Thoughts on Interstellar, the movie (spoilers!)

This post contains spoilers. Please go watch the movie, and then read this. Seriously, go watch. This is an all-time movie, and I have a feeling this will stand the test of time and gain even more popularity as time goes on. This one is that good.

I just had to jot down some thoughts about the movie — and particularly the science therein. One, I’m interested in this stuff, and can’t help it. But also, two, I heard people pooh-poohing it away, and I didn’t like that at all. So here goes.

In summary: I loved it. This is what science-fiction is supposed to look like — a combination of adventure and extrapolation of real science into the unknown. I’ve been reading and hearing some of the negative ‘reviews’, and it seems to me that most of it revolves around “hey, that’s not science, it’d never work that way!” The great thing about this movie is most of the ‘extrapolations’ are in directions that are truly unknown, and until science does cover those areas, your, mine, and the Nolans’ imagination is as good as anyone’s.

  • I loved the scientific accuracy. I usually hate it when films get their premises wrong. This one got the science right — mostly. (We’ll go into details soon.)
  • I loved that a wormhole near Saturn wouldn’t just appear out of thin vacuum. I loved that they didn’t create some bunkum theory for man to create a wormhole, and just went with “we don’t know”.
  • I loved that tidal wave on the first planet. That wasn’t just there as a plot point — being near a black hole is supposed to cause that. Giant tidal forces should be a norm near a black hole, and it was.
  • I did NOT like the fact that a planet could exist so near to a black hole. I think they showed the planet to be basically situated right near the ‘edge’ of the black hole, and at that distance, with a planetary mass, the tidal forces should work on the solids too, and basically tear the planet apart. Crucially, it’s not impossible, though. (Here again, they’re stretching the limits of the science, at most. Lovely.)

  • I did NOT like the fact that 23 years elapsed on the spaceship in orbit, when only a few (three?) hours elapsed on the surface of the first planet.

    Remember, it’s not the gravity of the planet that’s causing the time-dilation, but the nearby black hole. So the premise is that they ‘parked’ the orbiting space craft at such a distance that time dilation effects were negligible, when compared to that at the planet surface.

    Now remember that they took 8 months to travel to Mars, and 2 years to travel to Saturn. Granted, they were using gravity assists and not direct thrust, so the interplanetary voyage took longer. But it gives an idea of the orders of magnitude involved here. Let’s say that using direct thrust of the smaller craft they can travel the distance between Earth and Saturn in 3 hours. Fair? (If I’m doing the math right, Earth-Saturn is about 1.5 light-hrs, so light would take 1.5hrs to get there.)

    There’s no way that that distance causes a relative time-dilation of 23 years in the vicinity of a black hole, and does not pulverize the planet itself. That right there was all wrong. - I did NOT like that Coop is thrown back into 3D space through the same wormhole that they originally went through. A wormhole is supposed to be like a tunnel. You go in one end; you come out another end. They went in one end (Saturn), and came out somewhere in the vicinity of the black hole, but not out of the black hole itself.

    If so, why would another wormhole originating inside the black hole lead back to an opening to a separate wormhole near Saturn?! That did not sit well with me. - I loved the black hole and event horizon sequences and visualizations. I’ll trust Dr. Kip Thorne and Cornell University grad students that they got the details right. It all looked amazing. - I loved the treatment of time as “just another dimension to travel through”. Seriously, we don’t really know what happens inside black holes, and one possibility is indeed that 4-dimensional spacetime can be mashed together. Beyond that, as I mentioned earlier, it’s an artist’s realm, and I liked what they did with it. It was convenient, of course, that the particular area of spacetime that Coop confronted from within the black hole was precisely the spacetime that he needed to confront, but we can allow that much cinematic coincidence, can’t we? - I did NOT like the idea of conveying through Morse code, via the seconds hand of a wrist watch, no less, experimental data regarding quantum mechanics and relatively. (What other ‘data’ would the robot ‘collect’ from within a black hole?!) I wish they could find a more ingenious way to achieve this. - I am okay with the idea that they only needed experimental data from within the black hole to complete their theory of quantam gravity. Perhaps they had a bunch of ‘general solutions’ and the experimental data allowed them to arrive at ‘particular solutions’. Not beyond the imagination, by any stretch. - Hans Zimmer, take a bow. Such a brilliant score! - I have to watch the movie again. I don’t think I’ve taken it all in, in one sitting. Christopher Nolan, keep making movies.