So guess what movie I saw last weekend. Go on, guess.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is our generation's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for better *and* worse. A science-fiction film with highly realistic depictions of astronauts and space travel, with entertaining robots and a confusing and highly implausible ending. Only this film is much less "arty" than Kubrick's 1968 work, and in my mind, that makes it better.
For starters, though, it's misnamed. They should have called it Intergalactic, because the (absolutely gorgeous) wormhole leads to...somewhere in another galaxy. But the title they went with sounds more cerebral, and I'm ok with that, because it's that kind of movie. I also can't remember the last time a movie soundtrack relied heavily on a church organ, and that's a shame, because it is truly something to behold, making the exploration of space into something like a religious experience, beholding creation untouched by man.
The trailers were all tantalizing, promising memorable alien worlds. In the end, we get to see three, plus a black hole for good measure.
That's right, this movie tours a solar system where the primary is a black hole. The matter spinning around and falling into it seems to be what generates light and heat for the orbiting planets, but...that's either really creative or really stupid; I still can't figure out if it's done with enough class and the appearance of realism to pull off creative. From what I remember, black holes are small. As small as the Earth if not more so.
In the plot exposition we find out that astronauts have been dispatched through a new wormhole near Saturn to a dozen potentially habitable worlds in a quest to find a new home for the human race. It's not clear whether these are all in a single star system; a neutron star is also mentioned briefly. The wormhole is humanity's only means of traveling faster than light, from which you can infer that there is only one star system to explore. However, the mission of the Endurance only seems to be interested in three. Maybe I need to rewatch this movie; it'd certainly be good on Blu-ray.
So in order of appearance:
Miller's Planet
Mainly this will be remembered as the planet with ludicrous time dilation (1 hour Miller's Planet time = 7 years Earth time), serving to set up character drama when the protagonist leaves the planet after a few hours to find his kids are now adults and he has a grandson. I can empathize; I've occasionally sat down to play FTL: Faster Than Light for "just one game", and emerged to find the global political landscape completely unrecognizable.
Now I think these time-stretching shenanigans should be accompanied by lethal gravitational forces, although I've heard conflicting interpretations. Due to poor life choices, I am not a theoretical physicist, so I will not enter that debate. I guess what matters is, it makes a good story.
What confuses me more, however, is the terrain. All we get to see is an ocean that's about two feet deep, which is in and of itself bizarre (I'm going to assume the whole ocean isn't like that). More confusingly, somehow waves are generated about two orders of magnitude higher than that. We see two 200-foot mega-tsunamis within about 5 minutes local time. Are these waves triggered by the massive tidal forces from Gargantua, which has already been established as too close for comfort? Or do the waves start in deeper water and then gain height as the depth decreases? (If you've ever been in a wave pool, you may have noticed that the waves seem more intense in the shallows.)
Mann's Planet
Um...
Frozen clouds.
This planet is definitely the most creative of the three we see, and also the most insane. Most of the action seems to take place on glaciers that look like clouds, resulting in some bizarre topography. As I said before, I don't know if this could ever happen in reality. Most would call it "absurd" unless you're from Minnesota, like me, in which case you'd be more likely to call it "January." If it could happen, Christopher Nolan is the greatest. If not, well, he wouldn't be the first to pull a stunt like that. But even James Cameron's Avatar had superconducting unobtanium to justify Pandora's floating mountains.
We're also told there's a surface below, but given that the guy describing the surface clearly couldn't be trusted, there's no hard evidence.
Edmunds's Planet
Only glimpsed at the very end, this looks like a desert planet (or, a planet with at least one desert). It's implied that this planet could indeed sustain a human colony.
I was hoping for more screentime spent exploring alien worlds, but I'm not exactly surprised; not many sci-fi movies give front-and-center focus to their settings. This movie's just crying out for a companion book that describes the setting in more detail though; maybe it could tell us about the other planets that astronauts were sent to before the mission depicted in the movie.
But nitpicking aside, Interstellar is a good movie. Flawed both technically and philosophically, but worth seeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment