OK, let me get this out of the way: I loved the movie. Mostly, I loved that scientists and engineers are the Heroes, and they talk like actual scientists and engineers that I know, and are flawed and human. So there’s that.

And the visuals were breathtaking. I need me some tickets to Saturn.

However, since poking holes in movies is in vogue, here is my engineery hole-pokingfest (spoilers after the More)

You don’t get to fly a trillion-dollar spaceship to a wormhole not knowing exactly what a wormhole is and what it looks like, not to mention what you’re supposed to do when you get there. Some dude poking a hole in note-paper isn’t going to cut it.

For that matter, you train for months, or years (no point in skipping that if time dilation is going to suck up years anyway): why didn’t the guy go back and visit his poor kids a few times?

Also, Earth is dying due to, apparently, a Blight. This is plausible if we didn’t do anything about it, and we kept doing stupid stuff like planting mono-cultures (also depressingly plausible, both of these). I prefer to think we could figure out a solution. Even the most horrible existence on earth (eating food made of hydrocarbons and breathing from nitrogen-scrubbers) would still be better than living on an alien planet. And easier. “Oh, killing off a blight is too hard… I guess we’ll just have to terraform a planet”.

What about that space station at the end? What happened to the Blight? If you can prevent Blight from infecting a tube in space, you can make prevent it from infecting a tube on Earth. There are lots of reasons for a species to become space-faring, but blight-avoidance isn’t one of them.

BTW, future wormholenauts: don’t land a spaceship without completely checking out your destination. ‘Ack! Surprise! Water! And a miles-high Tidal Wave! I guess we should have pulled out some binoculars during the months it took to travel to the planet’.

And what kind of idiot decides a planet close enough to a black hole to produce those kinds of tidal waves is a good place to establish the sole outpost of the future of mankind? I’d chance it on Earth, thankyouverymuch.

This irked me: Newton’s laws have don’t say ‘dropping stuff makes you go up’, which was the plot point for dropping stuff into the black hole. Shooting stuff would make you go up, but that isn’t what they did.

Also, On Earth, they show the ubershuttle launching on a Saturn-V wannabe. On all the other planets, including the massive 1.3x Gs one, achieving orbit is as easy as taking off from LAX. Over and over again.

Also, a ring-shaped spaceship will spin if you blow chunks of it up, but it won’t spin around what used to be the center, unless the explosion somehow managed to blow stuff up in exactly the right way to not shift the center of gravity.

And the doozy: if ‘They’ are ‘us’, how did we escape doom the first time, before Us became They, or whatever. We don’t survive without Their help, and they don’t exist until we survive. I hate time travel movies, especially when they don’t even try to get it right. It would have worked if They remained They.