Another Comment on INTERSTELLAR

A reader expressed his view of this Hard SF Masterwork so well that I wanted to quote his thoughts here, and emphasize them:

“The “What are you doing?” “Docking” “It’s impossible.” “No, it’s necessary” exchange Cooper has with Dr. Brand and TARS before the spinning docking is one I found inspiration in recently during my general exams week for the PhD program

here at Oklahoma University, in which I had to write about 40 pages in one week. Despite the challenge feeling like having to climb mount everest, I just kept thinking that to myself–“it’s necessary”.

I am currently studying William Shakespeare’s Catholic background and its influence on the plays–great time to be doing that since Shakespeare and religion has become a hot topic in the field.

I also loved in the film how Cooper’s son has a controlled reaction to Cooper leaving earth, but (at least in my viewing) is the one to first give up hope that his father is going to return (at the end of the 20+ years of messages Cooper watches, his son says something to the effect of him feeling like his father is not hearing these messages, that they’re just being sent off into the dark, and that he hopes Cooper is at peace) —Murph has a completely devestating reaction when Cooper leaves, refuses to send out messages for a long time, but actually has the strongest hope–nay, “faith”—that her father will return.

It’s great how both she and Cooper both have to make an act of faith — she when she turns the car around to go back to the house and figure out what was happening with the “ghost” so long ago, and later Cooper, when he’s in the tesseract, having faith that she will remember and care enough about the watch he left her to figure out the data he’s going to leave for her.

To my mind, when TARS asks Cooper in the tesseract why he’s so confident that Murph will know that the answer is in the watch, and Cooper says something like “because I told her to” this is a moment nicely paralleled later when cooper asks the elder murph why she knew he’d come back and she answers “because my father promised me” — to me, the movie is very much about the miraculous things that can happen if we don’t accept the mundane “realities” and lies of life and instead walk by faith, performing actions which God has promised us will have a good effect in the end even if we can’t see those results in the moment of the here and now.”

My comment: when I saw this film, I honestly thought it had found that long-sought point of maximum overlap for all audiences, Leftwing and Rightwing, Science Fictioneers and Muggles, Faithful and Infidel, carefully crafted to put across its message of hopeless hope and the brightness of love in the darkest of worlds in a way that everyone would like.

I was a little surprised, but perhaps I should not have been, when Leftists hated it, though. They are simply much crazier than in my youth when they still had the Soviet Union to lust after. Now they have nothing aside from accusing the innocent to warm their cold and empty souls. While they talk about hope and change, and say they like films with messages, actually they don’t. So a message of faith and hope and love will of course provoke their ire. Gollum cannot eat the Elfish waybread.

When Science Fiction people started criticizing it, that shocked and confounded me, and the little numbered badge at my robotic neck began blinking, requesting help from Norman.

I could not fathom how anyone could find fault in a film that had taken far, far, far more painstaking trouble to get the smallest of astronomical details right, and complain about the science.

One critic complained about the size of the wings on the drone seen in the opening scene as being too small to hold enough solar cells. But the film never establishes anything about the propulsion or composition of the craft, nor how many years in the future this is, nor what technologies have been developed. The film simply does not say.

Another critic complained that the spectrum shift of dark lines seen through a spectroscope of the accretion disk surrounding rapidly rotating supermassive black hole should have created a visible brightening on one side of the accretion disk — even though such Doppler shifts are invisible to the human eye, and even though the film gives no figures of mass nor rates of spin nor temperature or anything else could be determined. The film simply does not say.

I did my homework on such things for one of my previous books, but even among science fiction writers, knowing the esoterica of Doppler shift and black hole spin rates and so on is rare, and no science fiction writer in his right mind expects the reader to know. Nonetheless, the what the film did say or show, the film got it right, and the critics got it wrong.

Such criticisms are not like complaining about the lack of altitude jets on Larry Nivens’ RINGWORLD, a story where there is teleportation, unobtainium materials stronger than possible, faster than light drive, and successful breeding for magical luck. There, Niven actually made an oversight in his world building which he corrected in a later sequel. It is like complaining about the lack of a counterweight asteroid on the beanstalk in Kim Stanley Robinson’s MARS Trilogy, when the author took the trouble to put the counterweight in!

This kind of thing is inanely trivial. If the wing size of a futuristic drone or the lack of a visible special effect for a phenomenon that, in real life, cannot be detected without an instrument anyway, or other trifling minutiae inconsequential to the plot jars you out of the film and ruins your ability to enjoy it, then there is no science fiction story, much less any science fiction film, nothing in the genre which can ever satisfy you.

There are more sound complaints: why does the earth liftoff require a multistage rocket, but liftoff from a world with 30 percent higher gravity not? How can a rocket make a transit to Saturn in merely two years? Again, the film does not say, but anyone with a highschool smattering of astronomy could answer the questions: the Earth liftoff is to get to escape velocity, which is a higher velocity than the orbital, or even suborbital velocity needed to rendezvous with a ship in orbit. The two year figure for Saturn is very low if a ship is matching the speed of Saturn, because a ship would accelerate, turn, and decelerate; but not if she is passing through a point in space near Saturn at a high speed, in which case the ship might as well accelerate the whole way.

The theological complaint is even less comprehensible to me. My brothers in Christ, if you cannot see that this film about faith, hope and love does far more to spread and confirm our worldview than infinite numbers of movies like LEFT BEHIND or FIREPROOF, you don’t know the power of story telling.

For nearly a hundred years the Left has used the power of story telling to propagate lies, but the stories are so well crafted, that they become part of the unspoken shared assumptions of the culture. How many people believe that institutional racism exist in America? How many people believe JFK was shot by a rightwing conspiracy rather than by a Commie? How many people believe sex outside wedlock is normal, expected, natural, wholesome, but premarital virginity is shameful?

If this is the way the Science Fiction readers or the Christian community, or just people who like good and complex stories that do not recite the trite messages of whining or sentimental pudding-headed Leftist bromides are received, we cannot expect film makers to go to the trouble to tale about the future in the future.

A little more gratitude and a little less criticism would seem to be in order.

Are you not sick and tired of the endless nihilism that pours out of Hollywood like an explosion in a sewerage factory?

This was a tale about a hero who does not boast and loves his daughter and who just wants to do his job and go home. It is a story about a pilot who loves to fly. It is a story about a little girl who grew up but who never grew out of her sense of hope and her sense of wonder.

This is the only film I have seen all year where the father was portrayed as a man, an actual masculine man in a leadership position who worked hard and could do a hard job well, and who was, as all fathers should be, willing to sacrifice everything for his family.

Even if all the criticisms about the theology and the science in this movie were true — and, so far as I have seen, not one of them are even making a prima face case — are you not hungry for heroes, O fans of science fiction? Do you not thirst for wonders? Let my eyes feast on the majestic rings of Saturn or the dark and blazing horror of a supermassive singularity!

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.