The movie’s tesseract is a fourth-dimensional version of a cube–the cube being Murph’s bedroom.
We see that cube projected throughout the fourth-dimension of time, with every moment of that bedroom’s existence, and the contents thereof (human or otherwise), being present simultaneously. (It might not have been the best possible depiction of that concept, but to me it was remarkably successful. Much more so than other elements of the movie, certainly.)
…As for the time dilation on “Miller’s Planet” not affecting the ship orbiting around it–I got nothing.
An absolutely fascinating, compelling movie. One of the best I’ve seen in some time.
One can of course find a thousand faults with the science. The movie works all the same; it’s not really about the science. Good science fiction is never really about the science. It’s about what the science means to people.
Why did love matter, why was Cooper in a tesseract - meh, who cares? Why did Miller’s Planet dilate time so much but a ship in orbit just above it isn’t affected? Perhaps the future humans did it, I don’t know. The movie did a good enough job staying consistent to its own tone and atmosphere to keep my disbelief suspended until it was over. Good enough.
What mattered here was what the move was about. The ending, really, is a triumph; it veers into convenient cliché and then, surprise, delivers the true ending, which is that Cooper’s mission isn’t over. And why is Cooper’s mission not over? Why, because there’s a person to save; because people matter. What the movie is truly about is people; they take to space to try to save humanity. Murph dedicates her life, as Prof. Brand had, to saving humanity. The saving of humanity is accomplished, but Cooper must now go out and save someone, because Amelia
Brand is, of course, part of humanity. We have closure on all of the main threads of the film, nut of course of story of humanity cannot end, because there is always the next quest that has to be completed.
Since you’re almost a year late, you might be glad to know that most people in this thread liked or loved the movie – so whatever they did, they did right by lots of folks.
I don’t really remember the film anymore, but glad you liked it. Any interest in sci-fi is awesome
First, I really enjoyed the movie and I wasn’t hung up playing “gotcha” with the science. However, in the hard sci-fi genre, it really is about the science. The filmmaker went to pains to get the science right by hiring a very eminent physicist, Kip Thorne (I have one of his books from years ago), and they still got some things wrong. That doesn’t make it a bad movie but you generally either make a big deal about getting it and then get it right, or you just throw science out the window and make Star Wars.
I saw this a couple days ago. I didn’t know much about it other than it was supposed to be about realistic interstellar travel. I assumed it must be about a ten thousand year voyage of a generation ship or something. I knew to dial back the science realism expectations when there were wormholes, stasis pods, and jet sized aircraft capable of VTOL space launch from 1g planets.
But that’s OK, you know why? Because realistic space flight is mind numbingly boring. It’s just people sitting around in a tin can and looking out windows and pushing buttons. Look at Europa Report. I loved it. Still has lots of scientific flaws and artistic license, but compared to Interstellar it may as well be a documentary. Yet most people think it’s dull as ditch water even though they did add some Hollywood drama. It has no blackholes, no cute robot sidekicks, no visiting multiple planets, no landing on frozen clouds, no skyscraper sized waves, no one goes insane and tries to kill everyone else, no time travel, no future human time paradoxes (b-but closed time loops), no BS about higher dimensions, and no hot shot flyboy maneuvers or pithy one liners. It just has people sailing through the inky blackness of space and performing a mission despite serious adversity and a determination to find the truth even if it kills them. In other words, yawn.
I think that love speech is a good calibration for how much sap and cheesiness you’re willing to swallow. It would be useful metric in reviews for other movies. Personally, I don’t mind glurge, even if I recognize it’s so corny someone has to put up a scarecrow to keep the birds away. Anne Hathaway acted the hell out of that ridiculous speech too. She made it sound perfectly reasonable. Maybe tingles really do transcend physics.
If firewalls exist (a controversial hypothesis) I’d expect a person to be incinerated. That would’ve been a funny ending.
The idea of using folded space to shortcut travel–and using a 2D surface in 3D to describe it–goes back at least as far as 1953 in Heinlein’s Starman Jones, where the protagonist explains a “transition” using a scarf.
Anyway, regarding the movie, I really don’t see the appeal of it. The characters aren’t very interesting, there’s too many questions regarding what’s actually going on with Earth, the whole thing feels both an hour too long and like about three much better movies smashed together, Hans Zimmer stomps all over the thing with a lousy score, and quite frankly I’m sick of causality loops.
The love speech: I hated it too. I’m puzzled because Nolan is a pretty good writer. He must know that if you want your movie to have the message that love is a powerful force between people, you don’t A) have a character say it on the nose like that and B) use love as a literal force like gravity or electromagnetism.
You pick something that symbolizes love and have that be a powerful force upon other symbolic elements within your story.
Doing it the way it was done in the movie is as if a character in The Shining had explicitly said in the middle of Act 2 that alcohol can make a man abusive toward those he loves or having a character in a Romero zombie movie say that consumerism makes zombies of us. Go back to writing school.
Maybe there’s something I missed but it was very clunky and I’m wondering if it was put there by the studio.
I thought the whole ‘love’ speech was a red herring to a certain degree. You certainly don’t need it for the plot - the daughter got the messages simply because it was her Dad that was trying to communicate. Was there something I missed in the plot that required ‘love’ to be an actual power?
In the Fifth Element, using love as a force of the universe (rather than a psychological phenomenon which is strictly inside minds) is perfectly fine; TFE is a sci-fi action comedy. It has segments like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk-CE9WAJHU
It has a literal *space opera * being performed while the element of love (in tight clothes) beats down a dozen brown space orks : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2246g7AzbMc
It’s fine for its plot points to be silly. Interstellar, though, is hopefully not meant to be taken as a comedy.
Now that I think about it, there’s likely quite a bit of overlap between people who disliked Interstellar’s love speech and people who disliked Snowpiercer and vice versa.
Honestly, I just found it boring. It had some visually impressive scenes. But I didn’t find it nearly as profound as it thought it was trying to be.
One thing I did like was the funny robots (“Everyone good? Plenty of slaves for my robot colony?”) and how they didn’t fall into the standard sci-fi 2001 cliché of turning on their human masters.
Well, I’ll help your hypo ;). I really liked the love speech in Intersteller (and think it gave the movie its raison d’etre, if you will - though perhaps a bit on the nose) and also enjoyed Snowpiercer.
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