except now we have Interstellar, a seemingly hard science-fiction movie that made all of the money at the box office last year. It did this despite repeatedly invoking real-world scientific concepts such as gravity and relativity, and despite going out of its way to present itself as a “realistic” vision of space travel right down to the not-having-any-sound-effects-during-space-sequences trope. It also did this despite straight up not being a very good movie, but that doesn’t stop the Transformers franchise and so is probably outside the bounds of this discussion.
The first half hour of Interstellar is probably the most interesting. It’s set on a decaying, technologically regressive Earth afflicted by a blight that’s slowly killing off the world’s staple food crops and turning the topsoil to dust. The main character, Cooper, is a washed-out astronaut who is now scratching a living as a farmer, and whose frustration with his world’s backwards, insular outlook on life drives him to seek some form of escape from it. The world-building that goes on here is perfectly respectable, and it felt like the beginning to a half-decent John Christopher novel. But then Cooper gets his wish, and the movie goes completely off the fucking rails.
Cooper is made the leader of a party of astronauts that is sent through a wormhole that appeared 50 years ago to see if they can find any planets suitable for colonisation. A wormhole? Fine, whatever, you’ve got to get the astronauts to another system somehow and so I’ll swallow that – the existence of wormholes isn’t exactly forbidden by the laws of physics, although the existence of a stable wormhole that you can traverse from one side to the other requires some extreme fudging of energy densities1. On the other side of the wormhole they find three planets orbiting a black hole called Gargantua, which is stated to have 100 million times the mass of our Sun. This makes it a mid-range black hole – we know of supermassive black holes with masses exceeding tens of billions of Suns, while the lower limit is like four Suns or something — but it’s still not exactly the sort of place I’d want to start humanity anew for the following reasons:
- Black holes aren’t very big on the whole providing heat and light for the purposes of sustaining life thing. Interstellar fudges this too by saying that the black hole’s accretion disk is providing a curiously sun-like environment for the orbiting planets, but while it’s true that accretion disks do give off a lot of radiation it’s usually in the form of X-rays and other nasty stuff that would make any planets present decidedly unhealthy places to live.
- Black holes are tidal giants. This is a point that Interstellar chooses to entirely ignore, but black holes will destroy planets long before they go anywhere near the event horizon thanks to tidal stresses. Even big planets do this – Saturn’s rings are basically chunks of moons and planetoids that wandered inside Saturn’s Roche limit, and if a pissant little gas giant can do that imagine the Roche limit a black hole with 100 million times the mass of the Sun will have. In order to survive a planet would have to be a very, very, very long way away from the black hole, which then poses some additional problems for getting adequate amounts of heat and light to sustain life.
- It’s a sodding black hole. I’m seriously struggling to think of a dumber idea than settling a new colony within spitting distance of one. Even digging out a planetoid in deep space and living underground would be more sensible.
But our intrepid heroes aren’t letting this stop them. Despite Michael Caine and Cooper’s daughter blathering on and on about how getting a look inside a black hole will let them “solve the problem of gravity”, the black hole in Interstellar has a curious lack of it and functions almost identically to Earth’s Sun for almost the entire length of the movie. It’s pretty much there for two reasons.
- To provide the usual deus ex machina that movie black holes do at the end of the film.
- To allow the writers to make a spectacular hash of the concept of gravitational time dilation.
They waste no time with the second one, as the first thing the astronauts do is make the mind-numbingly stupid decision to land on a planet so deep inside the black hole’s gravity well that seven years will pass in “normal” space for every hour they spend on the surface. I have a number of problems with this sequence.
- You would have to be bloody close to the event horizon of even a 100 million Sun-mass black hole before you experienced that degree of time dilation. Gravitational time dilation is much like relative velocity time dilation, where you don’t experience significant time dilation effects until you’re all the way up to .99c; otherwise it’s something that’s not really noticable on the human scale. As we’ve just established, being that close to the event horizon means your planet just gets pulled apart and there’d be nowhere to land on. For that matter the spaceship would get pulled apart and there’d be no astronauts to land on it.
- There’s a hefty amount of technobabble about how to land on this planet in such a way that it will save fuel. I have bad news for the astronauts: if your planet is sitting at the bottom of a gravity well so deep that you only age one hour for every seven years that pass outside of it, then there’s no amount of fuel that’s going to get you back off the planet’s surface again. We have enough trouble getting out of Earth’s gravity well, for crying out loud.
- One of the reasons they land on this planet is because there’s an all-clear signal being sent from a pathfinder ship that was sent ahead of them several years ago. When they get there they discover that the pathfinder ship is wrecked, but thanks to the time dilation in the planet’s frame of reference the ship has only just crashed. This is a nice idea, with one extremely significant flaw: if the gravity well was that deep then any transmissions from the pathfinder spacecraft would be incredibly redshifted, and it would have been extremely obvious to the astronauts that something was up. Assuming that they weren’t yet another collection of dumb movie scientists, that is.
- I don’t even know what was going on with the ankle deep water and the huge tidal waves that are somehow not spotted by the astronauts on their initial approach. Have they never heard of side-looking radar? And yes, if you’re that close to the black hole you’re going to experience significant tidal effects, as I’ve mentioned several times, but I somehow don’t think that this is what was on the filmmaker’s minds when they shot that scene. Anyway, I’d be more interested in how the planet has managed to retain a liquid ocean without having it all escape into space under the gravitational influence of the black hole. Ditto any atmospheres and, well, solid matter.
There is a lot of stupid concentrated on that first planet, but Interstellar still has a couple more stops to make on its tour of idiocy. First there’s Crazy Matt Damon’s planet, where the ice surface they spend their time tromping around on is apparently a collection of floating solid clouds. Which is ludicrous. Perhaps in response to the frank impossibility of his environment, Crazy Matt Damon goes crazy and attempts to kill the astronauts and steal their spaceship; the ensuing fracas kills the remaining redshirt astronaut and damages the spaceship so badly that Cooper is forced to attempt some sort of slingshot maneuver around the black hole to get Anne Hathaway to the last remaining candidate planet. He does this by burning all of the fuel they have left and then jettisoning the spent shuttle vehicle he’s piloting into the black hole to reduce the spacecraft’s mass. This is not the dumbest thing that happens in the film by a long way; we’ve already established that they must have some sort of magical future fuel/engines that can get them out of any gravity well and so slingshotting around the black hole while dumping unnecessary ballast is actually quite a good idea. Sadly there’s then an extended sequence where Cooper falls into the black hole, which is inevitably very, very stupid indeed.
- First, there was some gobbledygook earlier in the film where Gargantua is described as a “gentle” black hole, where somebody might be able to dip inside the event horizon and escape again with the data required to solve Michael Caine’s gravity equation. This is nonsense. The whole point of the event horizon is that it’s the point of no return: once you cross it, not even light can get back out again. That’s why it’s called the event horizon; we can’t see anything over it. That’s why black holes are black. Once you’re over that horizon, falling towards the central singularity is inevitable.
- This is also the part where Interstellar contradicts its own twisted movie logic as well as the laws of physics. The accretion disk around the black hole is burning with a heat comparable to the surface of the sun. It must be in order to provide the Earth-like light source that illuminates each of the worlds the astronauts have visited, and I think there’s a part where this is outright stated to be fact by somebody or other. Cooper somehow falls through this incredibly hot accretion disk without being burnt to a cinder and reaches the black hole’s event horizon. Maybe they’ve discovered super-asbestos in the future and lined their spacesuits with them or something.
- Oddly, Cooper would probably survive the tidal forces present at Gargantua’s event horizon. This is because the radius of the event horizon increases more or less linearly with the mass of the black hole, while the strength of the tidal forces obey an inverse square law that means they get exponentially weaker the further out you go. A small black hole on the order of a few solar masses will have a tiny event horizon, but it’ll kill you long before you reach it. A supermassive black hole like Gargantua, on the other hand, will have an event horizon that extends some way beyond the black hole’s lethal radius2. Cooper’s death is inevitable once he’s crossed it, but he’d at least live long enough to see what was inside it.
Of course the interior of the black hole turns out to be some pseudo-mystical time travelling bollocks that ties up the story, as I’d been expecting almost from the very beginning of the film. In fact I’d seen every single plot twist bar Michael Caine’s deathbed confession coming the moment the character or concept was introduced because Interstellar is, as I have already stated, a terribly written movie that hews to all of the worst soft sci-fi tropes despite having dressed itself in hard sci-fi clothing. And this is my problem with Interstellar: it’s actually a soft sci-fi movie, but it’s explicitly linked to the present day and repeatedly invokes real-world scientific concepts in the manner of a hard sci-fi movie, right before mangling them horribly because they just get in the way of the story it wants to tell. Unfortunately if you invoke that real-world science as heavily as Interstellar does you have to be partially bound by it, otherwise there’s no point; you might as well have made a more fantastical film with lasers and aliens.
Yet despite mentioning it repeatedly Interstellar doesn’t use its science in any interesting fashion bar its brief (yet incorrect) flirtation with time dilation, and it’s a much weaker film as a result of cloaking itself in a hard sci-fi raiment that, after the most cursory of inspections, turns out to be the emperor’s new clothes. It would have been far better if it hadn’t made a point of making a point out of the science; if it didn’t go out of its way to draw my attention to how wrong it was at every single turn. It wouldn’t have been a good film, but I probably would have been able to suspend my disbelief the whole way through rather than having it repeatedly snap under the weight of the film’s scientific bullshit. As it is not only is the science awful but Interstellar has a worse grasp on its internal logic than the Fast and Furious series does. At least those movies are fun. Interstellar, on the other hand, is a dull, dreary and pointless expedition into the absurd, and I deeply regret having watched it at all.
(I did like the robots, though.)
—————————————————————————-
- One thing that did amuse me about this was that the pencil-through-folded-paper exposition one of the other astronauts does for Cooper (about five minutes before they fly into the thing – you’d think Cooper would have boned up on his wormhole physics a little earlier than this) is exactly the same as the wormhole explanation in Event Horizon. ↩
- Of course this does mean that that water planet should have been orbiting inside the black hole’s event horizon in order to experience that amount of time dilation. ↩
I really liked the movie.
Out of curiosity, have you read up on the physicist who acted as the film’s scientific expert? He wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar to cover this very topic, and I know I’ve read some articles about the tidal planet and how the black hole visuals are as accurate as they can currently be. I haven’t read the book myself, but I’m curious if it addresses any of your complaints.
I am aware Kip Thorne acted as scientific adviser for the film, but from what I read his main contribution was making the black hole + wormhole *visuals* as accurate as they could be. In this, he succeeded. The black holes look like black holes, and the wormholes looked like how we think wormholes should look. Unfortunately if he was dispensing any scientific advice about the actual physics he seems to have been roundly ignored.
And hey, Interstellar at least wasn’t as bad as Prometheus. I’d even say it’s 50% of a decent film. Unfortunately it’s the 50% that takes place in Earth’s solar system.
…I also liked Prometheus. :/
“I really liked the movie… I also liked Prometheus.”
Damon Lindelof? Is that you?
I loved it too.
It’s interesting that it’s caused so much debate about the science, what with Kip Thorne having been heavily involved in the writing of it and even Neal deGrasse Tyson talking about it a fair bit.
Sure, there’s plenty of sci-fi in there that’s going to be wrong; you can say that about any film or TV show that’s supposed to be about a real field of study. (Does anyone really think Homeland accurately portrays the CIA, or CSI accurately portrays crime science, or ER accurately portrayed a hospital, or Friends accurately portrayed idiots in New York? I don’t think so.)
I totally enjoyed it for the movie it was, rather than the documentary it wasn’t.
Except CSI is regularly lampooned for being just about as far away from real forensics as possible, Friends is a sitcom and thus inherently ridiculous, and ER was never about the medicine. Interstellar *is* about the science, however. And if it’s not, they shouldn’t have leaned on it so much.
It’s true, I left the movie thinking like I learned something new about space and physics. But it was all sort of commingled together to allude to some far fetched concepts, which confused as it did mesmerize. I am going to stand on the side of creativity because that’s only how we push the boundaries, also I’m an artist. So what I couldn’t understand scientifically, the film made up for in visual and story telling. In the end I realized it was just a movie (with factual loopholes albeit) but for me it was thoroughly enjoying.
I thought that the movie was pretty interesting and cool looking, but I’d have to agree with a lot of what was said about it
I liked how Murph was hooked up to a Dash 4000 monitor at the end. Really should start that “medical devices in popular culture” blog/tumbler one day.
Oh, the film. I wasn’t particularly fussed – looked stunning, and the robots were cool, but I found it kind of disjointed and incoherent as a whole.
It’s almost like Christopher Nolan directed it.
OH WAIT.
So – 7/10?
“Not Recommended”, according to Eurogamer’s new review system.
I’m with you – I’ve been wanting to write a review or perspective on it as well.
For saddest thing is that by masquerading as hard sci-fi it confuses the public, and the last thing the public needs is more misdirected information about science.
As a sort of thriller / visual feast if you can shut down your brain’s logic circuit the movie is pretty enjoyable, but I too just found way to many of the moments laughable. Going down to the water planet ….. each hour is seven years right? So why the big rush to drop down without at least giving the thing a survey pass, you know, to check for any big giant tidal waves or something.
I can tolerate a certain amount of liberties with the science itself, but what bugs me the most is when the characters that are supposed to be scientists don’t act the least bit scientific. That ends up failing both the narrative and the science content both.
I liked it, but I can understand why you didn’t. I think it’s unfair to compare it to Prometheus, though, because there’s an important difference between the two films: Interstellar criticises ignorance and inward-looking attitudes, encouraging exploration and discovery, whereas Prometheus punishes exploration and curiosity. Granted, Prometheus is descended from Alien and is meant to be at least partly a horror film, but there’s a definite vein of anti-intellectualism running through it. Whatever may have happened beyond the elevator pitch, Interstellar is far purer of heart.
You definitely have a point there. The entire Alien franchise bears this anti-science attitude, with science being represented by unempathic androids while Ripley’s redneck attitude towards the unknown is what saves the day in the end. It always irritates me when watching Alien(s), though both movies handle the scientific content perfectly ok.
This can be contrasted to “War of the worlds” or even “Mars attacks”, in which defeating the threat relies on the uncovering of the enemy’s non-obvious weakness. In the future alien invasion of earth, humanity may lose the battle, as a consequence of Ripley’s past stubborn resistance towards the “knowing thy enemy” principle
I think the Aliens franchise leaves me with an impression that it is more like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu than an actual sci-fi genre.
I hated it as well. That whole peeking through the bookshelves business was horrible, as was the gravitational nonsense.
You say it would be ridiculous to live on a planet near a black hole and the movie itself agrees with you, because that turns out to not be the reason the people of the future created the wormhole in the first place, the whole point was for Cooper to go inside the black hole to learn the “secret of gravity”, not live on another planet, understand?
I was a bit disappointed by the movie overall, it’s not the runaway success Inception is, but I still thought it was pretty good.
Doesn’t matter why the people of the future created it though. The humans of the present knew there was a black hole there and still set off with the objective of colonising one of the planets.
Maybe because desperate times call for desperate measures? Everyone was dying, what do you expect them to do say “well as far as we know it’s not feasible to live near a black hole, guess we all have to just sit here and slowly starve to death”, of course they had to at least try it.
I didn’t see the movie, but you make a conceptual point in your review that helps me think about SF in a new and useful way!
“It would have been far better if it hadn’t made a point of making a point out of the science; if it didn’t go out of its way to draw my attention to how wrong it was at every single turn.”
This, and your discussion about soft vs hard SF is really spot on, and explains some of my previous reactions to various SF titles. What broke Prometheus (sorry for changing the subject) for me was not that much the stuff you cover in your review of it, while I agree with all that, it was rather the discussion about human origin and evolution that arose when Noomi Rapace character presented her theory. Thing is, her to-be-verified theory about humans being planted by aliens didn’t have a way to explain the fact that we share a large portion of our genome with the rest of earth’s life (which real-world creationists do have an answer to, albeit a bad one). This would have been fine with me, unless the story’s biologist had mentioned evolution as a challenge to her theory, but let the subject slip when confronted with a faith-type argument. So it was a fictive scientific discussion which had no resemblance of a real scientific discussion, and after this I couldn’t take the movie seriously anymore.
Now, through your analysis of Interstellar, I understand why – in that particular scene they made a point out of the science in order so that the scientific flaw became impossible to suspend disbelief in.
This might even be a special case of a more general principle in fiction – what makes a good work of fiction is not as much how far the creators get with it in terms of quality (or science), but rather the level of agreement between where the creators aim and where they end up. (I still think that “Meet the Feebles” is Peter Jackson’s best creation, for example).
This movie had so much potential, creativity, and ideas going for it. I think sometimes it is more painful to have a film with an awe-inspiring plan that has poor implementation versus films that are the reverse. Does it stand far above most mediocre and poor science film movies? Absolutely, but as you put it, it dressed itself as the ‘hard-science’ film where we could lose ourselves in the complexity and glorious detail. Since it set the bar so high and hit it so low that relative failure makes it worse for me as an avid sci-fi fan. You really can’t have a movie that tries to be pseudo-science/fantasy and hard-science at the same time.
- I was kinda OK with the scene where McConaughey chases that UAV through the corn field. A good sci-fi movie will present you with something unusual that will later start to fit within the world. This never happened though – The guy was simply a superb hacker/pilot/farmer/astronaut. Very random.
- A few hundred (thousand?) scientists build a rocket… in secret… in isolation… from a hole in the ground. How did they get the materials? Who was feeding the chickens?
- The rocket is your typical contemporary tech – 95% fuel tank just in order to get away from the Earth’s gravity. Then, for the rest of the movie, McConaughey is flying all over the place in a vessel that’s obviously powered by cocaine and writer’s block.
… There’s more but I’ll stop now. Ugh.
There’s an underlying assumption underneath all of your arguments that compromises your entire thesis: namely, you think your opinion matters.
There’s no point debating the individual scientific and plot points you make. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, when asked to rate the scientific veracity of the film, gave it a 9 out of 10. Now I’m not going to automatically believe everything he says and I’m sure some of his points of view are debatable, but I’ll take his word any day over yours. You know why? Because he’s actually contributed something to science and the way people perceive it; you haven’t. You’ve done nothing of value and contributed only nitpicking irrelevance that’s nothing more than a feeble attempt at justifying your existence.
It seems you find it gratifying to specifically seek out any opportunity to demonstrate your superiority over a cast, crew, and production team funded by millions of dollars and a script vetted by veteran filmmakers and scientific advisers. As if every instance of purportedly flawed logic in the film is an opportunity to make yourself feel better about never being able to create anything of value or partake in anything that could ever have the impact of the film you’re lambasting.
If you think you know so much about “hard” sci-fi and film making, why don’t you make your own film? Because you can’t. You have no skill or talent or vision or capacity to make an impact on an audience. You have no ability to get people to care about what you do or get excited about your vision or philosophies. You have nobody to fund your films or projects because you have nothing to offer. The truth of the matter is, if you made a film with your scientific knowledge and point of view according to the standards you espouse in your preceding diatribe, it would SUCK. No one would watch it other than similarly creatively destitute degenerates who get high off their hairsplitting and who enjoy watching documentaries about curdling milk.
You can attack me and call me a troll for taking the time to write all of this up, but I don’t do it for your sake; I do it for mine. To remind myself not to sit around complaining and picking out flaws in the creative works of others, especially when it clearly has tremendous value to many other people.
If you had some respect for the creative work of others and the staggering amount of effort, resources, talent, and sheer will it takes to bring such a vision to life, you might be inspired by what they DID manage to successfully accomplish and take any perceived shortcomings as a challenge to create something of value yourself. You won’t though, because you’re a non-contributing zero.
Enjoy writing your blog. It’s all you have.
Perhaps, instead of writing a needlessly personal attack, you could point out the sections where you feel the author didn’t do the film-makers justice? Because from where I’m standing everything he said was accurate.
And quite how you can state that the blog is ‘all you have’ when you have no idea who wrote this or what else they do is beyond me. At least he has this blog, which many, many people read and enjoy. You however, appear to have nothing.
Where did you… come from?
I don’t think you understand how reviews work
Joseph Anderson you are a complete hypocrite. Your rant applies squarely to your own comments and not to the original review. I would suggest you shed your prejudices and re read the review with fresh eyes, but I doubt you have the self perception to do so. I doubt you have any idea of why you felt it necessary to launch such an emotional, fact free tirade in the first place. It has solely to do with your myopic world view and nothing to do with the review, the movie or anything else.
If I had a spare 100 million, I would happily give it to Hentzau to make a movie. It would be far better than anything you could make. I believe it would be well written, consistent and entertaining. For the same reasons it would also crap all over Interstellar, Prometheus and all the other underwhelming, over budgeted, poorly written claptrap that Hollywood insists as passing off as Sci-Fi.
You say that you would take the word of Neil DeGrasse Tyson over Hentzau. Science and consistency isnt about belief, its about logically consistant facts. Interstellar’s ‘science’ is internally inconsistent. It breaks its own rules. This isn’t suspension of disbelief, it’s poor writing and even worse execution.
Joseph, you also fail to understand the difference between emotive and personal. Hentzau makes an emotive argument. He doesn’t like the movie and lets us know why in a logically supported impassioned argument. Yours is largely an Ad Hominem argument – you attack the writer and not the writing. This logical fallacy you indulge in totally discredits anything you have to say.
I would suggest that if you intend to discredit someone else’s argument, you learn how to do so effectively in the first place. Your pitiful writing style more closely resembles a toddler’s temper tantrum then a cogent essay.
In short, please check your head.
Sooo… is that Farscape picture there for the wormhole mention, or for “goes completely off the fucking rails”? I figure both are appropriate, and the second in a good way.
need hyperluminal SPEED and TIME of the Immortals to conquer SPACE
…interstellar travel (the universe is just there for us)… theory relativity: impossible to go beyond Solar System…religion: impossible to go beyond Solar System…theory relativity = Hoax = religion…repugnant religions with pontifices living in golden palaces eating partridges, while children perish of hunger in The Third World deliberately maintained, because without poor and ignorant there is not religion (when aliens will come to Earth, goodbye religion and all its Lies)…repugnant theory relativity against logic and reason with empty space that expands, wormholes in empty space, Empty Space and all the Energy in Universe pre/Big-Bang tucked inside a without dimensions dot and outside “nothing”, speed of light no beyond and therefore Humankind damned here forever till extinction, etc. Just Time, will demonstrate that relativistic equations are fallacies (fallacy: lie said with to make hurt intention), byt…when?, because meanwhile people looking elsewhere, evidently the religious control the World: business, factories (see that typical religious subliminal threat in discupowered gojjleson-Inquisition image with head-cut…spying and suddenly erasing antireligious comment while is been written, and of course, occult sending to people´s computer virus who cause “operating system not found”, etc…virus who are installed in Microson-protected HD directions for not to be totally erased by antivirus program;…is the same discu-Inquisition “strong-threat”, wopres-Inquisition “middle threat”, blopo-Inquisition “low threat apparent” for mislead innocents and foolish;…see that religious symbol in Microson-Inquisition all O.S. and also in its new O.S.10…), jobs (if you want have a job, you must stay silent), governments…religious control all global media: TV, movies (“Contact” before launch scientist…religious ask, “do you belief in god?…I…but doctor, major part of people belief in God”…scientist did must to say: major part of people need more Astronomy and nothing religion, some unknown Supreme Being perhaps, but no religion sanguinary sick homo-vices god, because religion is Lie), radio, newspapers censured to free folks opinion…see the most important New York newspaper who only permit comments at 1% articles and still so under discu-Inquisition approval…false freedom: people can have all classes of fire gun, but people not can says their free opinion because the pen is mightier than all weapons… (Internet are totally under religious infection: when typewrite anything immediately first appear as a scabies religious affairs infecting the searched topic, and putting 90% their thousands “of confidence” obedient bribed blogs who manipulate in web pages phrases of true comments so that it seem say at religious convenience, instead of the normal blogs who people want, using the ancient religious malign threatening tactical: “by mouth dies fish”, “the same who someone says against us, we say against them”, and calling “unclear” to who says anything about their occult religious-vices apparently “virtues”), religious secretly have the Power, and therefore they are very dangerous for in Peace Humankind Future, because they prefer thermonuclear extinction instead of no religion (typewrite: “religious say World War III has already begun”)…religious do not permit that Science develop enough for the facts demonstrate the relativistic lie. ½ century ago NASA (strangely cancelled the 2 last Apollo missions when they were in all prepared for launch) does not go again to Moon, why?…WHAT ARE THERE IN MOON THAT DO NOT WANT WHICH HUMANKIND KNOWS?, aliens?…relativity incorporated to religion for avoids Justice, Progress and Equality in distribution of the Goods of the Earth, because that is, always all that is: the poor, poor and the rich, rich… The Evil Empire: religion, armies, monarchies (Nobel Prize must be given up by a citizen committee) and politicians…when until?. Are not “the physics Laws”, are “the relativistic physics Laws” that is not the same. And now they can to continue with the tale of “the Lorentz factor” &Co. that already minus remains…1,000 years?
Just a random comment, having read most of your reviews.. I’m surprised you’ve never made a rant about the film Primer.
You should read “The Science behind Interstellar”. Kip Thorne didn’t just make sure “the black hole + wormhole *visuals*” are “as accurate as they could be”. You are ranting about the science of a nobel prize winner in his special field and you don’t really show, what and why Kip Throne got wrong and how it would be right, because you don’t know what he was thinking – you didn’t bother reading the book after all, you simply rely on what you’ve heard about him and his book. Very scientific of you. Read the book, it explains why most of your points are flaws of your thinking, knowing and understanding.
It’s a stupid movie.. Glorifying Man as. God, which really shit me too. .
I just watched this. What an absolute waste of two and a half hours. Even putting aside all the “science”, it was just such a poorly written bunch of tripe I could barely sit through it.
The worst thing is the knowledge that the average person watching it must have thought it was brilliant. It’s no surprise at all that it gets the acclaim it does as it allows the average idiot to feel like they’ve just experienced and understood something intelligent.
What an interesting read…enlightening…I watched the movie but couldn’t endure it for long…Anne Hathaway is best suited for the pradas and oceans of this world…not intergalactic travel.
One way to have made the movie and millers planet visit believable was they should not have calculated the time dilation beforehand. That would have really set a lot of interests going on, such as seeing the crashed ship, the giant waves, returning back and then realizing they spent 23 years for visiting it by meeting old Romilly and he revealing the time spent to them. That would have eased out a lot of stupidity of Millers planet.