I enjoyed the movie, but the one issue I have is that the director really dragged it out for way too long. The interminable cuts back and forth between Earth and space could have been seriously shortened and the argument between Murph and her brother removed altogether. Just show her going into her old room and finding the watch. BAM, plot point accomplished with no loss of story. And the love speech could have been removed and that whole scene replaced with the line, “We’re going to Dr. Mann now.” Really, the only point of that scene is to show that she was in love with the unseen Edmunds.
I wanted to like this movie, but I didn’t.
The acting was fine and the effects great eye-candy, but the plot could not pass muster with me, for a bunch of reasons.
-
Heavy-handed homages to 2001. It is like the filmmakers thought ‘let’s set up some of the plot elements from 2001, but with a twist’. The mission is sabatoged from within - but by a human, not by HAL. The ‘need to get in through the airlock’ sequence - only this time, instead of success, near-disaster; and by the bad guy, not the good guy.
-
The humans are shown making extensive use of unmanned drones on Earth, but never once think of doing so on their all-important missions in space (even though we are shown them having advanced robots and, indeed, drones). Thus, the necessity for self-sacrificial one-way human missions (setting up the plot) AND they are continually suprised by the planets they encounter (OMG this place has continuous miles-high waves! OMG this place is all frozen clouds!). They never thought to look before they lept?
-
The film-makers did not come up with a convincing peril that was going to destroy humanity if it stayed on Earth. It is hard to buy that it would be easier to invent some fundamental principles of physics (antigravity?) and move the entire population of Earth, rather than engineer some counter to the Blight. What if the Blight follows them to their new planet?
-
In 2001, having the aliens not communicate directly to humans made sense - they were (apparently) only interested in helping along the evolution of sentient beings, and were, as far as we know, compeletely alien otherwise. Here, we have “us” in some future era, able to communicate with the past. Why not do so directly? No reason is given why they can’t.
-
That ‘love transcends the dimentions’ stuff was just painful.
That’s just the basics - not even getting into the odd physics of time-travel and black holes (let’s just assume all of that makes sense).
That’s a good point. The water seemed too shallow for such large waves. And was there any land on that planet or was it entirely wet?
BTW, that planet could be used for a back-up plan for humanity. If they parked a small group of people on the surface of that planet for six months or a year, when they lifted off, thousands of years would have passed. Even if no other humans are nearby, at least that colony could reestablish humanity somewhere. And at the end of the movie, Brand and whoever was with her were the only humans in the entire galaxy.
Also, in another thread on the movie, someone linked to an interview with the screenwriter who said that the wormhole closed at the end (when Cooper was ejected from the tesseract). But if that’s the case, what reason is there for Cooper Station to be in orbit around Saturn, rather than at L4 or L5? If the wormhole is still open, then we can assume Cooper Station is a waypoint for people going through the wormhole. And if it’s still open, Cooper has a chance of finding Brand. So I think in the movie the wormhole is still open.
There was a throw-away line about how they had to send people because the drones don’t have the originality to make the decisions that need to be made.
It doesn’t take much originality to see that those two planets (the wet one and the frozen one) weren’t suitable for human habitation. In fact, current-day probes could have told us that.
Even assuming human-on-the-spot was necessary, why not have the human stay in orbit and send drones down for a first look-see?
Or never mind drones - just look at the place through a telescope from orbit. Presumably, you’d see gigantic waves.
I really enjoyed the film. The whole crops dying thing, especially the opening talking heads? It may be lost on many people now a days but it reminded me so much of my Grandfather telling me stories of growing up in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. A lot of the science made perfect sense to me because of my interests: the spherical wormhole, I immediately identified the tesseract before they said anything, I was OK with the causality paradox, etc. The issue of losing kids (even though MM didn’t have his children die he missed out on their lives) was very real; again based on personal experience. So everything I had a connection with was extremely well done IMO. I even like how they humanized the computers and made then true characters - except I could have sworn it was Phil Hendrie and not Bill Irwin as TARS.
But I had a problem with some of the story aspects. So “love” has a 5th dimensional coupling constant or something? I don’t think characters should be omniscient but I hate when their lack of knowledge is completely out of character. One hour on the first planet is 7 years in our time. So no one stops and says, “Hmmmmmm. So she has like 4 hours worth of data. That’s not a lot.” And the HUGE wtf?! They orbit a black hole. Seriously?! That is totally shoehorning the singularity/time/gravity story into the finding-habital-world story. I know the Bad Astronomer was “You couldn’t find a planet around a star?” also. Oh and waving fingers in a tesseract creates gravity forces to shape dust and move books?
So overall - acting a 9 with MM a 9.5 with possible Oscar nomination.
Story - 4.5
ETA:
Even the wave made sense. I know people have an issue with there being water left but a wave can only reach so high and suppose the water on the planet started 18’ deep? It’s possible once the wave forms it travels around the world without sucking up more water.
I don’t know I read it here or another board, but apparently those talking heads were ripped directly from Ken Burns’ documentary about the Dust Bowl.
Weird thing is - as soon as he got back from outer space he asked whether his daughter was still alive and then, on learning she was, rushed to see her. He doesn’t seem to give a shit about his son, didn’t even mention him. And after his son spent all those years recording messages for him as well!
I enjoyed the film as well, but the wave still didn’t make sense.
A large wave, travelling across a shallow region (such as a tidally-generated wave moving up a river valley) moves as a tidal bore: a steep, turbulent wall of water that doesn’t fall away as the bore passes – it stays deep on the back side as well. Check out videos of the tidal bores at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy, or videos of the tsunami bores moving up shallow channels after the 2011 Japanese earthquake.
A crested wave, like that in the movie, will be associated with a shallow trough, but the trough will be no wider than the wave crest.
Yep, time travel is always a mistake. Ruined the show Heroes and also Lost.
I also agree- 45 minutes of showing what a shithell Earth was? Could have been done in 10 minutes.
I wish they’d given us more of an idea what the rest of the world was like and how America came to be so authoritarian and why.
I mean yeah, we don’t see American troops marching around in jackboots but if we have bureaucrats deciding when a kid is 15 what they’re life occupation would be and they’ve altered all the text books to claim the Moon landing was a hoax, something like that must have happened.
And finally, why would the US government decide to suppress the truth about the moon landing. And how far into the future was this. It seemed weird that this was a world with advanced robots where everyone drove around in old pickups, wore clothing from the 80s, read books(was it just me or was there little evidence the internet even existed anymore).
I doubt that since those were Cooper’s kids talking.
I really liked this movie. I get why many didn’t. It was very slow paced and Science-y but I enjoyed it a lot. It was hopeful and depressing at once.
My interpretation of things was this:
The beginning was after society went through a famine and essentially an environmental Apocalypse that contracted the population due to a lack of food.
The blight was some sort of bacteria that fed off different species of food plants and produced Nitrogen. It would wipe out one and evolve to eat something else.
The people who made the tesseract Cooper used at the end were far future humans who had learned to control time and space.
If it only had been Science-y enough to not violate about all the laws of physics every time something happened I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more. As a movie it was very well done and directed IMO, but so far my best theory for what was actually going on is that the whole thing was Cooper’s fevered dream when he was dying in his spaceship after the accident that’s briefly shown early in the movie. That way it’s all dream logic and it no longer matters that a shuttle can ascend to orbit from a planet with 1.3 Earth gravity without external fuel tanks or that a bad docking attempt causes a huge explosion in vacuum or whatever.
Fine movie. Lousy tacked on ending.
I think it was a classic Nolan movie in the sense that it was huge, epic, entertaining and full of things that don’t make sense.
-
Time travel plot didn’t work for me at all. If future humans could travel in time, why not go even further back. I would have really preferred a plot without this mystical element.
-
The science exposition was distracting. Does an astronaut (Cooper) really have to be explained that light cannot escape a black hole.
-
Shouldn’t there be a sun for the planets to have sunlight?
-
They were extremely unprepared for the decisions they would face.
- Why hadn’t they decided in advance which planets to go to
- Especially after the black guy had more than a decade to think about where to go next
- They knew that the signal on the wave planet had only lasted a very short time, shouldn’t that make them more suspicious.
-
Why couldn’t more info me sent home from the people landing on the planets?
-
Were we supposed to take Brands misunderstanding of evolution speech in any way seriously? I hope not.
-
I don’t understand Matt Damon’s character’s motivation. I understand his motivation for pretending that there was a signal. (Really, they didn’t at all consider that humans might lie?) But what would he achieve from taking a 50-50 to kill Cooper.
-
The movie screwed over the son. First he turns into a guy who does not care about his family, for no reason other than to create drama. And in the end, are we even told what happens to him? Cooper doesn’t seem to care.
-
I don’t understand the ending. All of a sudden Cooper is back near Saturn, and I have no idea how. And was the wormhole closed? And then he still wanted to go back to the other galaxy?
-
When Cooper left, his daughter says that the “ghost” told him to stay. And he already knows that the ghost is trustworthy, since he followed it’s coordinates. So why wouldn’t he trust it at that moment, or at least consider it? And why did he tell his past self the coordinates in the first place?
-
The fact that the daughter didn’t know that the equation was unsolvable before the black-hole data. If she is so brilliant, wouldn’t she figure out earlier that the old professor was just messing around. Also, why would he tell Matt Damon’s character, but not her?
I feel like I could go on…
I don’t care about bad science as such, like whether or not such high time slowdown is really possible, etc. But when i constantly find myself questioning the motivations of the characters, that’s a problem. And I agree with the OP about time travel.
If you’re outside any type of time dilation, how do you even see a planet that is traveling (is that the right word?) at a rate of 1 hour = 7 years, relative to you?
Interesting question. Would the planet be significantly redshifted? Also, that might explain why they didn’t notice the rather improbable waves - they would look like mountain ridges, unmoving.
Nothing about their visit makes sense, but the planet would certainly be interesting to watch from a safe distance.