Photo illustration by Slate. Interstellar photo by Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros.; deGrasse Tyson by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Earlier this month, Neil deGrasse Tyson offered up a critique on Twitter of Interstellar. (Learning a bit from the furor over his 2013 Twitter review of , this time he frontloaded his review with the stuff he approved of.) While Tyson had plenty to say about the film's science- good and bad-he tried hard to reinforce the message he put out shortly after his Gravity tweets set off a firestorm. 'Science experts don't line up to critique Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,' he said then. 'To 'earn' the right to be criticized on a scientific level is a high compliment indeed.' (Warning: Some mild Interstellar spoilers are ahead.)
Many scientists and science journalists who reviewed Interstellar offered even less damning with faint praise. 'A missed opportunity,' said Discovery.com's Ian O'Neill. 'If the pseudoscientific woo about love and time travel in Interstellar pissed you off, you aren't alone,' declared Annalee Newitz of io9.com. And as Phil Plait said on Slate, 'I could go on and on (and on and on and on and on ... ) with the scientific missteps the movie takes.' Newitz summed up her frustration with Interstellar and other science fiction films with a metaphysical bent, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey: 'These are films that aim to popularize science and our quest to colonize space, and yet they basically lie to audiences about how space works.' (Non-scientist critics, while not unanimous, were kinder to Interstellar, which is at 74 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.)
Science fiction has always leaned on science for its credibility; artists from Jules Verne to Christopher Nolan have borrowed scientific ideas and concepts to drive their narratives. Science, for its part, has drawn inspiration from science fiction. But the question is: How much do artists owe science? How closely should science fiction hew to science fact? The truth is that science fiction is, first and foremost, fiction -and that's how it should be judged.
A cottage industry has grown up around the world-building of science fiction films. Any high-grossing science fiction franchise can expect an explanatory volume, from to to, yes, Interstellar. Filmmakers parade high-profile scientific advisers: Paleontologist Jack Horner helped Steven Spielberg populate Jurassic Park with lifelike dinosaurs. Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin and others advised the makers of For Interstellar, physicist Kip Thorne assisted the Nolan brothers with the science of black holes. Touting the scientific credibility of a science fiction film has become a marketing tool, but it's a double-edged sword; when a filmmaker asserts that 'to really take on the science of the film, you're going to need to sit down with the film for a bit,' as Christopher Nolan did in a recent interview, plenty of scientists will accept that challenge. The online conversation around science fiction in film has a lot less to do with plot or dialogue or visual language than with easy point-scoring about a film's ' veneer of science' or whether it's ' on the fine line between science and magic.'
We lose something when we erect high walls between the language of science and that of metaphor.
As any science fiction aficionado will tell you, there is a difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. As Tyson noted about films that don't 'earn' scientific criticism, the particular strain of unforgiving nitpicking that he's popularized wouldn't have the same impact applied to The Lord of the Ringsor even to . (There are exceptions, of course: Some fans have tried their best to introduce scientific plausibility into LOTR, and almost 40 years later people are still trying to make sense of Han Solo's claim that the Millennium Falcon ' made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.') The further we are from what we perceive as reality, the more forgiving we are of seemingly fantastic elements. But we have forgotten that the use of reality in fiction is not meant to pull a story into our world, but to help us fall into the world of a story.
Forcing story to serve the world as it is (or even as it could be, more or less plausibly) has a purpose: It can inspire, and it might produce compelling art. But story is also about expanding the limits of reality and transcending what seems possible. The stories at the center of our myths and our religions are about powers and events beyond our understanding. The story at the center of American identity-that of a perfectible, perpetual Union-was impossibly utopian 240 years ago.
Entities 0 Name: Christopher Nolan Count: 2 1 Name: Tyson Count: 2 2 Name: deGrasse Tyson Count: 1 3 Name: Neil deGrasse Tyson Count: 1 4 Name: Paramount Pictures\/Warner Bros. Count: 1 5 Name: Jack Horner Count: 1 6 Name: Phil Plait Count: 1 7 Name: Ian Lipkin Count: 1 8 Name: Discovery.com Count: 1 9 Name: Interstellar Count: 1 10 Name: Kessel Run Count: 1 11 Name: American Count: 1 12 Name: Nolan Count: 1 13 Name: Steven Spielberg Count: 1 14 Name: Annalee Newitz Count: 1 15 Name: Jules Verne Count: 1 16 Name: Newitz Count: 1 17 Name: Ian O'Neill Count: 1 18 Name: Kip Thorne Count: 1 19 Name: Han Solo Count: 1 20 Name: Stan Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1EVecxF Title: 14 Things That Happen In "Interstellar", Ranked By Scientific Accuracy Description: Professor Kip Thorne, the science advisor and executive producer of Interstellar, has written an excellent book called The Science of Interstellar in which he describes several plot points and how he thinks they could be made to agree with our understanding of physics. That's not what we're doing here.
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