For scifi book/film/tv shows there is a level of 'suspension of belief' to not get too caught up in the minor things. Of course when it is blatant it just kills it.
I think it can be important to distinguish between "
hard science fiction" and science fantasy (or space operas, space westerns, soft science fiction, etc).
Criticizing the science behind plot elements in a hard sci-fi tends to be a lot more legitimate of a criticism than doing so in a science fantasy setting. When the creators of the sci-fi want you to intentionally feel that "this is a plausible future and these are the plausible consequences of these scientific advancements," the liberties taken with the science can more easily pierce the suspension of disbelief. Now obviously those criticisms have to be balanced against narratives and production needs. For instance, take The Martian. The whole premise of The Martian rests upon the windstorm at the beginning of the movie, yet the atmosphere on Mars is so thin compared to Earth that a windstorm would never have enough force to violently destroy their settlement and threaten to knock over their lander the way it does. It's a pretty significant scientific error in an otherwise pretty darn accurate movie. But, there wouldn't have been much of a plot without it. Similarly, how basically every movie lights space helmets is wrong (internal lighting would essentially blind the people in the suits), but the audience would struggle to see the actors without it, so it's worthy of a pass.
Bore us, please. Ain't much else to talk about these days.
I think most space/sci fi movies get most things wrong technically... I think The Martian with Matt Damon was one of the more technically accurate ones and even it was full of tech liberties.
Besides the simple impossibility of a "warp drive" like Star Trek and Star Wars rely on, one of my favorites is astronauts in open space with their face perfectly visible under the bubble glass of their helmets as if radiation in space just doesn't exist.
To start off, here's Chris Hadfield's take on a bunch of sci-fi. For Interstellar, he predominantly focused on the third act (where it's transitioned away from hard sci-fi to a softer take on what could happen inside of a black hole).
But my gripes (which aren't to say it's a bad movie, they're just gripes) are more with a few moments in the first couple acts in which the crew is taking time to explain the "science" of orbital mechanics/maneuvers, only for the following scenes to ignore those orbital mechanics.
For example, this scene is probably the worst offender.
During this scene, they realize they cannot get close to "Miller's Planet" due to the time dilation caused by its proximity to the black hole. So they instead opt to orbit the black hole at a greater distance, send a lander down, and then return (as diagrammed on the board there). All that is well and fine. However, during the landing mission, they get held up, and they eventually return later than planned (which results in a 23 year difference compared to orbit due to time dilation). The issue is that the spacecraft couldn't have been in the same place 23 years later. That's not how orbits work. In order for the spacecraft to be orbiting from a larger distance away from the black hole than the planet, it would have have to been moving much slower (the larger the orbit, the slower the orbital velocity). It's why Jupiter takes 12 times as long to rotate around our Sun than the Earth does, because it's orbiting from much further away. So in order for the spacecraft to be in the right position for the lander to return to, they would have either had to be incredibly lucky with the orbital periods (something that would have incredibly low odds, given that they didn't plan for the trip extension) or the spacecraft would have had to be burning fuel for that entire 23 year period (something that also wouldn't have worked with other plot points in the movie, as fuel is set up as a limited resource). The one remaining possibility is if they had "parked" the craft at the
L2 Lagrange Point. However, this doesn't work with the time dilation plot point, since Lagrange points exist at points of equilibrium between the gravity of the larger bodies, and thus there would have been extreme amounts of gravity from the black hole at L2 (and thus extreme amounts of time dilation relative to Earth).
It's one of those things that's pretty easy to overlook and move on from, but when they have a scene explicitly to set up the science of a plot point only to get the science wrong, it's kinda frustrating.
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