Interstellar (2014)

Screening Room Film
, , ,
1 
type: work
slug: interstellar-2014
medium: film
mode: fiction
year: 2014
creator: Christopher Nolan
runtime: 169 min
imdb: tt0816692
tmdb: 157336
wikipedia: Interstellar_(film)
dek: An hour on Miller's planet costs seven years at home. Nolan's relativity picture, built on Kip Thorne's equations — and it closes in a loop.

Kip Thorne was executive producer, and the physics is not decoration. He set two rules before writing began: nothing would violate established physical law, and speculation would start from real science. The production largely held to them.

The time dilation is the part audiences remember, and it is the part that is simply true. Close orbit around a supermassive black hole slows a clock relative to a distant one. The seven-years-per-hour figure required Gargantua to spin at very nearly the theoretical maximum, which Thorne worked out and Nolan accepted. Cooper returns to a daughter older than he is. Nothing in that sequence is invented.

Gargantua itself produced science rather than consuming it. Double Negative built the renderer from Thorne’s equations rather than from artistic reference, and the gravitational lensing it revealed — the disc appearing to arch both over and under the hole — had not been visualised properly before. The team published it in Classical and Quantum Gravity in 2015. The film’s visual effects are a citable result.

Then it closes the loop. The bulk beings are human. Cooper is the ghost in Murph’s bedroom, sending the coordinates that send him, and the quantum data that saves everyone has no author and no origin. It is a bootstrap paradox played straight and without apology, and the film treats it as an act of love rather than a puzzle.

In Earth’s future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth’s population to a new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind’s new home.

3 Likes
2

Pulitzer Prize winning theoretical physicist Kip Thorne served as the film’s chief scientific consultant. He also worked as an executive producer, and Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan relied on him to ensure that every scientific element stayed rooted in real physics.

3 Likes
3

Here’s my review, from 12 November 2012

Interstellar: 2001 meets Time for the Stars, with a Touch of Frequency

103×160 6.33 KB

I just saw Interstellar in IMAX in New York City, in what the theater announced to be the second biggest IMAX screen in the world (the largest is in Sydney, Australia). Was the movie up to the theater? Well, until the last 30 or so minutes I’d say it was - a masterpiece in many ways. But the ending - or, at least, the science of the ending - just didn’t do it for me.

The two best parts of the movie - in addition to the powerful story of an astronaut taking a ship through a black hole near Saturn, to save the human race from ecological disaster - was the computer on the ship, and the way that going in or near a black hole slows down time, so the astronaut and crew age at at a normal rate while the people back on Earth, aging at their normal rate, age much more quickly, where hours in space equal years and decades on Earth.

The computer - TARS by name - was a worthy homage and successor to HAL of 2001, smart-talking, funny, sage, and brave. It - the computer doesn’t want to be referred to as “he” - looks good as a walking rectangle with a pair of wide stilts for legs. There have been lots of computers on spaceships over the years - including Star Trek - but TARS is far and away the best.

The aging effects were beautifully done, with Matthew McConaughey putting in his best work in this movie and indeed right up there with his riveting performances on television and in the movies in the past few years. Jessica Chastain is also excellent as his daughter who becomes the same age as her father - at the same time as her father - as the plot progresses. All of this was reminiscent of Robert Heinlein’s classic juvenile science fiction novel, Time for the Stars, except Interstellar situates these personal paradoxes in a much grander story.

So far, so great. The special effects were also outstanding, and better in many ways than previous state of the art movies in space like the second Star Wars trilogy. The science, too, was good, and made Interstellar, until this point, a fine hard science fiction movie - one, moreover, with real heart.

But then came the ending, which hinged on father/daughter communication across time. In this case, I saw this done far better in the father/son communication across time via ham radio in Frequency, a very well controlled, tight little movie. In the case of Interstellar, the time travel depends upon a murky interpretation of quantum mechanics, which not only verged on the mystical, as quantum mechanics always does, but withdrew the strong mix of hard science and human emotion which worked so well in the rest of the movie. Instead, we got superb emotion, but situated in an unclear, metaphysical base.

Nonetheless, I’d strongly recommend Interstellar, for the first two-and-a-half hours the movie, which were exceptional science fiction and movie-making indeed.

1 Like