Interstellar (2014)
Four and half Stars out of Five
Cooper: Matthew McConaughey
Brand: Anne Hathaway
Murph: Jessica Chastain
Director/Writer: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Jonathan Nolan
Cinematography Director:
Hoyte Van Hoytema
Music: Hans Zimmer
Even though I found Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar compelling enough to be on
my short list for Best Movie of 2014, and even though this is science fiction
with inevitable logic and science gaps, there were several technical questions and
couple of logic questions that bothered me enough to prevent me from giving
this movie five stars. I thought I would follow up my first review with a somewhat
tongue-in-cheek review of these gaps.
Starting with the sound editing, it is nearly impossible to
hear the dialog on multiple occasions due to the soaring musical score by Hans
Zimmer. Nolan has stated this was intentional, but it seems very
counter-intuitive to me to write a dialog, have your actors act it, and then
drown the sound out with music.
From a logic standpoint there are several gaps in the story:
first up is the unlikelihood of Murph’s room remaining untouched for thirty
years while she is off working for NASA (at site only a few driving hours
away); convenient to propel the story, but pretty unlikely. Even more unlikely
is that after Coop finds the secret NASA site, is subjected to a pointless interrogation
regarding how he found the site, he is then lauded within minutes of his
interrogation as the only one that can lead the mission. Really? If that is
true, why on Earth wasn’t NASA searching for him? And by the way, why is an
Indian drone flying around American corn fields and why is Coop so easily able
to take control of it, and why is this series of scenes even in the movie; to
prove to us Coop is an engineer? If so, why does he spend the rest of the movie
acting like Captain Kirk and not Mr. Spock?
Now, onto my real gripes: the technical missteps. Why does
it take the Endurance two years to fly from Earth to Saturn, but (apparently) a
far shorter time frame to fly from Planet 1 in the new galaxy to Planet 2? And
while we’re on the new planets, are there supposed to be twelve of them in a
single stellar system orbiting a single sun and all in orbit about Gargantua,
the black hole? I get that maybe only three are good enough to check out, but
are we to believe that NASA thought originally there were twelve potential Earth-like
planets in a single stellar system, and that they did not know there was a
nearby black hole there, but they did know there were potentially twelve good
planets? This really begs the imagination. And by the way, didn’t Endurance use
all of its fuel escaping the black hole; how does it brake to enter into orbit
around Planet 3 so that young Brand can land and hook up finally with her old
boyfriend?
With respect to the physics, I will admit I am a chemist, not
a physicist and that this movie had a renowned physicist, Kip Thorne advising
them. That being said, why does Coop’s ranger spaceship disintegrate as he
crosses or nears the event horizon of the black hole, but his suit and his body
remain remarkably intact? If the gravity well that Planet 1 has is so high as
to have a seven year to one hour time dilation effect, why is the gravity only
1.3X that of Earth?
But the two killer problems, the two that wipe all the above
small complaints out are the following: the blight would suffer its own growth
rate control from negative feedback as its host plants disappear and as it
converts the oxygen into nitrogen (that’s a new metabolic pathway, btw); and two,
how do the super, multi-dimensional beings of the far future who only exist
because of the events involving Murp and Coop manage to create their tesseract
used by Coop to bring about their future without creating an unbridgeable time
paradox? That is to say, Coop could not have communicated with Murp without the
tesseract, having the tesseract allowed Murp to save humanity, having saved
humanity the multi-dimensional beings are allowed to evolve from humanity, and
thus create a tesseract for Coop; this is a paradox. Unless….
Okay, now I feel better. I did actually love this movie,
really.
Please write with your gripes or correct my mistakes, if you
think I am wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment