Infrastellar
Interstellar has been described to me as “the very best Science Fiction movie based on real science”. It’s also one of the stupidestest movies I’ve seen this year.
Now, granted — the year is young, and there may be far stupiderer movies out there, but, folks, really, this is such a joke. It doesn’t help that they’re talking about gravity most of the time, which brings back all my not-so-fond memories of that other crappy space movie of late.
The plot goes a little something like this (spoilers ahead): The planet is dying, because of what they call the “Blight”. It’s a giant cloud of dust, and it already killed all the earth’s crop except for corn (probably Monsanto’s patent at work here). The Blight is somehow sucking up all the atmosphere’s oxygen, because it “breathes” nitrogen or so. But whatever, we understand that times are bad, extinction is just around the corner, and we need a way out.
Enter the handsome white dude and his cool little daughter. She is being visited by “a ghost” that pushes books from her bookshelf, while he is trying to convince her that this phenomenon must have a “scientific explanation”. He even goes as far as to explain to the dumb viewer what that means — scientific. This is probably five minutes in, and it all goes downhill from there.
The “ghost”, by means of morse code, gravity and dirt (don’t ask), manages to deliver coordinates of a super-secret NASA base, where physicists have been working on a plan to save the human race from suffocating. It is here, where we bear witness to one of the greatest “it makes no sense, so just act as if we don’t notice” scenes in the history of modern film making, probably only topped by Denzel Washington’s visit to the observation lab in Déjà Vu.
We learn that a wormhole has been placed near Saturn, and that it leads to another galaxy, where NASA has identified 12 potentially habitable planets. The wormhole is said to have appeared “48 years ago, just when we needed it”, and that some ominous “they” seem to be “watching out for us”. We also learn that NASA has sent 12 so-called “Lazarus” missions into the worm hole to check out the planets.
Now… just wait a minute, ok? Some distant civilization, be it us from the future or some aliens from another dimension or whatever crap comes next in the movie, is watching out for us by placing a wormhole near Saturn? Because, like, secrecy or what? And then, just for the fun of it, the destination offers 12 planets, and we have to figure out, all by ourselves, which one will suit us? And of course, the wormhole leads to another galaxy, because, why not, the Blight might take over ours, so just to be save, right?
The following two hours of the movie see a small crew hop into a space ship, travel to Saturn, into the wormhole, and then explore three of the potential planets. I forgot how they picked these out, probably because of data sent from their surfaces or such, but it doesn’t matter, because one features a giant wave, the other features a hostile alien life form (played by Matt Damon), and the third can only be reached by traveling into a Black Hole and thrusting all remaining engines just at the right time, to accelerate out of its gravitational pull.
You read that right. They manage to escape a Black Hole by thrusting standard rockets. Science!
The film concludes with our hero falling into the Black Hole (dude), yelling: “it’s all blackness” (duh), but thanks to his sturdy, NASA-crafted suit surviving the fall (while his space ship disintegrates). He ultimately ends up behind a multi-dimensional bookshelf. Yes, the very bookshelf from the beginning of the movie, you know, the one with the “ghost”. We learn that it really was him pushing the books and painting dirty morse code, and we follow along as he does all that stuff again (or for the first time — you never know with these time travel stories). His daughter, now in her late 30s (because General Relativity, look it up), finally gets to understand everything, solves a mystery equation, and with the help of her friends at the secret NASA base manages to launch a space station and travel to Saturn.
We then wake up to Matthew McConaughey waking up aboard the space station and to kids playing baseball. Because that’s the sport that survived the Great Catastrophe and made it into space. Dear Matthew then visits his dying daughter (“Go away! No parent should see theirs kids die!”), repairs a robot featuring a 75% humor setting, sneaks into a badly secured hangar, puts on his helmet in a shot that just has to be a nod of respect to ID4 and… sets out to find poor lonely Anne on a planet far, far away in another galaxy.
Because, that’s the take home message of the movie: Love is a force that travels through space and time and can’t be explained by science. Which, I can only guess, is supposed to make us believe the rest of the movie can. Yeah, it’s awful like that.
So next time I’m looking to rent a film, please remind me to follow my casting guts. McConaughey, Caine and Lithgow in the same flick — do not watch. Anne Hathaway in a space suit — do not watch. Casey Affleck — well, do not watch, unless he’s shooting Brat Pid in the head. Jessica Chastain — probably watch, but don’t tell afterwards.
Final Verdict: I give 1 Star and a cluster of at least 5 super-massive Black Holes. If you don’t get this, then go watch the movie, as you’ll probably have fun doing so.
This story was written in Ulysses for Mac and published using the new Medium integration API. Test, test, mic-check, one-two…
