Interstellar

I watched Interstellar two days after it was released on a lazy Sunday morning with a big fat tub of popcorn and one of my closest friends with me in a chilly multiplex.That isn't where our story begins though. That Friday when the movie was released  my brother had threatened to spill the bean and later on after watching it all I heard from him was something akin to a 'Meh'. So much for expectations !

Being from a place where you overhear people discuss string theory over steamy idlis I had the opportunity to talk to a few very different people about the movie. One of my friends who is an aspiring physicist told me that he found the movie appalling. It would have been okay if it had chosen to show light sabres or warp or any impossibility like the Star Trek/Wars series which might be explained by future technology and is put in an already non-realistic environment. However interstellar had goofed up already know things; it had shown things that we know for sure are wrong/impossible and still brands itself as science fiction. Things like the fact that you can't just go in to a black hole or that for planets that close to black hole for the observed time dilation it would be very hard to hold an atmosphere.

When I watched the movie I had hit upon my share of impossibilities too (despite being far far behind my friend in terms of black-hole knowledge). For example I had seen equations about a black hole's entropy and the predicted its temperature to be very very close to 0 Kelvin and Cooper would have frozen solid before he could even think of ejecting. And bookshelves inside a black hole ? Seriously ?! and love transcends space-time ??!! Also what exactly is 'quantum data' ? :P

That isn't all though. Many things which I thought were ridiculous when I watched it turned out to be more plausible and it was another one of my friends who explained this to me. The huge waves in the high gravity planet they reach aren't a contradiction; they're the tides caused by Gargantua! Apparently there are black holes with very weak gradient of the gravitational field which would prevent say your front toe from being ripped apart when you go near it; or your whole body.

The plot holes many and obvious are a quintessential part of any movie and Interstellar follows the suit. God knows how he figured out that humans were the ones who had created the bookshelves world inside the black hole or  how Murph figures out that her father was 'the ghost'. Isn't it dumb to plan so much ahead but not account for the fact that humans send to the planets with really long relative time scale with no hope of rescue might flip out and rig a beacon to just be rescued ?

However after all this I still love the movie. One of the reasons is this (it didn't get much screen time :/):


Despite all its faults, fallacies and holes the movie did something that none had before: it showed what a black hole might look like and what it means to be near one, gave a form to the idea of interstellar travel and time dilation and gravity. It might not be accurate but it still has put these ideas into the dream-scape of so many people ! A child who loves this might grow up and realize that it isn't that accurate but maybe this is all that it would take to plant a seed in that young mind to dream about black holes and gravity and spaceships and to study them when he/she grows up.

The graphics in the original TRON would make a toddler laugh (or weep depending on how you look at it ;) ), yet it managed to get so many people to dream about future and pursue things.


Topping of all this is the brilliant screen portrayals by Matthew Mcconaughey, Anne Hatheway and many more; and the screen play by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. I was more than impressed by the dry humor and awesome persona of TARS, faintly disappointed at the fact that I couldn't buy one even if I wanted to as I walked out of the theater ! So my final verdict : take the movie for what it is with its own faults and dream of Gargantua :D.