Interstellar

If we are to believe Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, the biggest hurdle humanity must overcome if we hope to explore other worlds isn't delta-V or boosters that asplode when it gets cold or even Congress, it's our innate gregariousness. The soul-crushing isolation of space is enough to drive anyone bonkers. It turns highly-trained astronauts into irrational killing machines willing to risk the mission and their very lives in order to find some flesh to press. And if that flesh is family -- look out. You have strayed between a mama grizzly and her cub, and she got the crazy eyes.

Hollywood just can't stop hitting us over the head with Family. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock was saddled with a dead kid for reasons only a test audience can explain. Apollo 13 gave us Jim Lovell's son bravely watching events unfold in the classroom, as if the events weren't compelling on their own. The Right Stuff showed pains the Mercury program inflicted not only on the astronauts but also the astronaut wives. In 2010, Dr. Floyd left his kid back home with the family dolphins and WW-III. Aliens gave us Newt, Terminator gave us John Connor, and Abram's Star Trek gave us baby Kirk. Apparently a story isn't a story unless gametofusion is involved.

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So, too, Interstellar. In the not too distant future, washed-out test pilot Cooper (a superb if somewhat stolid Matthew McConaughey) returns to his family and his family farm, where we soon learn the end of the world is nigh. Climate change is turning America's breadbasket into a dust bowl, and the collapse of government has left local communities bravely soldiering on sans help from FEMA or the NEA or even the National Guard. Nolan has managed to craft a dystopian future that is simultaneously a rightwing nightmare and a rightwing wet dream.

Shenanigans at the farm lead Cooper and young daughter Murphy (a great performance by Mackenzie Foy) to a secret installation run by the remnants of NASA. As luck would have it, they are in the process of procuring a replacement Earth. Deep space exploration has been made possible by the recent discovery of a wormhole orbiting Saturn, and there are currently several candidate planets that need checking out before a mass exodus can begin.

And, hey, whattaya know, they're looking for a pilot.

The set-up of Interstellar is a gripping depiction of climate change that doesn't resort to hyperbole or finger wagging. Although never blinking from the dire future people like James Inhofe have likely doomed our progeny to, it's more about can-do spirit and human adaptation than hopelessness and despair. Still, the rather idyllic ambience of it felt odd. I dare say when the wheels start to come off, the world is going to look more like Mogadishu and less like Bedford Falls. We're also asked to believe the world's militaries have disbanded, just because, whereas if history is any indicator the military is going to be the last thing to go. Indeed, in reverse order we may expect humans to vanish: the military, potable water, food, petroleum products, gasoline, the rule of law, and civility. You may decide for yourself where we currently reside on that slippery slope.

"Secret NASA" is similarly a hard sell, and Cooper showing up as the perfect round pilot peg for their round pilot hole is only believable on a second viewing. However, once we get to space all is forgiven. The CGI and zero gravity effects are stunning. The future tech is future-y enough to be interesting while remaining somehow familiar. The ship's snarky AI was a nice touch -- a film finally gets it that the goal of AI is to simulate human, not simulate creepy. The robot was fun to watch even if it was questionable from an engineering perspective. I suppose filmmakers are obligated to show us something we haven't seen before.

Funky robots notwithstanding, Interstellar tries to get the physics right, or at least as right as can be entertaining. Nolan consulted with physicist Kip Thorne on the film, the guy who (literally) wrote the book on gravitation. This provides Nolan his central theme, which we might call the human consequences of General Relativity. All of which would have made for compelling drama on its own. But, alas, Hollywood has decreed science fiction requires Big Ideas, and so the final act finds our crew tasked with "getting quantum data out of the black hole." Here the story begins to lose its way.

I don't know what quantum data is (a "little bit of data," if I remember my Latin) but quantum mechanics doesn't have anything to do with black holes. Indeed, combining quantum mechanics and Relativity is the béte noire of contemporary theoretical physics, as Thorne must have mentioned at some point. I imagine Nolan's creative process on this went something like "...well, I don't understand math and Professor Thorne isn't a screenwriter, so let's just use buzzwords." He could have cribbed a random page out of Thorne's Gravitation and the script would have read better. Alternatively, a simple email exchange could have supplied a solution:

TO: labkittydesign@gmail.com
FROM: nolan@hollywood.com
SUBJ: Dialog

I need plausible dialog to motivate going inside a black hole. Ideas?

Chris

TO: nolan@hollywood.com
FROM: labkittydesign@gmail.com
SUBJ: RE: Dialog

Here, try this:

X: The path integral around the Schwarzschild radius diverges.
Y: Can we use renormalization, like Feynman did in QED?
X: Possibly, but we have no idea how the singularity behaves.
Y: Curses! If only there was some way to view the inside of a black hole!

Ne pas? I even threw in a reference to Feynman -- nerds like that.

LK

Nolan describing his major plot point as "getting quantum data out of the black hole" is the equivalent of Lucas describing The Force as "midi-chlorians." Grown-up science fiction deserves better.

Additionally, and more damningly, while getting quantum data out of the black hole provided a visual treat and a twisty ending, was it really necessary? I won't say it ruined the experience (LabKitty gives Interstellar a paws up, if anyone cares) but the film could have been something different. Something more. Isn't traveling through a wormhole and locating a habitable planet for colonization to save humanity from extinction drama enough? Is that not a story worth telling?

Apparently not. Because the real reason for getting quantum data out of the black hole is so that a weepy Cooper can reconcile with his estranged daughter before the credits roll. Interstellar takes five dimensional space-time and reduces it to a Hallmark card. Space Magnolias. It hangs a "kick me" sign on the majesty of exploration.

What begins as a brainy tale of human resilience ends on the same tired hackneyed insipid saccharine Hollywood take-home message: Family, family, family. If you have kids, you deserve redemption and salvation and a window seat on the ark. If not, you are a worthless husk who may as well be ground up and used for ballast. Pause here while Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon sing a duet. Ironic that in a story about there being too many mouths to feed, it never occurred to anyone that having children is part of the problem.

Call me crazy, but if we're concerned about the heart-breaking loneliness of prolonged space flight, maybe patresfamilias aren't the best choice for the mission. Sure, it makes sense for nuclear submarine captains and Soviet gymnasts to have family waiting for them back home, but when the primary job requirement is a hundred years of solitude, an antisocial virgin might be just the ticket. It's not like they're hard to find; Heutzutage, the Internet breeds them by the thousand.

Heck, promise unlimited Tang and Netflix (and not the kind where I have to wait until May 2015 to watch Interstellar) and I'd sign up today.