The Black Hole Visuals In Christopher Nolan’s $759M Oscar-Nominated Sci-Fi Movie Called “One Of The Most Accurate Depictions Of The Environment” By Expert, Who Gives It A Near-Perfect Score

Christopher Nolan has created some impressive universes over the course of his filmmaking career. These worlds can stem from both the real-world and the sci-fi space, as Nolan has honed his ability to create an epic whether its story originates in fact or fiction. Starting with his Oscar-nominated 2000 breakout film Memento, one of Nolan’s signature elements is his interest in time. Memento sees its story told in reverse, while movies like Dunkirk find drama in showing multiple intersecting timelines. While this is not featured in every Nolan movie, it is a noticeable trend throughout his filmography.

In addition to experimenting with time, Nolan’s films also deal with complex themes. His 2010 hit Inception, for example, explored the idea of dreams and how they could be manipulated. His Best Picture winner Oppenheimer explored the life of a historical physicist while also unpacking deep moral issues about the ethical fallout of what happens when a major scientific development causes the loss of human life. Now, one of Nolan’s notable sci-fi movies is unpacked by an expert, who praises the visual elements of one of its key devices.

An Expert Breaks Down Interstellar’s Black Hole Visuals

The Accuracy Is Impressive

An expert speaks about the black holes in Intersellar. The 2014 sci-fi movie tells the story of a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who re-enters space exploration in order to help locate a new planet for humans when Earth becomes uninhabitable. The film features a leading cast including McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Jessica Chastain, and a young Timothée Chalamet. Interstellar made over $758 million at the box office, and ultimately ended up as one of Nolan’s lower-rated films in terms of Rotten Tomatoes score, getting a 73%.

Speaking with Insider, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter discusses Interstellar‘s black hole visuals, giving them a high accuracy rating. Sutter said there is “so much good science in the black hole image,” noting how well Nolan’s film maps the behavior of light in relation to a black hole. The expert also explains how Newton’s third law impacts how Cooper is acting in the key black hole scene. Ultimately, he gave Interstellar‘s black hole accuracy a 9 out of 10. Check out the full quote from Sutter below:

So much good science in the black hole image. Light follows the curves, the hills and valleys of spacetime. And these curves are set by massive objects. This is one of the earliest tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity. And black holes bend space a lot, and so what we are seeing is there’s a thing disk called an an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. But if you’re standing on one side of the black hole, light from the back end — which normally you wouldn’t see because you know, black hole in the way — there’s light that’s going up this way but then gets bent and curves right to you.

Newton’s third law is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And this is in the fundamental basis for space travel. We push against the air to get our airplanes to go. But in space there’s no ground, there’s no air. So we can only push against ourselves. If we throw something away from us, that propels us in the equal and opposite direction. So what I think he’s going for, old Cooper, is to get him away from that orbit, if he pushes something towards the black hole, that will nudge the spacecraft away from that orbit, and give it a safe escape.

The event horizon is the one way barrier. This is the edge of the black hole. This is the point of no return. That if you cross the event horizon, that gravity is so strong, that nothing, not even light can escape.

When Cooper first falls through the black hole, then he goes ‘oh, everything’s black.’ No, like you’re not the only thing falling into a black hole. There’s light from the entire rest of the universe that’s falling in with you. For a supermassive black hole like this, like Gargantua in the movie, you’ve got a handful of seconds from the moment you cross the event horizon to the time you hit the singularity.

That was an incredibly accurate depiction. In fact, it is one of the most accurate depictions of the environment around a black hole ever made. I would give it a 9. Okay a point off because it is not actually dark in there. But honestly, we don’t know what actually happens inside of a black hole, so that’s fair game.

What This Means For Interstellar

Interstellar Was Highly Scientific

Working with physicists and other scientists was notably a huge piece of making Interstellar. Sutter’s glowing review of the black hole element of the film shows how some of this hard work paid off. While there is definitely some conjecture and science-fiction guessing in Interstellar, Nolan and his team did their best to create a film that honors its scientific origins. What results is the film that is the most scientific of all the director’s forays into the science-fiction field. While Nolan can have high-concept movies, he is primarily a visual story teller and uses those talents to great effect when visually creating a black hole.

That said, not all of Interstellar has been taken to be factually accurate over the years. At the time of its release, the movie’s accuracy was highly scrutinized. The biggest liberty that Interstellar takes is assuming that one could ever survive going into a black hole. This is plot-crucial to Cooper’s ending in the Nolan film, but the experts tend to believe that one would be immediately killed, their body destroyed by the black hole’s gravitational pull. On a scientific level, this flies in the face of the ending’s accuracy.

Our Take On The Interstellar Accuracy Evaluation

Interstellar Is Impressive Within Nolan’s Career

Despite some stated inaccuracies in the ending, it is fascinating to me that the movie manages to render even some of the black hole elements with impressive accuracy, such as the behavior of light that Sutter describes. Like many intergalactic topics, black holes can be incredibly difficult for the layperson to visualize, as there are no spacecraft in real life that can travel anywhere close to Interstellar-like speeds in order to explore multiple galaxies. As such, it is interesting for audiences to be able to get a space movie that even comes close to mimicking what scientists have observed.

This accuracy elevates Nolan’s Interstellar‘s quality beyond its initial perception, which while still receiving overall positive reviews, did not reach the height of some of the auterus other works. Looking at the director’s career trajectory, it is fascinating to see how, nearly a decade later, he went from physicist-informed science fiction to winning an Oscar for a movie about a real-life physicist. While Nolan will depart from these themes in his next film, The Odyssey, it will be interesting to see how his career might circle back to complex science topics in the future.

Source: Insider

Movie

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Interstellar

7/10

Release Date

November 7, 2014

Runtime

169 Minutes