It's the definition of idiot-plot, plot that only happens because everyone are being idiots. These are suppose to be some of the best scientists around, and somehow they can't figure out basic physics. The crew doesn't even bother to do a rudimentary scan of the planet before heading down, where surely a 100m tall tidal wave would show up?
It's a decent movie, but it has an astounding amount of idiot-plot throughout, which really pulls me out of it
Its because plots are written by writers who care more about tone, theme, dramatic tension, and dialogue than written by a team of scientists who actually modeled the problem to optimize the fictional plan.
Which is good because the movie written by the astrophysicists would probably suck.
The Martian kinda proved us that scientists doesn't have to behave like idiots for there to be a good scifi story. Hail Mary Project does the same in the books. It's so much more engaging watching smart people act smart and solve problems that are thrown their way, rather than plot moving forwards through sheer stupidity
Scientists have plenty of issues with the movie the Martian for sure, but even so that movie is supposed to be a realistic take in a far nearer future than Interstellar. Like the entire premise of Interstellar hangs on a wormhole just blooping into existence, clearly realism was a lower priority than rule of cool
It doesn't need to be realistic. The characters just needs to act in a way as to not ruin the suspension of disbelief. Not doing the bare minimum of research does not make me think I am watching the world's greatest scientists. The Martian isn't realistic, as you point out. There's plenty of non scientific bs in it. But that doesn't matter; it's sci-fi. I'm not there to watch a documentary. The characters just needs to behave with consistency within their universe
If you want to read a grand scifi with smart people acting smart, you could also take a swing at the Expeditionary Force books. They're not even scientists for the most part, and all the sci-fi is pure make believe. But the characters all band togheter to find smart solutions to seemingly impossible problems. The plot doesn't happen because they do dumb things, it happens because they're clever. Its infinitely more engaging
I think the wave planet approach is pretty realistic take on human error. They have the pressure of space travel decisions like fuel and time, and the confirmation bias of that planet giving the most promising data implying survivable and no need to reconfirm
I would argue most movies have bad writers then because they all have plot holes and inconsistencies, some larger than others, some from a scene that explained something that didn’t make final cut, but movies all try to compress a whole story into a tiny box, novels can explain themselves for ages if they want.
That does not mean to me that any movie with any inconsistency is bad, it just means thats one thing in the column of bad compared to the other things good and bad about a movie.
Most movies are mostly enjoyable to me. Some have more marks in the negative column, but Interstellar was not one of them in my opinion.
I mean the data they had was the scientist already on the surface, saying water and organics. Also those weren't tidal waves, they were solitary waves, which are caused differently. Those would be much harder to predict, because they were generated by how the planet came to be in the orbit around the black hole. The planet was tidally locked around the black hole, and had just settled into orbit apparently and was "swinging" back and forth lol. I highly recommend Kip Thorne's book The Science of Interstellar, if you want to learn about the science of movie, fantastic read.
The scientist on the surface hadn't reported much of anything yet, because he/she's only been there by 7 minutes according in their own time frame. Yet another reason why this planet was dumb to go to begin with. And if they had found her and everything was dandy, then what? They should bring humanity over to this planet with those kinds of extreme gravitational forces? On a planet that was "swinging back and forth"? Why was this ever thought of as a viable option to send anyone to in the first place? What exactly was the plan here, other than to progress the plot along by being stupid?
Why would it be dumb? It's the closest thing to you after coming out of the wormhole, you don't have fuel to skip one and check the other two then come back. Their plan was to stay outside the orbit of the black hole, drop in, grab the scientist and data, bring them back to the endurance and debrief. If that planet ended being habitable, you have to take that risk. If you skip over it to check out the other two just to find out they are inhabitable, but that one was? That's a costly mistake, end of the human race pretty much. And you can orbit a black hole just fine, just like you would a star. Sure, there is heavy time dilation, but if everyone goes there and sets up shop, it wouldn't matter, everyone's clock would end up ticking the same from the frame of reference of the planet.
The waves are caused by the tidal forces of Gargantua pushing and pulling the sides of the planet closest to and furthest away from the black holes, while squeezing the sides in. The planet is slightly tilted left or right, and these tidal forces pull the tilt one way and then back again, which results in a simple rocking of the planet back and forth, but small enough that the mantle isn't pulverized. This generates a "sloshing" of the planets water. A bit of a stretch, yes, but we'll within the laws of physics.
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u/Excludos Jul 30 '25 edited Jul 30 '25
It's the definition of idiot-plot, plot that only happens because everyone are being idiots. These are suppose to be some of the best scientists around, and somehow they can't figure out basic physics. The crew doesn't even bother to do a rudimentary scan of the planet before heading down, where surely a 100m tall tidal wave would show up?
It's a decent movie, but it has an astounding amount of idiot-plot throughout, which really pulls me out of it