Interstellar is a 2014 movie about Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi. It is from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada directed by Christopher Nolan written by Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain.
A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity’s survival.
Earth’s future has been riddled by disasters, famines, and droughts. There is only one way to ensure mankind’s survival: Interstellar travel. A newly discovered wormhole in the far reaches of our solar system allows a team of astronauts to go where no man has gone before, a planet that may have the right environment to sustain human life.
It runs for 2 hours, 49 minutes in English. On IMDb, 1,898,118 people gave it an average rating of 8.6 out of 10 stars.
Interstellar is a terrible film, here is why
It’s been over a week since I saw Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar. Remembering my enormous disappointment with the massively hyped-up Prometheus, I did not have high expectations to this hyped-up intergalactic epos. My disappointment was therefore not massive, but I am still rather surprised at how horrible a film Interstellar really is. Given Nolan’s very decent track-record, with top-notch flicks such as The Dark Knight and Memento, I honestly thought Interstellar would be better. Below are my reasons why the film is horrible (SPOILER-ALERT):
Reason 1: I am a geek and a nerd, and as such I actually give a shit whether a film’s physics is somewhat coherent. The physics in Interstellar is almost all ridiculously wrong, with only a few decent exceptions. Some examples of shittiness: There is not such thing as a “soft” or “nice” black hole and human life would never be viable on a planet right next to one. The radiation and gravitational stress would destroy any possibility of life. Also, remember why a black hole is called a black hole? Because no fucking light escapes its gravitational pull. A planet “surfing” on the event horizon of a black hole would therefore be shrouded in eternal darkness. Further: When the crew is on the water planet, they are surprised by a huge wave the size of a mountain. They escape by surfing on this wave. Also, the gravity on that planet was much higher than on Earth. Ok, so far so good, yes? Fuck no. A wave that size would suck the crew and ship into it way before the actual wave struck them. Watch any wave on any beach and you will see how the water are sucked away from the beach long before the actual wave. This effect is amplified with the size of the wave. A good example is the video from the 2004 tsunami; you can clearly see how the water is sucked away from the beach a long time before the tsunami hit. And if the gravity on the water planet is more severe than on Earth, this would also amplify the current; making it impossible for the crew to run around only meters away from the mountain-wave. There are far more examples of moronic physics flaws, but I want people to read this, so for brevity’s sake I’ll just mention one last thing: Ammonia. Matthew McConaughey’s character lies on an alien planet with ammonia for athmosphere, and his visor is cracked so that he can’t breathe. He lies like this, gasping and talking for minutes. This is not humanly possible and would result, at best, in massive internal injuries (lung- damage for one). He would not be able, minutes afterward, to endure G-forces strong enough to knock out seasoned astronauts, making crack jokes in the process.
Reason 2: Plot holes. The plot holes in this film are so massive, they dwarf the film’s black hole. There are video-reviews out there that spend literally hours going through them all, so I won’t. But here are a few whoppers: Michael Caine’s character spouts the regular cliche-spiel about how McConaughey’s character is the ‘best pilot they have’ and how he should go on this mission because he has ‘trained for it his entire life’. Okay, fine. But why did they allow him to stop being a pilot to become a farmer in the first place then? And if they somehow changed their minds, why didn’t they send for him if he is so critical to the plan’s success? He only discovered the secret NASA base because he in a parallell universe in the future told himself to travel to the NASA-base’s coordinates (using morse code). Further: Why the fuck does McConaughey’s character’s daughter scribble away physics equations on a big blackboard? This is not how theorhetical physicists work. They use computers, just like everyone else. Einstein and Oppenheimer are sometimes shown in film-clips scratching away on a blackboard; but that is for educational purposes. Their actual work was done in notebooks, for fuck’s sake. Also, just because you have worked out a theoretical problem, you are nowhere near being actually able to make practical use of it. So when they, in this film, find out the “key” to solving a physics equation using the “singularity” from the “soft black hole” (all bullshit), this does not mean you can actually implement it in practice. For example, the theories of quantum mechanics allows for teleportation, and this has been known for a long time. But we do not have any technology enabling teleportation. Finally I must mention the wormhole itself. Apparently NASA has been able to find out, via drones and suicide missions, that it leads to three different solar systems with three possibly habitable planets. How does the crew of the film’s spaceship know how to navigate inside the wormhole? They clearly state that they are going to a certain planet before leaving the wormhole, so how do they choose this if the wormhole has one entrance and three exits? And if the wormhole has only one exit and they had to travel between solar systems on the other side; how did they do that in the time allotted to them? Best case scenario is that the solar systems with the three candidate-planets lie 1 light year away from each other (highly unlikely). It took the crew months to travel from Earth to Jupiter; it would therefore take them decades (if not centuries) to travel from one system to the next.
Reason 3: The actors. It is blatantly (far too much so) obvious that Nolan is trying to imitate Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (a perfect film, btw). Yet, he fails to learn from Kubrick’s genius. In ‘2001’ Kubrick only used totally or mostly unknown actors. The film’s main protagonist can arguably be said to be HAL or the Monolith itself, not ‘Dave’. However, in Interstellar, we are presented with extremely famous actors, some of whom act like shit. Anne Hathaway overact the entire time. McConaughey acts decent enough, but he is way too famous. They even put Matt fucking Damon in this film! When Matt fucking Damon appeared, I could literally hear a collective groan escape from the audience. If the actors had all, or nearly all, been unknown or only semi-famous; the film would rely more on it’s plot and script. In Kubrick’s ‘2001’, this bolstered the film, in Interstellar; it would be disastrous as stupid audiences then wouldn’t be blinded by famous pretty faces.
Reason 4: Pandering to religious right-wing ‘Muricans. In modern science fiction films, we are these days almost always presented with two concepts: Science is evil and/or religion/faith is good. Interstellar is no exception to this. We are shown a story in which science is actually a force for good, but we are simultaneously told that faith and a belief in a “higher power” is good. By the way, the way we are told that NASA is a force for good in this film is when they say that NASA previously refused to “bomb starving people from orbit”. If the goal was to kill off starving people, you don’t need to bomb them. They are starving, just don’t give them food. Secondly, why would any government require bombing ‘from orbit’? We have the atom bomb and ICBMs, there is no need for any NASA-operated space-bombing. But the most horrible (and I mean horrible) example of religous pandering is when Hathaway and McConaughey’s characters debate what planet to travel to. Hathaway’s character go on this rambling rant about how ‘love is the only force that goes beyond gravity, space and time, love is a higher power that supercedes mankind’s understanding’; and she uses this bullshit to argue for traveling to the planet where her boyfriend is located. No, Nolan, love is not ‘a higher power’. Love is a chemical reaction formed by hormones and inter-personal human relationships. It is not an “unknown dimension”. And if an actual astronaut started blabbering about such nonsense, he or she would be locked away/restrained due to acute space- sickness/cabin-fever. Also, why is it that only ‘Murica is presented as mankind’s saviours? This is such a huge cliche that I was genuinely surprised Nolan included it. Also, when the film shows its happy- ending resolution, it shows a space station laid out like a Republican dream-land. All green lawns, houses, white picket fences and only white people (not a single other ethnicity). Such bullshit.
Reason 5: The audio-score. Jesus H. Christ on a monocycle it is bad. Zimmerman’s background music is so loud that you are often unable to hear the actual dialogue. The music score also never lets up (it’s always playing, for over 3 hours) and is totally out of sync with actual plot events. Often we are presented with dramatic music when nothing is happening and vice- versa.
Finally I would like to mention the only three things that are good in this film:
- The film shows that there are no sound in space. Space is a vacuum and as such soundwaves cannot travel.
- The apocalypse on Earth is realistic. It’s not a huge meteor or a nuclear war or anything like that. It’s shown in a simple, effective and believable way.
- The robots were funny.