Up the River with a Paddle and Generous Supplies: How Interstellar Fails to Deliver

[This post contains unabashed spoilers for both Interstellar and Europa Report.  Consider yourself warned]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last several months you’ve probably heard that this past Friday Christopher Nolan’s newest blockbuster Interstellar hit theaters.  The publicity campaign put the movie forward as a 2001 for our time, a rousing and deeply scientific exploration of, well, exploration.  The plot centers on the exploration and supposed colonization of other worlds for human habitation, and the movie as a whole does an excellent job of being the kind of wholesome, pro-science, pro-knowledge advocacy piece that the world can always use more of.  That being said, I found several key elements of the plot severely disappointing and worthy of address.

Specifically, the movie’s whole explanation for how humans find a habitable world is that “five-dimensional” humans from the future save the “present” humans by building a wormhole and also a device that lets Cooper move things across time in his daughter’s bedroom.  Oh yes, there’s also some sympathetic mush about love being a quantifiable force that acts across time, space and dimensions.  All in all, I have a very simple problem with Interstellar as a film:

No one has actually accomplished anything by the end of the film.

To be certain, a great deal has been done, and the circumstances of the human race at the start and at the end of the film are very different.  But the two real, hard questions the plot poses, how to travel to distant galaxies and how to solve the quantum mystery of gravity, are outsourced to beneficent future beings.  Cooper doesn’t figure out how to travel to a different galaxy – he’s handed a wormhole he can use for that purpose.  His daughter doesn’t figure out how to solve her complicated equations, she has the answers fed to her through her Dad, who himself has the data fed to him by the same kindly future beings.

I can’t help but feel reminded of the scene in the ungodly Transformers 4, when Mark Wahlberg’s character picks up an alien rifle and suddenly finds himself at an advantage.  He hasn’t done the work of building and inventing and striving to create the rifle, it’s just gifted to him by circumstance and thenceforth used as his tool.

Pro-tip, if your high-minded, intellectual, sci-fi thriller even comes close to reminding a casual viewer of Transformers 4, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Again, the problem here is that, while the characters make extraordinary use of the resources made available to them, in a movie like Interstellar that plays with questions of time travel, space colonization, and the future destiny of the human race, realism is important.  These are real issues that do face us now, that our children, grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren will have to stare in the face, and if we’re going to explore the question of if and/or when we’ll ever leave the Earth, as we will likely have to do at some point, we should make the hard questions hard.

A stable wormhole leading to a habitable star system is not going to appear within our reach, or at least we would be fools to bank on that as a real possibility.  The first astronauts we send into the stars to settle planets will, near indubitably, die trying, and never see home or anyone they love ever again.  That’s not an uplifting idea, but it’s the kind of reality that sci-fi can uniquely explore, for which sci-fi is uniquely suited to prepare us.

As nice as it is to see Matthew McConaughey reunite with his family after an exile among the stars at the end of a grueling 3 hours of film, movies like this that purport to explore the hard science behind ideas like space travel should remain as committed to the mortal reality of what space travel will mean as they are to the nifty minutia of time passage at the speed of light.

In this sense, a much less “big” film from about year ago, Europa Report, far exceeds Interstellar.

How to do it right.

The great thing about Europa Report as a film is that it does not flinch from the realities of space travel, either the good or the bad.  Throughout the movie’s run of about two hours, characters seem to die in an order approximating most to least likable, and by the end we are left with an entire crew dead, but scientific progress made.  There is no savior in this movie, there is no wormhole from the future or an inter-dimensional confluence of young girls’ bedrooms.  There are people who get on a spaceship, launch themselves into the black unknown and die in the search for more and better knowledge.

I will not spoil the details of the film, because it actually is excellent and well worth the time of anyone interested in space travel as a subject, but it makes a much better “tent-pole” kind of film for the real advancement of science and knowledge than any other science fiction I can ever remember having seen.

Here, we see exemplified that the kind of work imagined is hard, and long, and slow.  We see hour after dreadful hour of persons sitting and waiting – a cruel reality of what space travel will most likely be.  We see death for simple mistakes, and most importantly we see, at least fictionally, that real, scientific knowledge is advanced slowly and at great cost, even in space.

The Black Beyond

Of course Interstellar is not alone in its leaning on external catalysts for human achievement.  Mass Effect posits “element zero” and “mass effect fields” to get away with hard science.  2001 has obelisks that seem to advance evolution at frightening paces.  All manner of sci-fi stories have all manner of throwaway explanations for things like truly long-distance travel, time travel, and all kinds of subjects and questions that we and our children will and must consider.

But can we please not be mistaken?  Science doesn’t come from a savior, and even the greatest of breakthroughs must be tempered and measured against a thousand variables before they may be safely implemented.  So for now, I’ll remain firm in my stance that science fiction is always better when it refuses to cede the greatest of our conceivable achievements to throwaway explanations and things we can not possibly rely on happening.  For all we know, all that lies beyond our atmosphere is, mostly at least, a gigantic, black void that does not care for us, or our hopes, or our dreams.

Maybe we’d be healthier if we started doing what we can with the knowledge we do have, instead of imagining magic McGuffins to get us out of our bind.