While You Were Offline: Sony Gets Hacked, the Internet Freaks Over Star Wars

Bad news, New York. You’ve been replaced as the city that never sleeps by the Internet, although admittedly that metaphor doesn’t really work if you try and apply real-world urban planning to it. (What is the sidewalk of the Internet? What are the parks? Is there a transit system, and if so, what is it? Also, who’s in charge of maintenance?) Nonetheless, what we used to call the World Wide Web has, as ever, been reliably busy with outrage and excitement this week, and once again, we have gathered together a short primer on some entertainment stories that you might have missed, just so that you’ll have an answer when a confused relative asks you what people are talking about on the tubes these days. No need to thank us.

A Year of Pop in 250 Seconds

What Happened: Proof we’re almost at the end of 2014 arrived in the shape of DJ Earworm’s “United State of Pop 2014″ mashup.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, blogs

What Really Happened: Why bother paying attention to what happens in pop music—even during what’s been called a banner year for poptimism—when someone will come along and summarize the whole thing for you in under five minutes at the start of December? The emphasis really is on pop, here; Taylor Swift, Pharrell, and Iggy Azalea are all present, so this is very much a collection of songs that you’ll already be familiar with. Hell, even Idina Menzel’s “Let It Go” from Frozen makes an appearance, despite that movie having come out in November 2013.

The Takeaway: This is only the start of the deluge, so get used to hearing a lot of this kind of thing over the next few weeks. Use them as a starting point for your own Best-Of lists, or a shopping list if you need to catch up.

Chris Rock Becomes the Internet’s Elder Statesman

What Happened: Chris Rock gave a series of interviews in which he talked about race relations in America.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: Responding to recent events including the lack of indictments in both the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, Rock talked to New York magazine and Grantland, as well as writing a must-read essay for The Hollywood Reporter .

To say that he was talking sense in each and every case is putting it mildly. Here he is, from the New York piece: “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.” Or from THR: “I remember when they were doing Starsky & Hutch, and my manager was like, ‘We might be able to get you the part of Huggy Bear,’ which eventually went to Snoop Dogg. I was like: ‘Do you understand that when my brother and I watched Starsky & Hutch growing up, I would play Starsky and he would play Hutch? I don’t want to play f—ing Huggy Bear.’ This is not a historical drama. This is not Thomas Jefferson. It’s a movie based on a shitty TV show, it can be anybody.'”

The response has been overwhelmingly positive: in addition to the interviews and especially the essay being shared across social media, Gawker called Rock “America’s Real Black President” and lauded him for “telling the truth.”

The Takeaway: Instead of merely regurgitating safe anecdotes about funny things that happened on set to promote Top Five, Rock is using the opportunity to talk about important things that matter, especially now. More celebrities should follow suit.

The Fantabulous Rap Battle (Twitter Division, Part 23,982)

What Happened: Azealia Banks used the lack-of-indictment in the Eric Garner case as the launchpad for a Twitter rant against Iggy Azalea. Azalea responded.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: Let’s just take a moment to enjoy Banks’ rant from Wednesday night, shall we?

It continued like that for a while. (A day later, she was still at it, citing Azalea and Macklemore as part of an attempt by white America to “remind us that they are in control.” She added, “They are even trying to tear down our father figure BILL COSBY.”)

By contrast, Azalea was the soul of discretion in response:

The Takeaway: Banks is more entertaining (and, let’s be honest, more offensive), while Azalea is more helpful and productive. Then again, Banks has more reason to be angry. Coming up with conspiracy theories about Bill Cosby isn’t a good look, though. The winner of this face-off? Let’s just go with “nobody,” shall we?

Sony Gets Hacked, Disaster Ensues

What Happened: Someone hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment, and leaked some embarrassing things as proof: the financial details of those who work there, and also the new Annie remake.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: WIRED’s Kim Zetter unsurprisingly had the best round-up of the story, looking into who was responsible and when it happened. (Spoilers: In both cases, the answer is “It’s not entirely certain just yet.”) For the purposes of this round-up, this is the money shot: In addition to data including personal information and salaries of employees, “the stolen data also includes the script for an unreleased pilot by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad as well as full copies of several Sony films, most of which have not been released in theaters yet. These include copies of the upcoming films Annie, Still Alice, and Mr. Turner.” Leaks of those movies have already started appearing online.

The Takeaway: The most obvious thing to say about this is, it’s very bad news for Sony. Not only has its internal security been decimated, leading to the chaos that will result from thousands of employees’ personal data being compromised, but the leak of a number of future projects could impact the company’s bottom line for some time to come. Until the full scope of the leak has been uncovered, it’s hard to know how much worse it could’ve been, but right now, it’s beginning to look as if the only people who can take any positives from this are those who wanted to see Annie without having to pay for it.

The Internet Reacts to Star Wars: The Force Awakens

What Happened: The Internet did what the Internet does, and responded to last week’s release of the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens with many parodies. No, really. A lot of parodies.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube

What Really Happened: It’s unsurprising that the new Star Wars trailer—which racked up views quicker than any other YouTube video to date when released the day after Thanksgiving—caught the attention and inflamed the imagination of the collective Internet. It is, after all, a new Star Wars trailer. Here are just some of the riffs released so far.

The Takeaway: Remember when you thought that you would never get sick of that 88-seconds of footage? Surprise! (Somewhere, everyone involved with Jurassic World is feeling a little abandoned when looking at their own paltry-by-comparison parodies. We’ll wait and see if Terminator Genisys proves to be as inspirational.)

Skeletor “Hacks” Honda

What Happened: Skeletor took control of the @Honda Twitter account as part of the company’s holiday promotional campaign. Not everyone on the Internet got the joke.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: Honda’s holiday promotion is based around the idea that getting a new car is just as exciting as getting a new toy when you were a kid—except, you know, far more expensive. As part of the promo, He-Man’s arch-enemy Skeletor “hacked” the official Honda Twitter account on Cyber Monday for a series of … almost funny tweets. For example:

What was amusing was seeing a lot of people apparently believe that the Honda account had actually been hacked for real by someone pretending to be Skeletor:

Because, obviously, linking to videos like this don’t make it abundantly clear that this was less “hack” than “wacky nostalgia play for the middle-aged dollar”:

The Takeaway: Apparently, the desire to see the corporate world be taken over by toys is so great that it overwhelms common sense; maybe we should chalk it up to tryptophan-inspired sleepiness. Still, whoever came up with the campaign for Honda deserves a raise considering how well it worked out in the end.

Nick Offerman Sings About Whisky

What Happened: Really, all you need to know is right there. Ron Swanson himself expresses his love for whisky (and music) in what is surely destined to become the folk song of the millennium.

Where It Blew Up YouTube, blogs

What Really Happened: As a preview of a series created for whisky manufacturers Diageo, Offerman gave the Internet an early holiday gift: A three-minute ditty about the problems that come from wanting to drink and play the guitar (or do carpentry or ride a horse) at the same time.

The Takeaway: If this is what a post-Parks & Recreation life looks like for Offerman (well, this and his his woodshop, of course), then the end can’t come soon enough. For all other reasons, of course, we wish that the show would continue forever. How else will we know if Leslie Knope’s kids rebel and become a libertarian?!?

Which Was a Better Sci-Fi Film: Big Hero 6 or Interstellar?

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.”

While You Were Offline: Sony Gets Hacked, the Internet Freaks Over Star Wars

Bad news, New York. You’ve been replaced as the city that never sleeps by the Internet, although admittedly that metaphor doesn’t really work if you try and apply real-world urban planning to it. (What is the sidewalk of the Internet? What are the parks? Is there a transit system, and if so, what is it? Also, who’s in charge of maintenance?) Nonetheless, what we used to call the World Wide Web has, as ever, been reliably busy with outrage and excitement this week, and once again, we have gathered together a short primer on some entertainment stories that you might have missed, just so that you’ll have an answer when a confused relative asks you what people are talking about on the tubes these days. No need to thank us.

A Year of Pop in 250 Seconds

What Happened: Proof we’re almost at the end of 2014 arrived in the shape of DJ Earworm’s “United State of Pop 2014″ mashup.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, blogs

What Really Happened: Why bother paying attention to what happens in pop music—even during what’s been called a banner year for poptimism—when someone will come along and summarize the whole thing for you in under five minutes at the start of December? The emphasis really is on pop, here; Taylor Swift, Pharrell, and Iggy Azalea are all present, so this is very much a collection of songs that you’ll already be familiar with. Hell, even Idina Menzel’s “Let It Go” from Frozen makes an appearance, despite that movie having come out in November 2013.

The Takeaway: This is only the start of the deluge, so get used to hearing a lot of this kind of thing over the next few weeks. Use them as a starting point for your own Best-Of lists, or a shopping list if you need to catch up.

Chris Rock Becomes the Internet’s Elder Statesman

What Happened: Chris Rock gave a series of interviews in which he talked about race relations in America.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: Responding to recent events including the lack of indictments in both the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, Rock talked to New York magazine and Grantland, as well as writing a must-read essay for The Hollywood Reporter .

To say that he was talking sense in each and every case is putting it mildly. Here he is, from the New York piece: “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.” Or from THR: “I remember when they were doing Starsky & Hutch, and my manager was like, ‘We might be able to get you the part of Huggy Bear,’ which eventually went to Snoop Dogg. I was like: ‘Do you understand that when my brother and I watched Starsky & Hutch growing up, I would play Starsky and he would play Hutch? I don’t want to play f—ing Huggy Bear.’ This is not a historical drama. This is not Thomas Jefferson. It’s a movie based on a shitty TV show, it can be anybody.'”

The response has been overwhelmingly positive: in addition to the interviews and especially the essay being shared across social media, Gawker called Rock “America’s Real Black President” and lauded him for “telling the truth.”

The Takeaway: Instead of merely regurgitating safe anecdotes about funny things that happened on set to promote Top Five, Rock is using the opportunity to talk about important things that matter, especially now. More celebrities should follow suit.

The Fantabulous Rap Battle (Twitter Division, Part 23,982)

What Happened: Azealia Banks used the lack-of-indictment in the Eric Garner case as the launchpad for a Twitter rant against Iggy Azalea. Azalea responded.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: Let’s just take a moment to enjoy Banks’ rant from Wednesday night, shall we?

It continued like that for a while. (A day later, she was still at it, citing Azalea and Macklemore as part of an attempt by white America to “remind us that they are in control.” She added, “They are even trying to tear down our father figure BILL COSBY.”)

By contrast, Azalea was the soul of discretion in response:

The Takeaway: Banks is more entertaining (and, let’s be honest, more offensive), while Azalea is more helpful and productive. Then again, Banks has more reason to be angry. Coming up with conspiracy theories about Bill Cosby isn’t a good look, though. The winner of this face-off? Let’s just go with “nobody,” shall we?

Sony Gets Hacked, Disaster Ensues

What Happened: Someone hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment, and leaked some embarrassing things as proof: the financial details of those who work there, and also the new Annie remake.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media thinkpieces

What Really Happened: WIRED’s Kim Zetter unsurprisingly had the best round-up of the story, looking into who was responsible and when it happened. (Spoilers: In both cases, the answer is “It’s not entirely certain just yet.”) For the purposes of this round-up, this is the money shot: In addition to data including personal information and salaries of employees, “the stolen data also includes the script for an unreleased pilot by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad as well as full copies of several Sony films, most of which have not been released in theaters yet. These include copies of the upcoming films Annie, Still Alice, and Mr. Turner.” Leaks of those movies have already started appearing online.

The Takeaway: The most obvious thing to say about this is, it’s very bad news for Sony. Not only has its internal security been decimated, leading to the chaos that will result from thousands of employees’ personal data being compromised, but the leak of a number of future projects could impact the company’s bottom line for some time to come. Until the full scope of the leak has been uncovered, it’s hard to know how much worse it could’ve been, but right now, it’s beginning to look as if the only people who can take any positives from this are those who wanted to see Annie without having to pay for it.

The Internet Reacts to Star Wars: The Force Awakens

What Happened: The Internet did what the Internet does, and responded to last week’s release of the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens with many parodies. No, really. A lot of parodies.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube

What Really Happened: It’s unsurprising that the new Star Wars trailer—which racked up views quicker than any other YouTube video to date when released the day after Thanksgiving—caught the attention and inflamed the imagination of the collective Internet. It is, after all, a new Star Wars trailer. Here are just some of the riffs released so far.

The Takeaway: Remember when you thought that you would never get sick of that 88-seconds of footage? Surprise! (Somewhere, everyone involved with Jurassic World is feeling a little abandoned when looking at their own paltry-by-comparison parodies. We’ll wait and see if Terminator Genisys proves to be as inspirational.)

Skeletor “Hacks” Honda

What Happened: Skeletor took control of the @Honda Twitter account as part of the company’s holiday promotional campaign. Not everyone on the Internet got the joke.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: Honda’s holiday promotion is based around the idea that getting a new car is just as exciting as getting a new toy when you were a kid—except, you know, far more expensive. As part of the promo, He-Man’s arch-enemy Skeletor “hacked” the official Honda Twitter account on Cyber Monday for a series of … almost funny tweets. For example:

What was amusing was seeing a lot of people apparently believe that the Honda account had actually been hacked for real by someone pretending to be Skeletor:

Because, obviously, linking to videos like this don’t make it abundantly clear that this was less “hack” than “wacky nostalgia play for the middle-aged dollar”:

The Takeaway: Apparently, the desire to see the corporate world be taken over by toys is so great that it overwhelms common sense; maybe we should chalk it up to tryptophan-inspired sleepiness. Still, whoever came up with the campaign for Honda deserves a raise considering how well it worked out in the end.

Nick Offerman Sings About Whisky

What Happened: Really, all you need to know is right there. Ron Swanson himself expresses his love for whisky (and music) in what is surely destined to become the folk song of the millennium.

Where It Blew Up YouTube, blogs

What Really Happened: As a preview of a series created for whisky manufacturers Diageo, Offerman gave the Internet an early holiday gift: A three-minute ditty about the problems that come from wanting to drink and play the guitar (or do carpentry or ride a horse) at the same time.

The Takeaway: If this is what a post-Parks & Recreation life looks like for Offerman (well, this and his his woodshop, of course), then the end can’t come soon enough. For all other reasons, of course, we wish that the show would continue forever. How else will we know if Leslie Knope’s kids rebel and become a libertarian?!?

Which Was a Better Sci-Fi Film: Big Hero 6 or Interstellar?

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.”