We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.
Cooper, Interstellar
It's a big full plane, which would make the Civilization Game quite playable, but I'm more intrigued to see that Interstellar is on the list of options for in flight viewing.
I ended up just not getting to Interstellar in commercial release, but it's been on my list of catch-up movies. It generated a lot of geek buzz when it debuted, with physics luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly weighing in regarding the accuracy - or lack thereof - of the wormhole and black hole science involved in the plot.
Interstellar presents us with an Earth which is no longer on the edge of starvation but past it, with a reduced population living in a global dust bowl à la The Grapes of Wrath. Widowed spaceship pilot manqué Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey*, grows corn and drinks beer while mourning the loss of the pioneer spirit in favour of survival.
Enigmatic messages from an unknown force point Cooper and his daughter Murphy toward a hidden NASA base which is covertly planning a trip through a mysterious wormhole in hopes of finding a habitable planet. Cooper decides to abandon his family and pilot the mission, even though time dilation makes it impossible for him to tell his family when he will return. Elderly physicist Michael Caine promises to have solved the mysteries of gravity manipulation before Cooper's return so that mankind can emigrate to their new home in space - once Cooper finds it.
The other side of the wormhole is a sort of physics playground, with a black hole causing all sorts of peculiar problems for the explorers.
Even as an amateur physicist**, there were aspects of those problems that I found to be questionable. For example, at one point the crew visits a planet which is orbiting a black hole closely enough that time dilation has slowed time to a crawl: seven years pass on Earth for every hour spent on the planet's surface. They leave one crew member in orbit and take a lander for a hit and run visit to the planet in order to determine the fate of previous explorers. Of course problems ensue, and when they make it back to the ship 23 years have come and gone for the solitary crew member***, and Cooper's distant daughter is now the same age that he is.
But...if the ship is in orbit, it would have to be orbiting in line with the plane of the planet's orbit so that it wouldn't get any closer to the black hole at any time, or else it would suffer from fluctuating time dilation effects. Actually, why not get the ship into a position so that exactly the same amount of time passes on the ship as on the planet? Or less time?
Similar moments of fuzzy logic continue throughout Interstellar, and the climax is a confusing mix of 2001: A Space Odyssey and arbitrary, illogical deus ex machina intervention by future versions of humanity. A little advice to our distant descendants: if you need to twist time and manipulate space so that information crucial to the survival of humanity is transmitted, maybe do your twisting and manipulating so that the information goes to a scientist instead of a pre-teen girl's bedroom?
- Sid
*** Who is a little quiet for the rest of the movie, not a huge surprise after more than two decades of solitary confinement.
* It used to be
that if you wanted to cast someone as an archetypal American, you picked
Kevin Costner. In the fullness of time, Mr. McConaughey has taken over the job.
** Reading science fiction is like getting a really strange education in the sciences. With aliens on the side.
*** Who is a little quiet for the rest of the movie, not a huge surprise after more than two decades of solitary confinement.
Second attempt to leave a comment (internet issues): would you recommend this movie to a layperson? As in someone mostly unfamiliar with the logistics and culture of sci fi? Or would it be too hard to follow and therefore not be enjoyable? Air Canada may offer this as a movie choice in the Vancouver-Toronto corridor.
ReplyDeleteWould I recommend this movie to a layperson? Interesting question. I'm actually not sure that I'd recommend this movie to anyone. The acting is good - Jessica Chastain is quite noteworthy, although Anne Hathaway is underutilized - but ultimately it's kind of a dull movie, which is odd considering the scope of the script.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit like an action movie for physicists: you're not supposed to pay too much attention to the details, just eat your popcorn and enjoy the special effects, and ultimately, it wasn't quite special enough to pull me in.
- Sid
Pretty much bang on commentary. The movie was really slow at the start and I almost turned it off (I was watching it on Netflix) but did continue watching waiting for the pace to quicken, the story to develop. It almost got to the point where I continued watching because I stubbornly refused to turn it off. Contact, another film with Mr. McConaughey, was also slow in that regards but I found it much more interesting.
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