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Monday, November 10, 2014

Movie Critique: Interstellar

Mark and I went to see Interstellar this past Sunday. It's been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a notion perpetuated by director Christopher Nolan himself.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: I saw 2001 when I was ten years old. I knew 2001 inside and out. 2001 was my favorite movie. Interstellar is no 2001.

First, Interstellar is too damn loud. I'm not the only one to make this complaint. A thick percentage of the movie's dialog is completely drowned out by a subsonic rumble that rattles your ribcage. If the director doesn't care whether you can hear what the actors are saying, why have them say anything? In 2001, there were long stretches where no words were spoken. There were long stretches of actual silence and musical interludes that substituted for soundlessness of space.

Nolan included some of that too; he obviously intended the film to be firmly grounded in realistic science: it starts out like a documentary, with geezers talking about the bad old days (these are actually flashforwards). It is filled with talk of slingshotting past Mars to get to Saturn, relativity, gravitational time dilation, the twin paradox (with a daddy twist), and it was peopled by physicists and astronauts.  But, like the recent film Gravity, Nolan just could not stop himself from filling the movie with unscientific and incoherent nonsense, without getting any artistic return for the sacrifice.

Nolan gets almost every bit of science and technology wrong: from agronomy, to astronomy, to remote sensing, to orbital mechanics, to physics, to physiology, and on and on.
Why, in a movie that that rails against mendacity and mediocrity, does the director settle for mendacity and mediocrity in his story-telling?
The premise of the film is that the world is suffering from sort of blight that is killing all the crops. Dust constantly sifts down from the sky, and there are huge dust storms, yet we never see where the dust is coming from, everywhere the characters go there are endless fields of bright green corn. Wheat no longer grows, and all the okra (seriously, okra?) has now died off as well. The only crop left is corn. And that's on the way out too.

The hero, "Coop" Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), is a former astronaut who is now a farmer. Because food is so scarce everyone has to be a farmer, even though crops are automatically harvested by gigantic robot combines. The world has abandoned its future, choosing to eke out an existence of pale, dusty subsistence.

Coop eventually finds his way to a secret NASA installation, where he and his daughter meet the people who have a plan to save the world. I knew this movie was in real trouble when the door from the conference room opened directly into the silo where they were going to launch a 1960s vintage Saturn V rocket.

What is the secret plan to save the world from corn blight? There are two. Plan A: go to another galaxy through a monolith, er, wormhole, that mysteriously pops up around Saturn, and then find another planet where we'll move six billion people. Plan B: same as Plan A except instead of bringing six billion people, bring thousands of fertilized embryos and just one woman (Anne Hathaway) to bear them all.

Now, as a former astronaut Coop would have known in an instant that Plan A is a total crock. You cannot save more than a few hundred or few thousand people through conventional space travel to escape corn blight. Plan B is also a total crock, because -- although they stupidly brought the frozen embryos along -- they didn't bring enough women, or fetal creches, or even supplies to house and clothe and feed a colony raised from embryos.

Nolan is playing us for fools because he's playing his hero as a fool. And it's not just technical errors, it's emotional manipulation as well.

NASA typically takes months and years to train for missions, but Coop — who hasn't flown in decades — goes directly from his farm to pilot a spacecraft to Saturn. Why the rush? Because the director wanted to force an angry and emotional tiff between Coop and his daughter, forcing an abrupt separation. In reality, he would train for months, and there would have been oodles of time for reconciliation with the girl. But the spindly directorial manipulations of his characters' emotions demanded this.

After the launch into space Nolan makes a huge deal of spinning up the spacecraft to generate artificial gravity: the trip from Earth to Saturn will take two years. But then the crew goes into hibernation.Yes, they're just going to sleep for two whole years. Which means that spinning up the spacecraft is a complete waste: lying motionless has exactly the same deleterious effects on human physiology that weightlessness does.

So why do they need to spin the craft at all? To force a gimmicky — and loud — action scene later on, of course. And besides, the Discovery in 2001 was spinning! And had hibernation. And had a computer that said snappy things. So of course Interstellar had to have all that too.

Once they pass through the wormhole any pretense of scientific accuracy is thrown out the airlock. While it took them years to get to Saturn, on the other side they zip around from planet to planet in hours.

The people who wrote this movie do not seem to understand a damned thing about how scientists study other planets. Five centuries ago Galileo saw mountains on the moon. Ninety years ago we knew the basic compositions of the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. We mapped the surface of Venus with radar from earth fifty years ago. Right now, today, we can analyze the compositions of the atmospheres of stars and even planets light years away.

Yet the only way Nolan's scientists can think to get this same data about potential new homes for mankind was to land on these planets. Even more incredibly and stultifyingly stupid, Coop and friends risk fetching a data recorder (why doesn't it just transmit the data via radio like our probes on Mars?) that is on a planet deep enough in the black hole's gravity well that it suffers a time dilation factor of 1:63,785. Once there, they are surprised to find that the mountains in the distance are actually huge waves of water (fortunately the data recorder had landed in a knee-deep puddle). Disaster ensues, of course, and they waste 20-odd relativistic years of earth time for a few hours of futile idiocy.

And, somehow, magically, they have enough fuel to get out of that huge gravity well and resume the normal passage of time.

Why didn't they just look at the planet from millions of miles away to determine that it was covered with water and uninhabitable? Like we can? Didn't they think to bring telescopes and spectrometers?

Oh, and if you're close enough to be affected by time dilation of the gravity well of a black hole, you're close enough to be killed instantly by the radiation caused by ripping apart of all the gas and dust in the accretion disc as it's sucked into said black hole. And -- without knowing the mass of the black hole, I can't really say this for sure -- I suspect that to get that kind of time dilation you would have to be inside the event horizon of the black hole, or so close that you would never have enough fuel to attain escape velocity.

Anyway, after that debacle they just zip on over to another planet shrouded with clouds made of solid ice that they can just flit by (what keeps the clouds up, I have no idea), to find a homicidal Matt Damon, who lied about the planet he landed on: it has no surface, it's just a bunch of ice clouds. Coop and friends had just looked at "the data" Damon sent back and decided it was their best bet, without seeing any pictures of the planet of the surface of the planet. These people are idiots.

The basic premise of the film, that humanity was in danger of dying out because of corn blight and could be saved by emigrating to another galaxy, is completely flawed. If all the wheat, corn and (ahem) okra died off, humanity would be at no risk of extinction. Would there be disease, famine, war? Yes. Mass die-offs of populations over vast regions? Yes. But we would survive as a species. The population would stabilize at some much smaller, more sustainable value, perhaps in the hundreds of millions.

Even climate change doomsayers don't say that climate change in and of itself will destroy the planet: it will drastically reduce populations of humans and certain species, but the planet, some remnant of humanity and life itself will still be here: the world will simply be much less amenable to an advanced technological society that requires cheap and abundant foodstuffs. The end of the world scenario only occurs if conflicts over land and food escalate into global thermonuclear war.

And, as shown in the end of Interstellar, it is not necessary to go to another galaxy to save the human race: we only need to reach the moon and other planets to establish a permanent human presence beyond the earth. And we can do it with the technology we have right now, without any fancy theory deduced by examing gigabytes of raw data dictated out loud by a computer falling into a black hole and then retransmitted by hand via Morse code through the hands of a watch. Say what?! You read that right. This is completely stupid, and it is the crux of the film.

I wanted to like Interstellar. The core of it is the relationship between a father and a daughter, and the mysteries of space-time and relativity. That is a story worth exploring. It's just so frustrating how incompetently and arrogantly Nolan and his brother treated their subject. If they had spent just 10 more minutes spit-balling the backstory, they could have made a 2001-quality epic that wasn't filled with idiotic nonsense.

First off, Nolan picked the wrong crisis to hang his movie on. Corn blight would never necessitate going into space, much less through a wormhole to another galaxy. That doesn't mean you can't make this movie, you just have to change things so that it makes sense.

For example, if that wormhole had appeared near earth instead of Saturn — incidentally trashing Coop's career as an astronaut, making it his personal nemesis — it would raise all kinds of havoc here, destroying our satellites, ruining our electrical grid, disrupting the climate, killing our crops and causing violent tectonic activity due to the tidal forces.

Social and political conditions would quickly deteriorate to those depicted in Nolan's movie. The difference being that the presence of a wormhole right next to earth really does threaten the very existence of humanity and the planet itself. Haring off to Saturn will never solve the corn blight problem: studying the wormhole that's about to swallow earth is the only option.

It makes for better special effects too: the wormhole could have been a baleful Eye of Mordor that hung in the sky. It could cause as many dust storms and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes as any movie maven could want. Positioning the wormhole near earth also eliminates all this pointless travel from point A to point B that plagued Interstellar and made it a ridiculously long three hours.

And then there's the irony: the wormhole that threatens to destroy humanity is the key to saving humanity if we learn its secrets. All the trademark Nolan mind-bending time-warping weirdness that is the artistic crescendo of the film would bear directly on the characters and their salvation, rather than some weird side effect of trying to escape corn blight. And what's really dumb is that at the end of the actual film, the corn blight problem is solved without ever going to another galaxy through the wormhole! All that running around was for nothing!

Did the Nolans consider this scenario and reject it as too abstruse? Do they seriously think corn blight resonates more deeply with the average movie viewer than the earth getting swallowed by a black hole?
Is corn blight some subtle jab at Monsanto and the monoculture that agribusiness is forcing on the American farmer?
The movie's obvious political theme, vilifying those who would just give up on exploration and let humanity sink into mediocrity and oblivion, could be just as effectively be played out in a world that had been ravaged by the tidal effects of a wormhole as a world savaged by corn blight.

2001, despite being almost 50 years old, is still solid technically. It still looks pretty damn good, even though all its special effects were optical and practical, rather than computer generated. It depicts fantastic and impossible events in a way that allows even the most critical viewer to suspend disbelief. You can see why 2001 would inspire a film maker like Nolan.

The knock against 2001 is that its characters are emotionless automata — the computer HAL shows as much emotion as anyone else. But that was Kubrick's intent: the cool, controlled, emotionless astronaut with the Right Stuff was an archetype of the 1960s. You can see why a film maker like Nolan would want to have a crack at a film that puts people and their emotions on an equal footing with the big ideas.

Thus, Interstellar tries to personalize the forces of the universe to tell a story about the love between a father and a daughter, the sacrifices that a father will make to save his family and the transcendance of the human spirit. And that's a noble goal. But you can tell that story without getting everything else wrong.

And it's not just the technical errors. When everything about that sacrifice is a crock and the father is a gullible fool deceived by lies that any comic book reader would see through instantly, you have to wonder whether the director is dishonest, lazy, incompetent, or simply has nothing but contempt for the intelligence of his audience.

When your movie is all about clever scientists and can-do engineers and pilots who are cracking the mysteries of the universe with science, and then you get all the science and technology wrong, and your inspiration is clearly 2001, it's clear you have failed in your attempt at an homage and produced an embarrassingly shoddy imitation.

One more time: Interstellar ain't no 2001.

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