Why I didn't like 'Interstellar' (Long post, with spoilers)
I watched the film "Interstellar" last night. I've been wanting to see it for some time--I love high-concept 'hard' sci-fi fiction in the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, etc., and I'm a big fan of Christopher Nolan's previous work. I went in to the movie with a lot of anticipation...and when it ended, to my surprise...I really disliked it.
The thing is, though, I wasn't actually sure WHY I disliked it at first. "Interstellar" has a lot going for it...stunning cinematography and visual effects, a talented cast of actors, a director and writer with a solid track record, and the PR for the film hyped its efforts to be as scientifically accurate as possible, consulting with a CalTech theoretical physicist. There were set pieces and individual scenes I thought were amazing. But I still finished it with a very negative impression.
I had to sleep on it and think a bit before I could articulate what bothered me so much about "Interstellar." Because the movie is long and complex--and my issues with it are ALSO quite complex, lol...I decided to post my thoughts behind spoiler tags here on LJ. The movie is divided into several segments, so I'll try to tackle each one individually and describe what I thought was good and bad. Here I go!
[Spoiler (click to open)]
PART 1: Earth in the future
The first act introduced Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey, apologies for spelling!), the main character, and his children, son Tom and daughter Murphy. Earth's crops are slowly dying out, technology and science has been abandoned in favor of farming to conserve what food crops are left. Murphy encounters a mysterious 'ghost' she claims is sending her messages that lead her and Cooper to contact a secret NASA mission to find a habitable planet to relocate humanity to. Cooper agrees to go, but the mission will take years and his family will be left behind, which results in a huge fight and his daughter effectively disowning him because she says the "ghost" is sending messages that Cooper has to stay.
PROS: The first act does a good job setting up the desperate situation humanity has gotten into, and why the later space mission is so important.
CONS: However, the first act is also...heavy-handed. I am a big proponent of space exploration AND environmental conservation, but I felt the message "Abusing environment bad! Anti-intellectualism bad!" was over-emphasized. There are repeated "documentary clips" shown with fictional interviewees telling us how bad the situation is in case we can't figure it out from the movie itself. Plus, the anti-intellectual school officials are cartoonishly bad and stupid. They reminded me of a similar problem I had with the awful film "The Happening"-which tried to send a valid message about the importance of the environment, but ended up discrediting its own message because of the ham-handed portrayal of the characters.
Also, I'll just give something away right here: The 'ghost' subplot gave away the entire movie for me. Five minutes into the introduction of the "ghost" I said: "Oh great. This is going to be a bad time-travel story and the 'ghost' is Cooper trying to reach Murphy from the future with an important message." It turned out I was right, and this subplot was, to me, the worst part of the movie. Mainly because I had to spend three hours waiting for my guess to play out. (More on this to come!)
Anyway, onwards!
PART 2: Miller's Planet
The NASA program's leader, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), tells Cooper that a decade past, NASA sent several astronauts on one-way solo trips through the Saturn wormhole...and signals are coming from survivors reporting three possible planets that may work for colonization. Cooper is asked to lead a follow-up expedition (he's the only trained space pilot left on Earth) which will determine if any of the three planets can be colonized and rescue any survivors from the first mission. Brand tells Cooper NASA is building an "ark ship" to get the remaining human population off Earth, but needs to finalize the math for the drive system. In the event of failure, Cooper's ship will carry frozen embryos that can be used to start a colony if the "ark ship" can't be completed in time.
The crew consists of Cooper, Brand's daughter Amelia, two other scientists and two ex-military AI robots, TARS and CASE (which turn out to be funny, interesting characters themselves.). The ship heads through the wormhole and explores the first planet near the black hole. Planet one looks promising and is covered in a shallow ocean of liquid water (about three feet deep). The bad news? It's in the black hole's gravity field, and relativity effects mean that if the team goes down there, every hour on the planet equals seven years passing on Earth...which is already running out of time. Because Miller, the astronaut from the first expedition, is transmitting a signal that the planet is a good prospect, the team goes down...and find's the wreckage of Miller's destroyed ship, still mostly intact, a short time later. In my favorite sequence, the horrified crew realizes that what they thought were distant mountains are mile-high tidal waves generated by the gravitational anomalies coming at them and the landing craft is damaged, with one astronaut killed. It takes three hours to get back to orbit, by which time 23 years have passed on Earth. Cooper and his team can't figure out what happened...until they realize that the relativity effects mean Miller must have landed, transmitted an initial signal, and been killed by a wave like they almost were-and because of time distortion, while a decade passed before Earth got the message, on the target planet only an hour or so passed between the time Miller was killed and Cooper's team arriving and landing. Yikes.
PROS: This was my favorite part of the movie. I've read claims that the science of the water planet's gravity and relativity effects are a little hinky in online articles, but the creepiness of the scenes where they find Miller's wrecked ship just before the planet's weird forces nearly wipe them out are very suspenseful. A great way of showing how dangerous the unknown could be in future space exploration. But...
CONS: There's also some things that make no sense. Why does the crew never orbit any of these planets and take readings there to find out what the surface is like? Why does Amelia (Anne Hathaway's character) insist on grabbing Miller's recording data when they are all about to be killed by mile-high tidal waves? (It's pretty darn clear the planet ISN'T SUITABLE!)
Part Three: Matt Damon's Planet, or Where The Movie Started To Unravel Big-Time For Tanuki
After the Miller's Planet disaster, the crew must make a choice. They spent too much fuel escaping, so they can only get to one of the two remaining targets and return to Earth. Both targets may be habitable and have surviving astronauts marooned there and are outside the relativity distortion effect. A is sending detailed messages confirming a survivor, B is sending automated messages. Amelia wants B because the astronaut sent to B was her boyfriend, but the rest of the crew outvote her and opt for A, because the astronaut on A was Dr. Mann, leader of the first mission and the most experienced astronaut.
Mann's planet is a frozen wasteland. Upon landing, the team find him alive (and he's Matt Damon!) in cryogenic suspended animation. They revive him and he tells them how grateful he is and that the planet is suitable for colonization, and he'll take them around. But just then a message comes through from Cooper's daughter, now an adult physicist. She reveals that Amelia's father has died on Earth...and on his deathbed he admitted that the entire "Ark Ship" plan was a fraud designed to get cooperation from Earth's governments. There is no chance of saving anyone on Earth. Mann, who knew about the plan, corroborates this: The space drive equation can't be solved without data from inside the black hole itself, so the only way to keep humanity from extinction is the frozen embryo plan. Cooper and Amelia are furious. Cooper announces he will help set up the colony on Mann's world, then take the ship home to be with his family for whatever time is left.
So yeah, that's great. Cooper and Mann go off to check the habitable areas, and then we get DA BIG REVEAL, duh duh duhhhhnnnn....the planet isn't habitable! Mann lied and sent false data, because he was desperate for a way off the planet and couldn't take being alone! Oh, but wait, there's more...he's gone crazy and wants to complete the mission himself and be a hero, so before sending the signal, he set traps to kill his rescuers after which he will steal their ship and travel to the final target planet with the embryos and save Mankind! His trap kills another crew member, but Amelia saves Cooper. They chase him up to orbit, where Mann manages to blow himself up thanks to a mis-handled docking procedure, damaging the ship in the process.
PROS: Uh, none. It's a terrible segment that makes NO SENSE, unless you handwave it with, "Well Matt Damon was just insane!" Mann wants to be rescued, so he sends a fake signal...but rigs his shelter to explode when a human accesses certain equipment? How could he know any rescuers wouldn't trip the trap before trying to wake him up? Why didn't he simply try to get the crew to go ahead with the embryo plan on Planet 3 without trying to kill everyone? It's obvious that he doesn't know how to pilot Cooper and Amelia's ship in the chase scene. Gaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!
And also...how horrible is it that Professor Brand simply gave up decades ago trying to find a way to save Mankind, and lied to Cooper (resulting in Coop being cut off from his family for decades) in order to convince Cooper to pilot the mission?) There's some exposition on how the needs of mankind take precedence over the needs of individuals, which frankly I found creepy and horrible and too similar to the horrid anti-science school officials in the first act, ironically enough. Eeeuuuggh. Anyway. On to...
Part Four: The Black Hole, or where things TOTALLY fell apart for Tanuki
With the ship damaged, Cooper and Amelia decide on an emergency plan: Using Mann's salvaged landing craft hooked up to their ship for extra thrust, they will slingshot around the black hole's gravity well in order to get to Planet Three, the only possible option left. The robot crewman TARS agrees to be dropped into the black hole on the outside chance that he can transmit enough data on the black hole to Earth for Murphy to actually be able to perfect the ark drive equation. Everything goes as planned, but then Coop reveals that they need to lose more mass to get through, and detaches the lander with himself in it to allow Brand to reach Target Three, find her boyfriend, and complete the mission. He and robot TARS fall into the black hole, the ship comes apart around Coop, who prepares to die...
...brace yourselves for a major "WHAT THE HOOEY" moment...
...and suddenly Cooper is floating in the middle of, um a room in his house on Earth behind his daughter's bookshelf. TARS starts transmitting and tells Coop (brace for it)...
...Apparently the Saturn wormhole was created by Fifth-Dimensional Space Aliens with FEENOMENAL COSMIC POWAH and they've sent Cooper to his daughter's bedroom thirty years ago so he can influence humanity's survival! Oh wait, no it's not...Cooper says it's not aliens, it Fifth-Dimensional Super Time-Travel Future Humans with FEENOMENAL COSMIC POWAH and they've sent Cooper to his daughter's bedroom thirty years ago so he can influence humanity's survival! It is never clarified in the story who the (bleep!) these mysterious Deus Ex Machina time travelers are.
Anyway. Cooper spends the next twenty minutes of the film crawling around the bookshelves sending messages to his daughter (Remember what I said about Part One?), crying, and trying to change the past by telling his past self to "Stay." (Arrrrrggggggh). Then he accepts he can't change the past and uses gravity manipulation to make an analog windup watch he gave his daughter before he left wiggle in Morse Code to transmit the complex black hole data TARS found to Murphy so she can finish the ark ship drive equations. (Morse Code? For physics equations? With gravity waves? Arrrrrrggggh!!!!) So he pulls this off, the room dissolves, and suddenly he's floating in space around Saturn where a ship is conveniently right there to pick him and TARS up. Turns out the Space Future Deus Ex Machina Future Humanaliens have deposited him 90 years in the future right next to the functional Space Ark, where all humanity is living quite comfortably and he finally reunites with his 124-year-old daughter, whose separation from him is a huge plot point for the entire film, for TWO FREAKING MINUTES during which she tells him. "Hi Dad. Glad you're here. Welp, time for me to die, you get along now and go take a ship through the wormhole and find Amelia." Oh, did I mention that the move ends revealing Amelia alone on Target Three BURYING HER POOR DEAD BOYFRIEND. THE END.
Pros: NONE
Cons: I could write an entire post on how preposterous I found this ending to be, but I'll just sum up with the Chewbacca defense from "South Park": IT. JUST. DOESN'T. MAKE. SENSE.
The movie falls apart so badly in the final act that I'm baffled. It leaves me with so many questions:
1. If the Future Deux Ex Machina People can open wormholes to other galaxies to help Mankind, why not simply send a space package to Earth that says "Hi guys! Here's some super future technology to fix your crops!"
2. Or transmit the math so Brand or Murphy could solve the freaking gravity equation and get everyone off the planet?
3. Or basically, do ANYTHING more helpful than what they did?
4. If the only issue with the Space Ark was the drive system (it's shown to be a giant O'Neill cylinder colony, basically), why couldn't Earth simply construct O'Neill colonies in stable positions at Earth's Lagrange points and move everyone up there?
5. Someone else pointed this out in a review: Earth is shown to have incredibly capable, durable AI robots. Why not send them through the wormhole first to explore the planets? They may not be as adaptable but they would require significantly less resources-no food, oxygen, water, etc.
6. But if NASA felt that humans were required, why send ONE person on a no-return trip to each world? Why not send at least two? It seems to me that a contributing factor to the disastrous results of the first mission was that each astronaut was alone. (Though Mann was shown to have a non-functional robot with him, it's true.)
Also, I found the underlying message of the movie kind of ugly. The movie claims to be about how important love of family is and how science can save humanity-but the most prominent scientists in the movie (Prof. Brand and Mann) deliberately falsify their results and lie to manipulate people-something that is considered incredibly unethical in science. The message I came away with was, "It's OK to lie and manipulate and do horrible things to people. Just make sure you're a scientist. Because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
YUCK! Needless to say, I do not agree with that message.
I think what ultimately bothered me the most about this movie was that, to me, it deliberately sabotaged the story it was trying to tell. It's trying to be a movie that promotes the realism of its sci-fi concepts, but relies on poorly thought-out, preposterous plot twists to conclude its story. It's supposed to be about how the human drive to learn and explore will benefit humanity-but it turns out that's not what saves humanity; it's a Deus Ex Machina sent by aliens/future humans who are never explained but simply handwaved into the story. It's supposed to be a film about the nobility and positive benefits of science-but its leading scientists are show to be selfish, dishonest and rather vile people.
Gahhh. It's just too much nonsense. The deux ex machina ending just unraveled the whole movie for me, despite its positive qualities. Now I really want to watch a movie that actually shows science and scientists in a good way. Like "Big Hero 6."
The thing is, though, I wasn't actually sure WHY I disliked it at first. "Interstellar" has a lot going for it...stunning cinematography and visual effects, a talented cast of actors, a director and writer with a solid track record, and the PR for the film hyped its efforts to be as scientifically accurate as possible, consulting with a CalTech theoretical physicist. There were set pieces and individual scenes I thought were amazing. But I still finished it with a very negative impression.
I had to sleep on it and think a bit before I could articulate what bothered me so much about "Interstellar." Because the movie is long and complex--and my issues with it are ALSO quite complex, lol...I decided to post my thoughts behind spoiler tags here on LJ. The movie is divided into several segments, so I'll try to tackle each one individually and describe what I thought was good and bad. Here I go!
[Spoiler (click to open)]
PART 1: Earth in the future
The first act introduced Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey, apologies for spelling!), the main character, and his children, son Tom and daughter Murphy. Earth's crops are slowly dying out, technology and science has been abandoned in favor of farming to conserve what food crops are left. Murphy encounters a mysterious 'ghost' she claims is sending her messages that lead her and Cooper to contact a secret NASA mission to find a habitable planet to relocate humanity to. Cooper agrees to go, but the mission will take years and his family will be left behind, which results in a huge fight and his daughter effectively disowning him because she says the "ghost" is sending messages that Cooper has to stay.
PROS: The first act does a good job setting up the desperate situation humanity has gotten into, and why the later space mission is so important.
CONS: However, the first act is also...heavy-handed. I am a big proponent of space exploration AND environmental conservation, but I felt the message "Abusing environment bad! Anti-intellectualism bad!" was over-emphasized. There are repeated "documentary clips" shown with fictional interviewees telling us how bad the situation is in case we can't figure it out from the movie itself. Plus, the anti-intellectual school officials are cartoonishly bad and stupid. They reminded me of a similar problem I had with the awful film "The Happening"-which tried to send a valid message about the importance of the environment, but ended up discrediting its own message because of the ham-handed portrayal of the characters.
Also, I'll just give something away right here: The 'ghost' subplot gave away the entire movie for me. Five minutes into the introduction of the "ghost" I said: "Oh great. This is going to be a bad time-travel story and the 'ghost' is Cooper trying to reach Murphy from the future with an important message." It turned out I was right, and this subplot was, to me, the worst part of the movie. Mainly because I had to spend three hours waiting for my guess to play out. (More on this to come!)
Anyway, onwards!
PART 2: Miller's Planet
The NASA program's leader, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), tells Cooper that a decade past, NASA sent several astronauts on one-way solo trips through the Saturn wormhole...and signals are coming from survivors reporting three possible planets that may work for colonization. Cooper is asked to lead a follow-up expedition (he's the only trained space pilot left on Earth) which will determine if any of the three planets can be colonized and rescue any survivors from the first mission. Brand tells Cooper NASA is building an "ark ship" to get the remaining human population off Earth, but needs to finalize the math for the drive system. In the event of failure, Cooper's ship will carry frozen embryos that can be used to start a colony if the "ark ship" can't be completed in time.
The crew consists of Cooper, Brand's daughter Amelia, two other scientists and two ex-military AI robots, TARS and CASE (which turn out to be funny, interesting characters themselves.). The ship heads through the wormhole and explores the first planet near the black hole. Planet one looks promising and is covered in a shallow ocean of liquid water (about three feet deep). The bad news? It's in the black hole's gravity field, and relativity effects mean that if the team goes down there, every hour on the planet equals seven years passing on Earth...which is already running out of time. Because Miller, the astronaut from the first expedition, is transmitting a signal that the planet is a good prospect, the team goes down...and find's the wreckage of Miller's destroyed ship, still mostly intact, a short time later. In my favorite sequence, the horrified crew realizes that what they thought were distant mountains are mile-high tidal waves generated by the gravitational anomalies coming at them and the landing craft is damaged, with one astronaut killed. It takes three hours to get back to orbit, by which time 23 years have passed on Earth. Cooper and his team can't figure out what happened...until they realize that the relativity effects mean Miller must have landed, transmitted an initial signal, and been killed by a wave like they almost were-and because of time distortion, while a decade passed before Earth got the message, on the target planet only an hour or so passed between the time Miller was killed and Cooper's team arriving and landing. Yikes.
PROS: This was my favorite part of the movie. I've read claims that the science of the water planet's gravity and relativity effects are a little hinky in online articles, but the creepiness of the scenes where they find Miller's wrecked ship just before the planet's weird forces nearly wipe them out are very suspenseful. A great way of showing how dangerous the unknown could be in future space exploration. But...
CONS: There's also some things that make no sense. Why does the crew never orbit any of these planets and take readings there to find out what the surface is like? Why does Amelia (Anne Hathaway's character) insist on grabbing Miller's recording data when they are all about to be killed by mile-high tidal waves? (It's pretty darn clear the planet ISN'T SUITABLE!)
Part Three: Matt Damon's Planet, or Where The Movie Started To Unravel Big-Time For Tanuki
After the Miller's Planet disaster, the crew must make a choice. They spent too much fuel escaping, so they can only get to one of the two remaining targets and return to Earth. Both targets may be habitable and have surviving astronauts marooned there and are outside the relativity distortion effect. A is sending detailed messages confirming a survivor, B is sending automated messages. Amelia wants B because the astronaut sent to B was her boyfriend, but the rest of the crew outvote her and opt for A, because the astronaut on A was Dr. Mann, leader of the first mission and the most experienced astronaut.
Mann's planet is a frozen wasteland. Upon landing, the team find him alive (and he's Matt Damon!) in cryogenic suspended animation. They revive him and he tells them how grateful he is and that the planet is suitable for colonization, and he'll take them around. But just then a message comes through from Cooper's daughter, now an adult physicist. She reveals that Amelia's father has died on Earth...and on his deathbed he admitted that the entire "Ark Ship" plan was a fraud designed to get cooperation from Earth's governments. There is no chance of saving anyone on Earth. Mann, who knew about the plan, corroborates this: The space drive equation can't be solved without data from inside the black hole itself, so the only way to keep humanity from extinction is the frozen embryo plan. Cooper and Amelia are furious. Cooper announces he will help set up the colony on Mann's world, then take the ship home to be with his family for whatever time is left.
So yeah, that's great. Cooper and Mann go off to check the habitable areas, and then we get DA BIG REVEAL, duh duh duhhhhnnnn....the planet isn't habitable! Mann lied and sent false data, because he was desperate for a way off the planet and couldn't take being alone! Oh, but wait, there's more...he's gone crazy and wants to complete the mission himself and be a hero, so before sending the signal, he set traps to kill his rescuers after which he will steal their ship and travel to the final target planet with the embryos and save Mankind! His trap kills another crew member, but Amelia saves Cooper. They chase him up to orbit, where Mann manages to blow himself up thanks to a mis-handled docking procedure, damaging the ship in the process.
PROS: Uh, none. It's a terrible segment that makes NO SENSE, unless you handwave it with, "Well Matt Damon was just insane!" Mann wants to be rescued, so he sends a fake signal...but rigs his shelter to explode when a human accesses certain equipment? How could he know any rescuers wouldn't trip the trap before trying to wake him up? Why didn't he simply try to get the crew to go ahead with the embryo plan on Planet 3 without trying to kill everyone? It's obvious that he doesn't know how to pilot Cooper and Amelia's ship in the chase scene. Gaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!
And also...how horrible is it that Professor Brand simply gave up decades ago trying to find a way to save Mankind, and lied to Cooper (resulting in Coop being cut off from his family for decades) in order to convince Cooper to pilot the mission?) There's some exposition on how the needs of mankind take precedence over the needs of individuals, which frankly I found creepy and horrible and too similar to the horrid anti-science school officials in the first act, ironically enough. Eeeuuuggh. Anyway. On to...
Part Four: The Black Hole, or where things TOTALLY fell apart for Tanuki
With the ship damaged, Cooper and Amelia decide on an emergency plan: Using Mann's salvaged landing craft hooked up to their ship for extra thrust, they will slingshot around the black hole's gravity well in order to get to Planet Three, the only possible option left. The robot crewman TARS agrees to be dropped into the black hole on the outside chance that he can transmit enough data on the black hole to Earth for Murphy to actually be able to perfect the ark drive equation. Everything goes as planned, but then Coop reveals that they need to lose more mass to get through, and detaches the lander with himself in it to allow Brand to reach Target Three, find her boyfriend, and complete the mission. He and robot TARS fall into the black hole, the ship comes apart around Coop, who prepares to die...
...brace yourselves for a major "WHAT THE HOOEY" moment...
...and suddenly Cooper is floating in the middle of, um a room in his house on Earth behind his daughter's bookshelf. TARS starts transmitting and tells Coop (brace for it)...
...Apparently the Saturn wormhole was created by Fifth-Dimensional Space Aliens with FEENOMENAL COSMIC POWAH and they've sent Cooper to his daughter's bedroom thirty years ago so he can influence humanity's survival! Oh wait, no it's not...Cooper says it's not aliens, it Fifth-Dimensional Super Time-Travel Future Humans with FEENOMENAL COSMIC POWAH and they've sent Cooper to his daughter's bedroom thirty years ago so he can influence humanity's survival! It is never clarified in the story who the (bleep!) these mysterious Deus Ex Machina time travelers are.
Anyway. Cooper spends the next twenty minutes of the film crawling around the bookshelves sending messages to his daughter (Remember what I said about Part One?), crying, and trying to change the past by telling his past self to "Stay." (Arrrrrggggggh). Then he accepts he can't change the past and uses gravity manipulation to make an analog windup watch he gave his daughter before he left wiggle in Morse Code to transmit the complex black hole data TARS found to Murphy so she can finish the ark ship drive equations. (Morse Code? For physics equations? With gravity waves? Arrrrrrggggh!!!!) So he pulls this off, the room dissolves, and suddenly he's floating in space around Saturn where a ship is conveniently right there to pick him and TARS up. Turns out the Space Future Deus Ex Machina Future Humanaliens have deposited him 90 years in the future right next to the functional Space Ark, where all humanity is living quite comfortably and he finally reunites with his 124-year-old daughter, whose separation from him is a huge plot point for the entire film, for TWO FREAKING MINUTES during which she tells him. "Hi Dad. Glad you're here. Welp, time for me to die, you get along now and go take a ship through the wormhole and find Amelia." Oh, did I mention that the move ends revealing Amelia alone on Target Three BURYING HER POOR DEAD BOYFRIEND. THE END.
Pros: NONE
Cons: I could write an entire post on how preposterous I found this ending to be, but I'll just sum up with the Chewbacca defense from "South Park": IT. JUST. DOESN'T. MAKE. SENSE.
The movie falls apart so badly in the final act that I'm baffled. It leaves me with so many questions:
1. If the Future Deux Ex Machina People can open wormholes to other galaxies to help Mankind, why not simply send a space package to Earth that says "Hi guys! Here's some super future technology to fix your crops!"
2. Or transmit the math so Brand or Murphy could solve the freaking gravity equation and get everyone off the planet?
3. Or basically, do ANYTHING more helpful than what they did?
4. If the only issue with the Space Ark was the drive system (it's shown to be a giant O'Neill cylinder colony, basically), why couldn't Earth simply construct O'Neill colonies in stable positions at Earth's Lagrange points and move everyone up there?
5. Someone else pointed this out in a review: Earth is shown to have incredibly capable, durable AI robots. Why not send them through the wormhole first to explore the planets? They may not be as adaptable but they would require significantly less resources-no food, oxygen, water, etc.
6. But if NASA felt that humans were required, why send ONE person on a no-return trip to each world? Why not send at least two? It seems to me that a contributing factor to the disastrous results of the first mission was that each astronaut was alone. (Though Mann was shown to have a non-functional robot with him, it's true.)
Also, I found the underlying message of the movie kind of ugly. The movie claims to be about how important love of family is and how science can save humanity-but the most prominent scientists in the movie (Prof. Brand and Mann) deliberately falsify their results and lie to manipulate people-something that is considered incredibly unethical in science. The message I came away with was, "It's OK to lie and manipulate and do horrible things to people. Just make sure you're a scientist. Because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
YUCK! Needless to say, I do not agree with that message.
I think what ultimately bothered me the most about this movie was that, to me, it deliberately sabotaged the story it was trying to tell. It's trying to be a movie that promotes the realism of its sci-fi concepts, but relies on poorly thought-out, preposterous plot twists to conclude its story. It's supposed to be about how the human drive to learn and explore will benefit humanity-but it turns out that's not what saves humanity; it's a Deus Ex Machina sent by aliens/future humans who are never explained but simply handwaved into the story. It's supposed to be a film about the nobility and positive benefits of science-but its leading scientists are show to be selfish, dishonest and rather vile people.
Gahhh. It's just too much nonsense. The deux ex machina ending just unraveled the whole movie for me, despite its positive qualities. Now I really want to watch a movie that actually shows science and scientists in a good way. Like "Big Hero 6."