Just for one example...
The crew being sent to save the Earth blasts off in a big ol' chemical rocket with stages. Yeah, fine. I guess rocket tech hasn't advanced all that much in this future. Then they land a ship on a planet in a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences (Note: the gravity alone should have killed them). Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is? The energy to get off Earth is nothing compared to getting out of a gravity well that deep! I guess Nolan thought an oldschool staged rocket looked cool.
The SFX people did some actual science to figure out the black hole visuals but, other than that, this is a far worse movie than Gravity as far as science is concerned. The new age emotions resolution was just a big ol' F U to the crowd. Lazy, sloppy writing.
There are plenty of unrealistic movies on this list, and that's fine. Some are just damned fun movies (e.g. Back to the Future). Interstellar sticks out from the pack for it's pretensions and underlying ridiculousness.
Pedantically, no, they don’t.
They land on a planet deep enough in a black hole’s gravity well to cause significant relative time differences.
(Obviously, this doesn’t change the issue of delta-V to get back to the mother ship, though the difference is relevant to your “the gravity alone should have killed them” comment, since that would only occur of there was a hard surface not in free fall with respect to the gravity well for them to be crushed into.)
> Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is?
Maybe because the super drive it uses would have adverse environmental impacts used in Earth’s atmosphere, and Earth has enough of that to deal with, but they cut the exposition-that-doesn’t move-the-plot-forward about that because they were making a movie, not a technical report on the mission’s decisionmaking.
One end of you is attracted more than the other. In a strong enough field, you would become a string of disjointed atoms, right?
The gravity alone would, actually, have killed them.
Probably he couldn't take it and just left. Maybe, they flew into the black hole and died. But she's a genius and needed closure. On her deathbed she had a fantasy or hallucinations about what could have happened. In any case, her super logical mind came up with a story that let her come to grips with the loss of her father. It's a bit grim, but gives enough room (for me) for lots of silliness. that's not what happened. they all died. But maybe, that could have happened. And that's enough for her to find some peace.
The writing did vary wildly between overly vague and overly explaining things, but I blame the trailers for people thinking this was what the movie was about. The only person making this argument turned out to be wrong (everyone left on earth would have died if they listened to her at the time) and she was making it out of desperation, not from logic.
The resolution was sufficiently advanced technology (no different than transporters or Ringworld construction). Love only transcended time and space in the sense that love is what drove the characters to do what they did.
It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it. It's hard not to see this as another form of nerd sniping (note: not directed at you personally, just talking about a dynamic I've seen with many friends).
I'll agree about pretentiousness, but I do think Intersteller should be given credit for working to get more right than the vast majority of flims, but more importantly for doing an original concept where in many ways, GR itself is a main character. That was a bold bet in a world where we have 9 Fast and Furious movies.
> The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
If you're looking for something even harder there's one author to stands out. Greg Egan. Most of his books are created by modifying some part of relativity and seeing what kind of world would be the logical conclusion from that modification. From the blurb for his book "Orthogonal".
> In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy.
> On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky.
Every one of his books are this weird, and he has books worth of education material and graphics to help explain the mechanics of each universe he creates. He has also done some novel discoveries when it comes to superpermutations.
If you don't want to go quite that deep into it all, you could take a look at "The Martian". The movie is a fine piece of work, but the book is really amazing. It goes into a lot more details. Andy Weir, the author, even made sure the phases of Earth and Mars matched up so closely that you can figure out when the book is happening by inferring the travel times and communication delays.
Generally, you won't find much of this genre. Writing space opera (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) doesn't require too much. You have to have good characters exploring an interesting scenario, and then write it competently. Proper hard Sci-Fi on the other hand is incredibly difficult. It requires intimate knowledge of things like orbital physics and being able to infer what is and isn't possible within the next ~20 years. This is where most hard Sci-Fi is set because it grounds it the most. An analogous issue is that hard Sci-Fi often "expires". Stories written 30 years ago suddenly start sounding silly because technology developed in a new and at-the-time unexpected direction.
Particularly in regards to Greg Egan since his books are really out there. I personally recommend Permutation City and Diaspora which I found both amazing (although most of his books are also very good). Seveneves is still on my to-read list, from a lot of reviews I got the impression that the first part of the book is very good while the second part goes a bit downhill. I'll still probably read it someday.
Another recommendation that's a bit more mainstream is the Expanse series which seems to really try to portray some of the real effects of space flight and gravity effects while, again, also throwing some more "out-there and not so realistic" stuff into the mix.
In contrast I bounced off Gravity because it was trying so hard to be accurate but had characters doing fairly long range orbital maneuvers by eye, and those two things didn’t feel like they fit.
Likewise when B5 had an episode centered round a character who had been Jack the Ripper, but got the area of London where the murderer had been active completely wrong that felt jarring because the nature of that character felt so central to that episode.
Interstellar was heavily hyped as being "realistic".
Yes, the movie isn't perfect scientifically, but a) it's extremely entertaining, b) gets people interested and listening to me talking about GR and c) saying Gravity is a better movie (in ref. to science) is imo ridiculous (imo Gravity is a pretentious "sciency" piece of drama set in space, but w/e).
Just respectfully disagreeing here. :)
For some reason I thought they mention it in the movie, but perhaps not and I simply read it elsewhere: fuel. The chemical rocket allowed them to take a large(r) payload into Earth's orbit and dock with the primary ship all while conserving the fuel that the landers had up there. Resources that were not easy to come by.
> fact that people think it's realistic is just a kick in the pants
The story is science...fiction. not a documentary on space travel. The realistic bit is obviously hyperbole, no one thinks you can take off a planet that easily. But it was good to move the plot forward. The part people like about that it felt like science anyone who has read popular mechanics (and heard about Hawking- 'S work and something about general relativity & time dilation) can nod their head during scenes that have payoffs that are "intellectually" satisfying.
Now now. Satisfying in that with space travel there are no free lunches and the universe in general is a pretty grim and hostile place.
And the black hole visuals were cool AF. That's a good movie.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/interstellar-science-explained-...
[2] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-i...
[3] - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-th...
An actual incredibly realistic film would be very very boring. Now let's follow Bob as he runs vibration testing on a small sensor in the rocket for the 12th time.
And now the crew spend 12 years travelling through space with nothing happening.
Maybe we can show some people debugging the AI code for the robot
It was made by someone with attention to detail. When Cooper looks out the window, it looks exactly like the real footage of Apollo astronauts looking out the CM window.
The music is great. That can't be understated. The organ music lends a gravitas that's missing in other scifi movies.
But most importantly, it goes to the core of what I want from science fiction: it changed my world view, permanently.
Remember Doctor Mann, and his desperation to return to Earth? No other piece of fiction has made me feel that way. That utter, unspeakable, unbearable isolation of being the only human on this side of the universe. To be so far from everything that it's hard to wrap your brain around it. And if you do... you experience a Lovecraftian horror that drives you mad.
That's why I like Interstaller. It's proper, classic science fiction!
I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.
This is my biggest pet peeve.
So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout. Smart-asses on twitter pointing out this or that being incorrect is boring and they ruin a movie for themselves.
Gravity is a little silly sci-fi movie and I enjoyed. I understand enough of orbital physics to chuckle at an astronaut flying on an extinguisher from a space station to another space station.
>> But ISS and Chinese stations could not be so close
>> But in the opening the debree from the original crash has different relative V therefore it would completely miss the station on second pass
Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.
The issue with Interstellar was it set itself up as a hard sci-fi with some Hollywood sugar with the way it depicted a future Earth, black hole physics (for the most part) and time dilation. But then it took a dramatic left turn into ridiculousness at the end. This really broke immersion of the film for me. Whereas films like Guardians of the Galaxy (and it's ilk) make it clear from the outset that it's a fun distraction from reality. So it's easier to suspend disbelief while watching.
The problem with movies is the cost of production is much higher than publishing a book. So movies have to appeal to a greater audience in order recoup their costs. And that usually means taking the "hard" out of "hard sci-fi".
> So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout.
Movies used to be in black and white and without sound. So many people don't get it.
Movies used to be made where the actors were all familiar with stage performance techniques and didn't know how to perform for a camera. So many people don't get it.
Movies used to have really wooden camera shots because the camera weighted 500 pounds. So many people don't get it.
> Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.
Somebody has a preference that you don't share, but instead of just ignoring them you had to tell them that they're wrong. Without any proof. And while enjoying movie improvements that have been going on for over a century.
That person just wants movies to be better. If you think that movies shouldn't be better why don't you go back to watching black and white moving pictures?
Stories that rely on magic or nonexistent technology to tell a story are fine, as long as the rules governing the magic or technology are applied consistently. Stuff that's just blatantly wrong or contradictory I find distracting. Some people aren't bothered by that, and anything science-fictiony is generally operating far enough outside the realm of ordinary experience that most people won't notice incongruities.
An interesting case is the movie The Wandering Earth, which I watched recently. A plot point relies on unexplained "gravity fluctuations" while attempting a gravity slingshot causing catastrophic failure of a bunch of important machines. This is nonsense, and made it hard for me to take the movie seriously. Later, though, I realized there's a (probably unintentional) sensible interpretation. The machines failed for an unrelated reason, but the world government can't bring themselves to say that they screwed up so they make up a story that doesn't make sense and everyone knows is a lie, but no one is willing to say so because they're afraid to or want to be "good citizens". This could be interpreted as a commentary on modern China (which is where the movie was made), while retaining plausible deniability.
I haven't read Cixin Liu's short story that The Wandering Earth is based on; I don't know if the gravity fluctuations are present in the original or are given a plausible explanation.
Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
Why is Dr Stone in space? What's she running from. What killed her child? (Gravity). What do humans do to survive, and how is that related to evolution?
And most importantly in the 3d version, why do things fly out in front of the screen, yet also hit an implied camera lens in a different shot?
I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.
> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.
The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.
Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.
Might have to watch the movie again but I think it’s implied that it’s an insane fuel burden to get them off the planet; additionally only a small part of the ship actually goes down to the surface, I believe the main bulk stays in orbit.
For the first take-off, it needed to carry enough fuel for the rest of the trip. By the second take-off, most of that fuel had been used.
I don't understand why this is often held up as a valid criticism of the authenticity of the movie. This quote is a character speaking and not the filmmaker. The movie isn't necessarily saying Anne Hathaway's character's reasoning for her actions is any more sound than Matt Damon's character's reasoning. The plot of the movie does not rely on her character's reasoning being right.
It’s weird the degree of overlap between “people who want absolute realism in their movies” and “people who want everything a character says in a movie to be a reliable description of the reality of the fictional context”, given the inconsistency of those preferences.
Setting aside whether or not that being true would be a good move for the franchise: the film didn't say that's true. It had one character say it to another. In a franchise that has a history of having one character lie to another about exactly this kind of thing. In an entry in that franchise that is explicitly playing with point-of-view and subjective experience of events.
But no, that must just be true I guess.
I haven't watched Interstellar, but this would certainly make sense given Earth's escape velocity (11.19km/s) is over 2x that of Mars (5.03km/s), and nearly 5x that of the Moon (2.38km/s).
The motives behind the characters (Anne Hathaway's character deciding to sacrifice humanity to see her boyfriend, Caine's character withholding physics advancements for years, Murph's whole behavior... and so numerous others) was, objectively, bad writing. Of the kind that you really wonder how it got out in the public and into such a high profile movie. I can't think of a single person in that movie that acts realistically. To the point that I kind of believe that the "plot" was just a pretext for Kip Thornes awesome work on the visualizations of the wormholes.
The plotholes... well way too many. That was the movie that ruined Nolan for me. Up to that point I was a very big fan.
Let go of trying to analyze the realistic-ness of the physics (even if it's in this list) and immerse yourself in the story, the moment, and I think the characters are actually very realistic.
But realism in the science aspects of a movie shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of a coherent story or bad character development.
I respect your take and what that movie means to you, but don't think that I didn't want to immerse myself in it or anything like that. I was highly anticipating this movie for years. It just didn't do it for me.
> I can't think of a single person in that movie that acts realistically
This is the most realistic action in the movie! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
We're not talking about experimenting on people (thus causing accidents/deaths/etc) but about withholding new knowledge.
But he didn’t do that. He and Mann had determined there was way forward and they were right. Without the new data from the black hole physics had gotten as far as it ever would.
EDIT: and Hathaway’s character didn’t intend to sacrifice humanity. One option was as good as any other. She even turned out to be right and most of the crew would have survived if they listened to her from the start.
Hathaway's Brand didn't want to sacrifice humanity, she just had a conflict of interest around a decision in a VERY information-limited environment. Her non-love-related argument about the black hole capturing things that would be needed to create planets more capable of supporting life - that Cooper thought was probably just rationalization - made sense and would have led them to a better decision than going down to Mann's planet did. Where we got exactly the sort of sterile environment she was predicting, like the water planet before.
Brand-on-earth's "withheld physics advancements" was sorta the reverse - he withheld his failure because his math hadn't enabled the advances NASA hoped they would and so releasing them would've been telling everyone on earth they were doomed. He decided to put the fate of the species ahead of releasing useless results that he believed would ruin the only chance the species had. (Even without that, not publishing negative results is common anyway!)
Not sure about your complaint with Murph, since you aren't specific, but both kid Murph and adult seemed consistent to me.
I HATED the magic black hole deus ex machina on first viewing, and still don't love it, but found everything up to that amazing. I think a bleaker story of founding a colony on a new planet without the magic trip back to earth at the end could've been even better, though.
It's almost like an uncanny valley where the truly expert film-making delivers all the tone, gravitas, and emotion you could want from a script that feels bland and incomplete.
There are a bunch of planets, and they choose to visit the one with the absolute worst time dilation first?
This is quite the assumption on your part. We won’t know if aliens eating your face is realistic until we encounter aliens.
We are infinitesimally small and insignificant. I felt the scale of space and the unforgiving progress of time, as characters dealt with the emotional impact of time dilation on them, their colleagues, and family. And we, as viewers, get to experience it as we see minutes pass from our POV only to return to Endurance and realize Romilly has aged over 20 years in orbit, all alone; and Cooper’s kids have suddenly grown up without us noticing.
And as others have noted about the film before, it also relates to the phenomena we experience as we age and our perception of time accelerates. If you’re a parent, you feel yourself slipping farther and faster away from your children with each passing year. Chances are if you watched Interstellar as a parent, you felt the film deeply on another level.
I enjoyed some of Interstellar, but disliked the anti-scientificism. When they need to pick planet, probably humanity's last hope, you know there will be two options -- the scientifically sensible option and the "go with your heart" one -- and of course the latter is the right one. When scientists follow the scientific method they end up making a mistake, because science is cold and uncaring but nothing can stop the power of the heart, I guess.
I would really like a scifi movie that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" mislead you, and sometimes you just have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Actually most science is intuition, followed by checking if it's correct.
Intuition misleads people all the time, and letting people in the spaceship after the xenomorph has infected them is illogical, and really bad.
I really, really dislike when Hollywood portrays scientists and science as fundamentally blind and cold, and that what will really save you is The Power of Love. The good old "leave your cold facts and numbers and follow your heart" trope, which tends to triumph in movies because Hollywood thinks audiences are uninterested in science (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
In Interstellar this is manifested in that the "logical" choice of planet (i.e. the one we would have wanted this group of people to pick, were this a real situation) was wrong (because obviously a scientist lied), and the right choice was following your heart all along.
As for xenomorphs: I utterly love Alien and Aliens (a pity they never made any sequels, right?) but they aren't examples of realistic movies, and the characters often make movie-logic decisions, and that's fine: these are horror-scifi and action-scifi movies, respectively, and don't try to be anything else.
> I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Those exist. Unlike with movies often ridiculing science and scientists, science doesn't downplay the usefulness of emotions and intuition.
FWIW I think those were supposed to be some sort of extreme tides due to the black hole. Maybe still impossible, but I don't think it was just "Big waves are cool lol".
Every now and then I watch it mainly for that bit. Fun movie, ending sucked.
these are my thoughts also
Basically, the water was acting as a comet's tail does. But backwards.
It’s old hat in written SF, of course, but hadn’t come up much in major movies before (or at least that’s the impression I get from reactions and reviews by people who don’t read SF).
I consider time dilation to be an inherently literary format, and Forever War is where the idea is turned up to eleven. There's also a short comic adaptation if you like.
Far better than the treacly Interstellar, in my judgement.
The character literally named MANN destroys himself due to shortsighted selfishness.