The Committee to Nuke Elysium

For those readers who didn’t like Interstellar or for those totally on-point scientists like Phil Plait who had all sorts of science problems with the film, let’s have a truce: if you’re predisposed to like Interstellar but you didn’t like it because the plot was too confusing, or it was too long, or the movie was too pretentious, or the maths were all over the place, or whatever, I hear you and might even agree with you a bit. This is not about that. This is about representation of what was an attempt to make an epic and thoughtful science fiction film dealing with the importance of space travel as it relates to the preservation of the human race generations and generations from now and as it relates to our motivations on an individual level…

I’ve ranted about this in more detail a few summers ago for The Awl, but my essential assertion is this: too many big Hollywood science fiction movies—even the good ones—present the science fiction element as the conflict to be overcome, which subtly creates a tendency in the genre of sci-fi movies to pit the “human element” against “the sci-fi element.“ As the Doctor said in the most recent Doctor Who special, “There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive.” From killer robots (in every popular robot movie ever except Pacific Rim) to being trapped in space until Sandra Bullock barks like a dog, to even the bizarre ending of Battlestar Galactica where the big message is to stop using computers and start farming again, there’s an almost pre-programmed knee-jerk reaction to make sci-fi stuff the enemy in your sci-fi movie. It’s hard to work against, and I really don’t blame anybody, but as I’ve pointed out before, Gravity isn’t really an interesting movie, and doesn’t really get people excited about space travel…

This is an epic film about the dangers of scientific ignorance and the hard pill to swallow that survival of the human race—IN GENERAL—has to be thought of in terms of multiple generations.