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Comment by EForEndeavour | Hacker News Reader

Interstellar had plenty of unphysical/unrealistic/fantastical content. Five-dimensional descendants of humans tearing open an Einstein-Rosen bridge in the outer solar system to screw with causality? Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth, but taking off without similar assistance from subsequent planets? "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it"??

I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.

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> I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.

This is my biggest pet peeve.

So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout. Smart-asses on twitter pointing out this or that being incorrect is boring and they ruin a movie for themselves.

Gravity is a little silly sci-fi movie and I enjoyed. I understand enough of orbital physics to chuckle at an astronaut flying on an extinguisher from a space station to another space station.

>> But ISS and Chinese stations could not be so close

>> But in the opening the debree from the original crash has different relative V therefore it would completely miss the station on second pass

Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.

What you're talking about is the difference between hard sci-fi and pop sci-fi. The pop stuff is intended to have fun Hollywood physics and not taken too literally. But hard sci-fi is intended to be more theoretically plausible.

The issue with Interstellar was it set itself up as a hard sci-fi with some Hollywood sugar with the way it depicted a future Earth, black hole physics (for the most part) and time dilation. But then it took a dramatic left turn into ridiculousness at the end. This really broke immersion of the film for me. Whereas films like Guardians of the Galaxy (and it's ilk) make it clear from the outset that it's a fun distraction from reality. So it's easier to suspend disbelief while watching.

The problem is that most people don't want hard sci-fi, so no hard sci-fi movies get made (although some are falsely advertised as hard sci-fi, as someone else mentioned), and the small number of hard sci-fi fans (like me) are annoyed they have nothing to watch. Saying "soft sci-fi can be good too" doesn't help much.

At some point though, if everything is solid, known, accepted scientific fact, there’s not much room for the “fi” in sci-fi.

The fiction can the plot, not the physics. And you'll find there's plenty of hard sci-fi novels out there. Some of those novels even get made to movies, like I Robot. Unfortunately it often gets heavily watered down.

The problem with movies is the cost of production is much higher than publishing a book. So movies have to appeal to a greater audience in order recoup their costs. And that usually means taking the "hard" out of "hard sci-fi".

Different things are made different so that people looking for different things can have the thing they want. Yeah, 5000 years ago we only had berries, animals we could catch, and plants we could grow. Today, in the future, we can have so many more things and we don't have to settle for what just happens to be available.

> So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout.

Movies used to be in black and white and without sound. So many people don't get it.

Movies used to be made where the actors were all familiar with stage performance techniques and didn't know how to perform for a camera. So many people don't get it.

Movies used to have really wooden camera shots because the camera weighted 500 pounds. So many people don't get it.

> Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.

Somebody has a preference that you don't share, but instead of just ignoring them you had to tell them that they're wrong. Without any proof. And while enjoying movie improvements that have been going on for over a century.

That person just wants movies to be better. If you think that movies shouldn't be better why don't you go back to watching black and white moving pictures?

I think people expect movies to make sense. If a character dies in the third scene and is alive in the fourth without any explanation, it's bad story telling. If rain falls up instead of down for no reason, that's also jarring. If a man is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and uses a table saw to build himself a shelter, with no explanation of where the table saw came from or where he plugged it in, that's similarly problematic.

Stories that rely on magic or nonexistent technology to tell a story are fine, as long as the rules governing the magic or technology are applied consistently. Stuff that's just blatantly wrong or contradictory I find distracting. Some people aren't bothered by that, and anything science-fictiony is generally operating far enough outside the realm of ordinary experience that most people won't notice incongruities.

An interesting case is the movie The Wandering Earth, which I watched recently. A plot point relies on unexplained "gravity fluctuations" while attempting a gravity slingshot causing catastrophic failure of a bunch of important machines. This is nonsense, and made it hard for me to take the movie seriously. Later, though, I realized there's a (probably unintentional) sensible interpretation. The machines failed for an unrelated reason, but the world government can't bring themselves to say that they screwed up so they make up a story that doesn't make sense and everyone knows is a lie, but no one is willing to say so because they're afraid to or want to be "good citizens". This could be interpreted as a commentary on modern China (which is where the movie was made), while retaining plausible deniability.

I haven't read Cixin Liu's short story that The Wandering Earth is based on; I don't know if the gravity fluctuations are present in the original or are given a plausible explanation.

If all movies had to withstand the test of logic, where would that leave us? -- Roger Ebert http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-journey-to-the-ce...

They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.

Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.

Why is Dr Stone in space? What's she running from. What killed her child? (Gravity). What do humans do to survive, and how is that related to evolution?

And most importantly in the 3d version, why do things fly out in front of the screen, yet also hit an implied camera lens in a different shot?

> They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.

I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.

> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.

No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.

The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.

Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.

>"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it"??

I don't understand why this is often held up as a valid criticism of the authenticity of the movie. This quote is a character speaking and not the filmmaker. The movie isn't necessarily saying Anne Hathaway's character's reasoning for her actions is any more sound than Matt Damon's character's reasoning. The plot of the movie does not rely on her character's reasoning being right.

> I don't understand why this is often held up as a valid criticism of the authenticity of the movie.

It’s weird the degree of overlap between “people who want absolute realism in their movies” and “people who want everything a character says in a movie to be a reliable description of the reality of the fictional context”, given the inconsistency of those preferences.

Don't get me started on the people who listed among their complaints about The Last Jedi that "Rey's parents are nobodies and that's lame and I don't like it".

Setting aside whether or not that being true would be a good move for the franchise: the film didn't say that's true. It had one character say it to another. In a franchise that has a history of having one character lie to another about exactly this kind of thing. In an entry in that franchise that is explicitly playing with point-of-view and subjective experience of events.

But no, that must just be true I guess.

Is that not how a human's perception of love is? Even if you think you're the most logical person in the world you find it hard to explain why you feel so much for a random person. Seems very realistic

> Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth

Might have to watch the movie again but I think it’s implied that it’s an insane fuel burden to get them off the planet; additionally only a small part of the ship actually goes down to the surface, I believe the main bulk stays in orbit.

The taking off from Earth in multiple stages but not other planets is actually pretty realistic. Earth is big. For example, Starship plans to do exactly this: using the super heavy booster to take off from earth but single stage from mars or the moon.

They make a point of saying the first planet visited has higher than Earth gravity.

Yes, but the ship was much heavier when leaving Earth.

For the first take-off, it needed to carry enough fuel for the rest of the trip. By the second take-off, most of that fuel had been used.

> Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth, but taking off without similar assistance from subsequent planets?

I haven't watched Interstellar, but this would certainly make sense given Earth's escape velocity (11.19km/s) is over 2x that of Mars (5.03km/s), and nearly 5x that of the Moon (2.38km/s).

It had to be unrealistic because we don't know real deep space travel.

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