Walt Disney Animation Studios (left), Paramount Pictures (right)
This November two highly anticipated science fiction films hit theaters: Disney’s Big Hero 6 and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar . Both feature a healthy dose of comic relief via friendly robots, but otherwise they’re drastically different. Interstellar is an epic, operatic story about colonizing alien worlds, while Big Hero 6 is a kid-friendly superhero flick. But which is the better film? We decided to put that question to a Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy panel.
Our group gave both movies credit for including science and scientists, and called out Big Hero 6, for example, for featuring students who use science to become superheroes.
“I really appreciated that—given that it’s focused around a robot—that they actually made all the powers specifically science-focused,” says Lightspeed magazine editor John Joseph Adams.
The panel also praised the film for its beautifully rendered setting of San Fransokyo, a delightfully colorful mashup of Tokyo and San Francisco, and for its diverse cast of lovable nerds. However, one area where the film falls short is its plot, which is a bit too familiar and predictable.
“I was not able to shut off my author brain,” says bestselling writer Carrie Vaughn. “And it’s because I was sitting there going, ‘OK, this is the kind of movie that has a plot twist. What’s the plot twist going to be? Oh, this is going to be the plot twist.’ And when you’re doing that within the first 20 minutes of the movie, that’s not good.”
Interstellar was more polarizing, though our panel agreed its strong points are strong indeed. Author and film producer Rob Bland applauded the movie’s epic scope and adult complexity.
“The movie worked for me on a science fiction level, on an emotional level, on a philosophical level, and on an intimate level,” he says. “I had to see it twice to understand what I think [Nolan] was trying to accomplish, filmically and thematically. So for me the movie worked.”
However, some of our panelists felt Interstellar was too long and convoluted, and that some of its handling of emotion was heavy-handed, with the human aspects proving less effective than the sheer drama of space exploration.
“It’s virtually impossible to find Hollywood science fiction that has a scientific worldview,” says Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley. “I just want to go to a movie where the scientists act like scientists.”
Still, all our panelists are glad to have seen both films. “I appreciate both movies,” says Vaughn, “because I really appreciate having big-budget movies where scientists are the main characters.”
For our full discussion of Big Hero 6 and Interstellar, and to learn which is our favorite, listen to Episode 127 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
John Joseph Adams on anticipating Interstellar:
“I’m a pretty big Christopher Nolan fan. Inception is one of my favorite movies of all time—it’s probably my favorite science fiction movie. I play it in my head when I’m bored sometimes—it’s just on an unending loop basically. So, I mean, I had pretty high expectations, just because I’m such a huge fan of Inception. He’s done lots of other great movies too, but Inception is the big thing for me. So I was very excited when I saw he was making this movie, and when I saw the first trailer I was pretty underwhelmed by it. There were lots of shots of corn, and it’s on Earth, and I was like, come on, the movie’s called Interstellar. But I was hoping they were just saving all the cool awesome stuff for the movie, and they didn’t want to show it all to us in the trailer. Which, fair enough, there’s tons of cool awesome shit in the movie. But I was pretty underwhelmed by the trailer, and then they released a couple other trailers, and I was like, OK, yeah, it’s looking pretty good. I tried not to get too excited. So I probably had impossibly high expectations based on Christopher Nolan, which may account for me maybe not loving it as much as I thought I would.”
Carrie Vaughn on outer space movies:
“I am such a sucker for spaceship movies, and space, and space exploration. Those are some of my favorite things to read about, and watch movies about. But I knew I was going to get hurt. I knew not to raise my expectations, because there’s not a good track record for this kind of movie. They will show me lots of pretty pictures of cool planets, and starscapes, and spaceships, and astronauts, and all the cool stuff I love so much, and then it will all fall apart in the movie, and it’s happened over and over and over again. So I sort of went into the movie bracing, and hoping, and there are things about the movie I really loved. But it did the thing that they keep doing to me, where I want a movie about space exploration, but what they do is give me some melodrama about people behaving badly and yelling at each other. … It seems to me that Hollywood doesn’t trust the idea of space exploration to be interesting enough on its own, and for me this was another movie that demonstrated that same thing.”
Carrie Vaughn on the message of Interstellar:
“Another thread that bugs me—and this is across all movies, it’s not just Interstellar, Interstellar is just the latest iteration of it—we’ve had a number of movies now that have posited, Look, we’re ruining the planet, we’re destroying the environment, Earth is no longer habitable, so we have to leave. In all of these stories we have to leave Earth, and it kind of blows me away, because if we have the technology to move human civilization off of Earth, then we have the technology to fix Earth. And it seems like an abandonment of responsibility in all of these. And it’s a personal pet peeve, but it just bugs me that no one in any of these stories sits down to think about what we have to do to maybe fix the Earth, instead of building these massive rockets and traveling to distant star systems. It seems like that’s actually a more difficult technology than it would be to maybe fix things here, and I think it says something about our culture that that is what seems like a better solution to a lot of people—or to a storyteller.”
John Joseph Adams on Interstellar vs. Gravity :
“I think that Interstellar is a little bit hurt by the fact that Gravity came out [earlier] and sort of stole some of its thunder. Because without Gravity, I feel like my mind would have been blown by all of the visuals in this movie, and all of its treatment of what putting people into space would be like. I feel like without Gravity, my mind would have been completely blown. But I felt like Gravity did a bunch of stuff better than Interstellar, so it sort of suffered by comparison as well. Throughout the whole movie of Gravity I was just really tense, and I felt the tension of the characters in the movie and everything, and I didn’t really get that as much from Interstellar, even in the scenes where they’re going for that.”
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