Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[Nuke]

5 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

The Science of Interstellar explains that the Ranger would have performed gravity assists around numerous neutron stars, and this is evident in the early scripts. Of course, this just padded the runtime that could better be spent on looking at the characters, the real meat of any story.

black holes and neutron stars? and were expected to colonize this system? bakes dealing with a simple blight seem a lot easier. 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Nuke

[lrd.Helmet]

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

black holes and neutron stars? and were expected to colonize this system? bakes dealing with a simple blight seem a lot easier. 

Whether it's easier or not doesn't mean the science is bad. Saying the science of interstellar is bad is just wrong, of course in a movie some things get stretched or a bit illogical for sake of telling a story. And you can dislike the story all you want, but the science isn't bad. It has the most accurate rendering of a black hole for crying out loud. There have been done scientific studies using it's simulation. Just because some of you don't like the story, the soundtrack of just want to be contrarian, doesn't mean the science is wrong.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

a simple blight

The Blight is some weird alien organism that is destroying the Earth's atmosphere. As usual, 90% of the key context comes in tie-in contact so that "real fans" can be patronizing towards the critics.

No, fighting the Blight is still far, far easier and wouldn't require NASA to turn into a secret conspiracy.

[tater]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The Science of Interstellar explains that the Ranger would have performed gravity assists around numerous neutron stars, and this is evident in the early scripts. Of course, this just padded the runtime that could better be spent on looking at the characters, the real meat of any story.

As I said on page 1 of this thread, the plot would have made far, far more sense minus the black hole entirely. Use a distant binary system. Travel time alone (with even pretty scifi capable near future spacecraft) would be enough to generate the desired time issues for the ticking time bomb plot.

 

20 hours ago, Nuke said:

i admit the plot was a little bit contrived. i feel like they could have solved their food shortage by growing it hydroponically under environmentally controlled conditions. they could have solved their problems without leaving the planet. i also have problems with taking the same soil the same air and the same seed stock, stick it in a concrete centrifuge and get it into space off screen with gravity magic. how do you make that work and not a terrestrial biosphere. and their space ships were op, wonder why they hadnt bothered colonizing mars or the moon. still it was worth watching. 

It was not worth watching, IMO, I was bashing it as I watched alone in real time.

As I just said, the black hole thing was an unforced error. It made the first world they visited pointless (no need to even consider that planet, it's a deathtrap just because of the position relative to the black hole). It also resulted in the complete BS dropping into the black hole part. Ignoring the relativistic issues WRT time (an odd thing to ignore, since it's a critical part of the plot until THAT point), they had a simple solution right at hand—a stargate.

I thought if this while watching it.

Find stargate, Earth is facing some catastrophe. Travel to Saturn takes years, stargate is instant to other system, but other system is a distant binary star system (assuming there is any reason to even do that for plot), so travel within that system will also take many years and involve trade offs... explore this group of planets, or THAT group of planets? So far all is pretty much the same. Also, there is no black hole, because settling around a black hole is STUPID and a nonstarter, but the magical love BS can be within the stargate (one on each end of the trip). It's a plot device that I won't think, "he just fell into a black hole, he's dead" I think, "he fell into a stargate, and that can work however they want it to work" (since you have to accept that plot device to get this far anyway).

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by tater

[Bej Kerman]

22 minutes ago, tater said:

As I said on page 1 of this thread, the plot would have made far, far more sense minus the black hole entirely. Use a distant binary system. Travel time alone (with even pretty scifi capable near future spacecraft) would be enough to generate the desired time issues for the ticking time bomb plot.

 

It was not worth watching, IMO, I was bashing it as I watched alone in real time.

As I just said, the black hole thing was an unforced error. It made the first world they visited pointless (no need to even consider that planet, it's a deathtrap just because of the position relative to the black hole). It also resulted in the complete BS dropping into the black hole part. Ignoring the relativistic issues WRT time (an odd thing to ignore, since it's a critical part of the plot until THAT point), they had a simple solution right at hand—a stargate.

I thought if this while watching it.

Find stargate, Earth is facing some catastrophe. Travel to Saturn takes years, stargate is instant to other system, but other system is a distant binary star system (assuming there is any reason to even do that for plot), so travel within that system will also take many years and involve trade offs... explore this group of planets, or THAT group of planets? So far all is pretty much the same. Also, there is no black hole, because settling around a black hole is STUPID and a nonstarter, but the magical love BS can be within the stargate (one on each end of the trip). It's a plot device that I won't think, "he just fell into a black hole, he's dead" I think, "he fell into a stargate, and that can work however they want it to work" (since you have to accept that plot device to get this far anyway).

Doesn't matter, it's still fun 

[tater]

13 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Doesn't matter, it's still fun 

If you had fun watching it, I'm glad your 2-whatever hours were not wasted. I hated it. I think I threw the bluray out, actually. Or put it in a donate bag.

[Bej Kerman]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

If you had fun watching it, I'm glad your 2-whatever hours were not wasted. I hated it. I think I threw the bluray out, actually. Or put it in a donate bag.

I think I know a film you might like 

Jokes aside, getting outright irritated because something didn't align with reality was something I grew out of, and something I regret. I hope you, one day, can enjoy media and not end up spilling paragraphs just because the writers took advantage of the fact that it's fiction and would rather spend time making a good story to build off of than waste time making everything perfect (assuming you can base the quality e.g. 'perfect' off of something on its scientific accuracy, which you can't) - a writer only has so much time to focus on pointless details like how many gravity assists a lander has to make before it can meet a planet 

2 hours ago, lrd.Helmet said:

Whether it's easier or not doesn't mean the science is bad. Saying the science of interstellar is bad is just wrong, of course in a movie some things get stretched or a bit illogical for sake of telling a story. And you can dislike the story all you want, but the science isn't bad. It has the most accurate rendering of a black hole for crying out loud. There have been done scientific studies using it's simulation. Just because some of you don't like the story, the soundtrack of just want to be contrarian, doesn't mean the science is wrong.

Exactly this - it's one thing to say "in my opinion, this could have been done differently". It's another to tell other people "this movie is bad because this rocket did something using dV it had" - it's the scientific accuracy equivalent of someone who works on continuity getting riled up because of something inconsequential like a character's necklace disappearing between scenes. Also worth noting that scientific accuracy doesn't have to be taken to the extreme. Obviously Interstellar demonstrated that you can have scientific accuracy to make the world feel richer, but not take it all the way because at a point the accuracy begins to mess with the story being told.

On that note, The Expanse (TV) is bad and no-one can convince me otherwise - shoulda spent the time and money budgets fleshing out the characters instead of trying to shoehorn scientific accuracy in a show that got stargates anyway

Edited January 13, 2023 by Bej Kerman
last paragraph is /s - I think it's bad, but obviously scientific accuracy and good character development aren't mutually exclusive.

[kerbiloid]

A conspiracny theory suggestion:

The aliens created that wormhole near Saturn to escape from the dying Gargantua system to the safe green oasis of Earth.

[tater]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Jokes aside, getting outright irritated because something didn't align with reality was something I grew out of, and something I regret. I hope you, one day, can enjoy media and not end up spilling paragraphs just because the writers took advantage of the fact that it's fiction and would rather spend time making a good story to build off of than waste time making everything perfect (assuming you can base the quality e.g. 'perfect' off of something on its scientific accuracy, which you can't) - a writer only has so much time to focus on pointless details like how many gravity assists a lander has to make before it can meet a planet 

1. It wasn't a good story. That's the first failure, telling a bad story, poorly. Even had I watched it as just space opera, it was completely uncompelling to me, my first thought after getting a ways into it was that I didn't care about any of the characters at all.

2. If it was original Star Wars—which I saw in the theater when it first came out in the 70s—I would judge it as the space opera it would be, just as I enjoy reading Iain M. Banks for the space opera it is. Spacey, fantasy with good stories and interesting ideas explored. See #1, I hated the plot/character/etc.

3. It was advertised with a lot of effort and $$$ as being "hard" SF. Much science. Such wow. Other reviewers (at "space" news websites, etc) similarly talked it up, how awesome the science was, etc. By pushing that in their PR and review narratives, they primed me to pay particular attention to the science/engineering aspects (which were abject fails at every turn, except maybe the render of the black hole).

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

On that note, The Expanse (TV) is bad and no-one can convince me otherwise - shoulda spent the time and money budgets fleshing out the characters instead of trying to shoehorn scientific accuracy in a show that got stargates anyway

Edited 2 hours ago by Bej Kerman
last paragraph is /s - I think it's bad, but obviously scientific accuracy and good character development aren't mutually exclusive.

I bailed on the Expanse when it was being broadcast because I saw a few shows with gaps, and not always in the right order—I saw the one with the zombie-looking people, assumed it was space zombies, and stopped bothering. A friend convinced me to watch it again, and the random episode I watched was the one with the gravity slingshot... and I turned it off while watching that because it was so stupid. Later I ended up watching it in order, and actually liked it, though the slingshot was cringe level stupid, and some of the other orbital mechanics were really, really stupid (watching some sort of missiles (rail gun projectiles?) moving across the solar system on a display in real time—I ended up liking it because the characters were compelling.

So while I would agree that the Expanse fell down needlessly on some of the hard scifi aspects (easiest hack is to simply show the passage of time in things like the slingshot episode... have his beard grow out as the maneuvers end up taking months, not minutes), it won by being great storytelling.

Edited January 13, 2023 by tater

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

A conspiracny theory suggestion:

The aliens created that wormhole near Saturn to escape from the dying Gargantua system to the safe green oasis of Earth.

2 minutes ago, tater said:

1. It wasn't a good story. That's the first failure, telling a bad story, poorly. Even if just space opera, it was completely uncompelling to me, my first thought after getting a ways into it was that I didn't care about any of the characters at all.

Well, I guess that's just your opinion. Still, the plot was clear and straight-forward, especially compared to the extremely weird early scripts. In my opinion, Nolan made a fantastic piece from what would have otherwise been a flop.

5 minutes ago, tater said:

2. If it was original Star Wars—which I saw in the theater when it first came out in the 70s—I would judge it as the space opera it would be, just as I enjoy reading Iain M. Banks for the space opera it is. Spacey, fantasy with good stories and interesting ideas explored.

3. It was advertised with a lot of effort and $$$ as being "hard" SF. Much science. Such wow. Other reviewers (at "space" news websites, etc) similarly talked it up, how awesome the science was, etc. By pushing that in their PR and review narratives, they primed me to pay particular attention to the science/engineering aspects (which were abject fails at every turn, except maybe the render of the black hole).

Nothing is specifically soft or hard sci-fi, it's a scale. Interstellar clearly acknowledges many hard sci-fi things, but makes leeway for the story. Not wasting time on neutron star flings so that time could be made to explore the dynamics of Cooper's family and also his fellow crewmembers is one example of that. Just because the black hole rendering was realistic doesn't mean it has to reflect everywhere else, just as the Expanse has stargates, and Epstein drives that work in ways the show refuses to elaborate on, alongside actually plausible things. You could handwave problems like heat and propulsion in your ship designs but still focus on things like orbital mechanics, populating your world with cyclers and considering the stability of the systems you come up with. As I said, it's a scale. Nothing's automatically good or bad just because it leans hard to the left or right, like Star Wars or Children of a Dead Earth, example. Interstellar leans hard hence the focus on just that from reviews et al, but it can't be expected to hold 100% realism all the way through.

20 minutes ago, tater said:

So while I would agree that the Expanse fell down needlessly on some of the hard scifi aspects (easiest hack is to simply show the passage of time in things like the slingshot episode... have his beard grow out as the maneuvers end up taking months, not minutes), it won by being great storytelling.

In my opinion, Planet Express was a less dysfunctional crew. Any self-respecting company with a state-of-the-art spaceship under their name wouldn't have put the crew of the Rocinante in charge of the on-board coffee machine

[Nuke]

5 hours ago, lrd.Helmet said:

Whether it's easier or not doesn't mean the science is bad. Saying the science of interstellar is bad is just wrong, of course in a movie some things get stretched or a bit illogical for sake of telling a story. And you can dislike the story all you want, but the science isn't bad. It has the most accurate rendering of a black hole for crying out loud. There have been done scientific studies using it's simulation. Just because some of you don't like the story, the soundtrack of just want to be contrarian, doesn't mean the science is wrong.

i mean it is a movie, and i did enjoy the movie. though its fun to go back and deconstruct it for realism. we all did the same thing with the expanse, and we still love the show.  you can hit perfect science accuracy in a few things and end up missing a whole lot of others. they need an existential crisis to drive the plot so combined dust bowl and potato famine kind of does the trick. only in retrospect does it feel a little bit contrived. 

4 hours ago, DDE said:

The Blight is some weird alien organism that is destroying the Earth's atmosphere. As usual, 90% of the key context comes in tie-in contact so that "real fans" can be patronizing towards the critics.

No, fighting the Blight is still far, far easier and wouldn't require NASA to turn into a secret conspiracy.

is there like an extended cut or something that i didnt see?

Edited January 13, 2023 by Nuke

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

On that note, The Expanse (TV) is bad and no-one can convince me otherwise - shoulda spent the time and money budgets fleshing out the characters instead of trying to shoehorn scientific accuracy in a show that got stargates anyway

the tv show could have been better with respect towards the books. the books were excellent. but because the show had so many bumps along the way. syfy dumping it, then amazon picking it up, alex getting canceled, and covid causing the final season to be way too short. it suffered from pacing issues too. spent way too much time on book 2 and not enough time on book 3. the books fleshed out the characters pretty well, and i would have not bothered to read them if the first couple seasons didnt wow me. 

[tater]

31 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Well, I guess that's just your opinion. Still, the plot was clear and straight-forward, especially compared to the extremely weird early scripts. In my opinion, Nolan made a fantastic piece from what would have otherwise been a flop.

The entire premise was garbage from the start IMO. If you have the tech to move a meaningful (or even just sufficient) fraction of the Earth's pop to a new world that requires at bare min the cargo/energy/dv of a round trip to Saturn, the problem is already solved without needing the worlds on the other end of the stargate. I'll never know anything about "early scripts" since—why would I?

38 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Nothing is specifically soft or hard sci-fi, it's a scale.

So what? It was talked up as being super realistic. I recall reading a bunch about it (avoiding spoilers).

38 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Interstellar clearly acknowledges many hard sci-fi things, but makes leeway for the story. Not wasting time on neutron star flings so that time could be made to explore the dynamics of Cooper's family and also his fellow crewmembers is one example of that.

There was no reason to have the black hole at all.

In our system there was a stargate. Make the other side a stargate. All the problems are then solved. The time difference then doesn't even need to be subjective (unless you want relativistic spaceships), it can just be the time it takes to move around the other star system (as I said, a distant binary would do nicely as it increases travel times without making a total mess of a couple Goldilocks zones (presenting an A, then B, or just B, etc choice branch with time as the constraint).

 

38 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Just because the black hole rendering was realistic doesn't mean it has to reflect everywhere else, just as the Expanse has stargates, and Epstein drives that work in ways the show refuses to elaborate on, alongside actually plausible things. You could handwave problems like heat and propulsion in your ship designs but still focus on things like orbital mechanics, populating your world with cyclers and considering the stability of the systems you come up with. As I said, it's a scale. Nothing's automatically good or bad just because it leans hard to the left or right, like Star Wars or Children of a Dead Earth, example. Interstellar leans hard hence the focus on just that from reviews et al, but it can't be expected to hold 100% realism all the way through.

I hated it as much as I hated Pearl Harbor (don't watch that, it's horrid, just watch Tora! Tora! Tora! instead)

[Bej Kerman]

5 minutes ago, tater said:

53 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Well, I guess that's just your opinion. Still, the plot was clear and straight-forward, especially compared to the extremely weird early scripts. In my opinion, Nolan made a fantastic piece from what would have otherwise been a flop.

The entire premise was garbage from the start IMO. If you have the tech to move a meaningful (or even just sufficient) fraction of the Earth's pop to a new world that requires at bare min the cargo/energy/dv of a round trip to Saturn, the problem is already solved without needing the worlds on the other end of the stargate. I'll never know anything about "early scripts" since—why would I?

The point was that by the time the Endurance came back, they'd have figured out the soft sci-fi propulsion method (HERESY!) they were looking for, which they manage in the end because of Cooper and Murph, hence the fact they got such a massive space station to Saturn.

8 minutes ago, tater said:

55 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Nothing is specifically soft or hard sci-fi, it's a scale.

So what? It was talked up as being super realistic. I recall reading a bunch about it (avoiding spoilers).

As I said, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to only be hard or soft, Children of a Dead Earth or Star Wars. Interstellar clearly went for a bit of both, evident from the ending and the massive exaggeration of time dilation (as IRL you'd barely notice the time difference unless you spent a much longer time on Miller's than Cooper et al spent). Lots of sci-fis go for something in the middle of the hard-soft spectrum and I can imagine they make you uncomfortable in the same way Interstellar does.

8 minutes ago, tater said:

There was no reason to have the black hole at all.

It's cool and if Interstellar went the boring route then everyone would still think of whirlpools when asked to imagine a black hole. Everyone knowing what a semi-realistic Schwarzschild black hole looks like is a win in my book.

10 minutes ago, tater said:

In our system there was a stargate. Make the other side a stargate. All the problems are then solved. The time difference then doesn't even need to be subjective (unless you want relativistic spaceships), it can just be the time it takes to move around the other star system (as I said, a distant binary would do nicely as it increases travel times without making a total mess of a couple Goldilocks zones (presenting an A, then B, or just B, etc choice branch with time as the constraint).

Not as cool

13 minutes ago, tater said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

(paraphrased because the original quote was massive, summed up for lurkers) Interstellar wasn't 100% hard sci-fi and it didn't need to be

I hated it

lol k

14 minutes ago, tater said:

...as much as I hated Pearl Harbor (don't watch that, it's horrid, just watch Tora! Tora! Tora! instead)

[Nuke]

26 minutes ago, tater said:

I hated it as much as I hated Pearl Harbor (don't watch that, it's horrid, just watch Tora! Tora! Tora! instead)

so much this. the latter does everything i like to see in a war movie. mainly showing both sides of the conflict. 

what was your opinion of ad astra? i think that movie was kind of disappointing, thats one i definitely felt like i wasted ten bucks and 2 hours on. lost me at exploding monkies. ended up having a really nihilistic message. felt like they should have just made a movie about moon pirates. 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Nuke

[tater]

21 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Not as cool

But falling into it and living is a nonstarter. Even with the black hole, he should have gone back via a stargate, anything else just stupid.

22 minutes ago, Nuke said:

what was your opinion of ad astra?

Never saw it. Think I watched the trailer and that alone had me give it a hard pass.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, tater said:

23 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Not as cool

But falling into it and living is a nonstarter. Even with the black hole, he should have gone back via a stargate, anything else just stupid.

...and?

I'd say it was a fairly solid ending. Tied the film together. Didn't need to be realistic.

[tater]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

...and?

I'd say it was a fairly solid ending. Tied the film together. Didn't need to be realistic.

They already introduced the stargate. Sloppy writing to not use it.

And yes, it needed to be realistic. If you have scifi that drops an astronaut into the sun with a spacesuit—he doesn't get to live, that breaks the movie, sorry. You could deorbit a spaceship, and the astronaut bails out in just a spacesuit—and lands on Earth, just fine? "Doesn't have to be realistic?"

Yeah, no. Lazy, crap writing.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, tater said:

And yes, it needed to be realistic

Nope. There's no authority that's going to arrest Nolan on the basis of "this piece of fiction didn't cater to my love and passion for realism for every second of its 2h30m runtime" - extra emphasis on fiction. It didn't need to be realistic, and it's the writer's choice if they go full hard, full soft, or go between. You can't just say something's bad because of its level of realism or its genre or its runtime, or something silly like that.

1 minute ago, tater said:

You could deorbit a spaceship, and the astronaut bails out in just a spacesuit—and lands on Earth, just fine? "Doesn't have to be realistic?"

Doctor Who did exactly that - it was a Series 7 episode, I believe. That episode had many flaws, and the Doctor surviving a fall from space in a spacesuit engineered to survive re-entry isn't one of them. And yet it went on to come out with an episode where the central premise was time dilation. Sorta proves my point that a piece of sci-fi media doesn't need to be an extremist in regards to realism.

[tater]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Nope. There's no authority that's going to arrest Nolan on the basis of "this piece of fiction didn't cater to my love and passion for realism for every second of its 2h30m runtime" - extra emphasis on fiction. It didn't need to be realistic, and it's the writer's choice if they go full hard, full soft, or go between. You can't just say something's bad because of its level of realism or its genre or its runtime, or something silly like that.

Nice straw man. I specifically claimed that some movies I watch as the fluff they are, and enjoy them based on the story/characters. My own take is my own take. Friends who watched it also hated it, so it's not just me. <shrug> YMMV. It's a garbage movie, I'd not rewatch it just to write more trenchant complaints even if you offered me $1000. I'd think about rewatching it for some meaningful amount of $ I suppose.

 

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Doctor Who did exactly that - it was a Series 7 episode, I believe. That episode had many flaws, and the Doctor surviving a fall from space in a spacesuit engineered to survive re-entry isn't one of them. And yet it went on to come out with an episode where the central premise was time dilation. Sorta proves my point that a piece of sci-fi media doesn't need to be an extremist in regards to realism.

Doctor Who is arguably the least realistic show that vaguely fits "Sci fi" at all. Time travel at all (except the usual forward moving time travel we all do) is always weak, and tends to break anything it is used in. Star Trek is a good example there, having added time travel at will, literally anything could be undone—and they should in many cases and don't (prime directive is a dumb hill for an entire society and billions/trillions of lives to die on when they could warp-whiplash back in time and kill whatever antagonist in the crib (borg, etc)).

[tater]

Nothing has to be realistic. If the plot actually revolves around certain elements of physics... then those better at least pass a "don't drop you out of the suspension of disbelief while watching" test. I was complaining (out loud, to myself, lol) in real time as I watched it.

Again, use the stargate as the magical bit (and stargates can take an arbitrarily set time to transit, because magic), and there's not reason to care much about physics, then it's 100% about the fantastic characterization and dialo... oh, wait, that was awful, too.

[Bej Kerman]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

18 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Nope. There's no authority that's going to arrest Nolan on the basis of "this piece of fiction didn't cater to my love and passion for realism for every second of its 2h30m runtime" - extra emphasis on fiction. It didn't need to be realistic, and it's the writer's choice if they go full hard, full soft, or go between. You can't just say something's bad because of its level of realism or its genre or its runtime, or something silly like that.

Nice straw man. I specifically claimed that some movies I watch as the fluff they are, and enjoy them based on the story/characters. My own take is my own take. Friends who watched it also hated it, so it's not just me.

I'd classify "And yes, it needed to be realistic" as gatekeeping, but as you said, YMMV. What I said still holds though, it's the writer's choice how far they go, even if internet people make trenchant complaints and insist it needs to be one way or the other. Realistic black holes don't need to be accompanied by ships that are more radiator than ship if the writer has better things to be doing or if they just don't want to get involved with that side of physics. IMO, compared to orbital mechanics, frame dragging around neutron stars, and all that exciting stuff, figuring out how many radiators a ship needs for what it's got is perhaps one of the more boring things one could be doing when developing a universe.

1 minute ago, tater said:

I was complaining (out loud, to myself, lol) in real time as I watched it.

People do that? Suppose it'd be harder to just enjoy something, I guess 

[tater]

12 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

People do that? Suppose it'd be harder to just enjoy something, I guess 

I enjoy lots of movies—just not lousy ones like Interstellar.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, tater said:

I enjoy lots of movies—just not lousy ones like Interstellar.

It's lousy in your opinion 

[tater]

13 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'd classify "And yes, it needed to be realistic" as gatekeeping, but as you said, YMMV.

Only because he did a movie where particular elements of realism were essential to the plot.

If the plot is about crops failing, then that playing out in some rational way needs to happen (unsure why NASA becomes a conspiracy theory in such a world, or why bad crops = MRIs don't work, but, you know, whatever). The space travel parts were in fact critical to moving the plot, so yeah, pay attention to that.

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

It's lousy in your opinion 

My opinion happens to be right in this case.