Star Wars didn't even pretend to have any SCIENCE. In it.
And was all the better for it.
I didn't mind the dodgy science in Interstellar, either. Just the bait-and-switch storytelling. It would have worked just fine without the failing agriculture and shoestring NASA - what's wrong with "We've found a swirly thing near Jupiter, sent some ships, but haven't heard much from them, now we're going to see what they found..."?
And then they could have made a whole other movie about what happens when crops fail on a global scale...
And yeah, and because of nitrogen breathing blight. That will somehow suffocate us. By, erm, oh, I don't know. It was probably planning to press a pillow over our faces in the night. I'd certainly build a ginormous gravity-defying spaceship to get away from the Pillow Monster.
To be honest, it seemed a way to get around mentioning those two words that many Americans can't stomach (
sotto voce global warming). After all, global warming is a pre-packed and ready-to-use calamity. Mind you, the entire premise of the movie was 'oops we've fucked up the world, let's get the number 49 space bus to Another Galaxy' which really ought to appeal to the US right wingers who probably have their pick-ups and SUVs packed and ready to go. They're going to horribly disappointed when they discover that the only way to get to Another Galaxy is by public transport.
And yeah, you just grow one crop at a time, and then it all dies, you grow another one, until that dies. Really? All varieties of that crop are susceptible? And you'd go from corn and wheat to okra? In the mid-west? Not, erm, something like sorghum, or maybe millet, rye, triticale, barley, oats, spelt, durum, einkorn, teff, kamut, etc. Possibly the world was also in the grip of an epidemic of gluten intolerance. I look forward to the director's cut that includes the scenes of rampage in health stores as the shelves are emptied of the world's remaining supplies of quinoa.
