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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

The inconsistency introduced by the magic shuttle craft ruined the movie for me. Using retouched Saturn V footage for the first take off is such a huge bait and switch.

Worse, the technology implied by the shuttle craft damages the entire premise of the movie. If they have that kind of power source and propulsion, they could build a huge orbital infrastructure, not just the one ship. A significant portion of Earths population could emigrate. They could build huge arcologies on the Earth.

And that was just the first problematic thing with the movie. The level of life support, the magic solar panel plane, and so on.

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I struggled with the basic conflict: terraforming some marginally hospitable world? Ok. Rehabilitating this one? Impossible. (Alternatively, building an arcology in space? Easy once you can just get stuff up there. Building a few biodomes on earth? Not worth the effort.)

I can imagine situations where that might be the case, (unavoidable massive impacts maybe), but blight and lack of crop diversity don't seem solved by moving all the crops through space. (Or if they are, they could be solved by moving them into a biodome on Earth with far less effort / risk.)

And it's not like there had to be a choice between science and story. A discussion of super-habitability might have bought some science cred while waving off some of the above.

The magic shuttle craft sort of moved the movie into space opera territory for me as well. I couldn't stop thinking about how advanced the shuttles must be as that one waterlogged landing craft took off from a 1.3G world orbiting a massive black hole and entered orbit without breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately, realistic Apollo LM ascent stage-style SSTO (as opposed to easy magical SSTO) doesn't seem to be compatible with landing on and exploring the sorts of uninhabited planets which would be of interest for human colonization.

It would have been really neat to see ISRU for the subsequent lift offs. In-situ resource utilization. Basically you land a solar powered robotic rocket fuel factory that converts water ice and CO2 into methane and oxygen using electrolysis and the Sabatier process. Then, when your rocket lands, you refuel for takeoff.

Still plenty of opportunity for drama, and not a whole lot higher CG budget.

Of course, that only fixes the first bit of magic. It doesn't fix the other issues or the many other problems with the movie, like all of Matt Damon's dialog.

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