science fiction genre - How does Miller's planet in Interstellar have such huge time dilation yet such a small gravitational force?

In Interstellar, the crew of the Endurance experience extreme time dilation (7 years to an hour) on Miller's planet, due to its proximity to a black hole. However, they only feel 130% of Earth's gravity when on the planet. How does a gravitational field powerful enough to create that kind of time dilation not also manifest as a huge physical force?

Answer

If an object is in free fall around a gravitating body, it feels no locally-measurable gravitational effects from that body aside from tidal forces (time dilation is not locally measurable, it can only be defined relative to distant clocks), and tidal forces are not significant on a human body near the event horizon of such a large black hole (see my answer here about tidal forces near a supermassive black hole). And any orbiting object is in free fall--for example, this is why a shuttle astronaut in low Earth orbit feels weightless even though the orbit is fractionally not much farther from the center of the planet than the surface is (see this page for a brief discussion, and I tried to explain the concept of feeling weightless in this answer on the physics...it may also be worth noting that in Einstein's theory of general relativity the local equivalence between being in free fall and moving inertially in the absence of any gravity is formalized into the "equivalence principle", there's a good article on this here). So, a person on Miller's planet shouldn't feel any gravity from the black hole, though they are not in free fall relative to Miller's planet itself so they do feel gravity from the planet.