Interstellar

interstellarWhile I loved all the visuals, and some elements of the story. The whole “love conquers all” angle really brought this down a few notches. Seriously? These people just need to get over themselves.

Also, the whole thing about flying into a black hole was frankly stupid. You know what happens if you fly into a black hole? You get ripped to pieces by the gravitational forces before you even get close. Stuff like this makes me a little angry – we wonder why the general public is so uninformed about science? It’s partly because of crap like this. While I don’t expect every movie to be a science lesson, they could at least try to not get it exactly wrong. I mean, the writers are just making up crap because they’re ignorant. Imagine they made a movie about surgery, and simply invented body parts with magical properties – it’d sound ridiculous. Just because most people don’t know squat about black holes doesn’t make it any different. They could have made a very similar plot without all the black hole nonsense.

The Martian

The MartianFinally… a science fiction movie that treats its audience like the smart adults we are. Finally we get a hero whose struggle isn’t against his own personal demons, but just against a hostile environment. There’s no stupid love story, no family crying at home about how they miss daddy, no people doing stupid things because they have some emotional baggage, no illogical plot points… instead, we’re left with a movie that’s certainly fantasy – and fantastical, but just on the right side of plausible. Sure, there are a few technical issues glossed-over (like how his plastic bubble fix to the habitat could not have come close to withstanding the pressure it needed to). But these were not central to the plot.

I think most movie-makers in Hollywood simply aren’t very scientific. They’re in the movie business, they’re all about art and emotion. I hope they “get it” with a movie like The Martian – there’s a huge demand for geeky smart stuff. Please make more.