I’ve been rethinking “Interstellar” of late, especially in light of Kip Thorne’s “The Science of Interstellar.” A lot of my science objections were actually explained away in terms that made sense… but only in light of facts that were not presented on screen. The fall past the event horizon? Obvious nonsense, nothing could survive the tidal stresses… till you find out the black hole is a two Hundred MILLION solar mass monster (somewhat counter intuitively, those are safer to approach than itty-bitty one solar mass black holes). Maneuvering in close? Far beyond the delta-V capability of the ship… till its explained that the ship does a slingshot maneuver – offscreen – around a 10,000 solar mass black hole in a convenient orbit around the big one. Stuff like that. Kinda cheating, but I guess it mostly works.
But one thing that still bugs me: once again, spaceflight is depicted as depressing, and the reason for the spaceflight is depicted as depressing. It’s not as uplifting as it should be. Once again, the movies let me down.
And then…
[vimeo 108650530]
Holy crap. Ho. Lee. CRAAAAAAAP. Someone get this guy $150 million to flesh this out into a three-hour epic NOW.
The basejumpers of Miranda? The folks walking across Europa? Floating through the rings of Saturn? The Saturnian airship? Long forgotten goosebumps came back to life.
Website:
http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/film.html
