Nope, they were from Dust Bowl as I recognized a rather distinctive half-blind man from the documentary as one of the talking heads in Interstellar.
All the Interstellar moviemakers had to do was find a few Dust Bowl interviewees who:
(1) sufficiently resembled the actors who played Cooper’s kids as younger people, which is IMHO a lot easier than finding a tween who looks like a younger Jessica Chastain, and
(2) said something generic; that is, could apply to the future fictitious catastrophe with no specific reference to the 1930s. As I recall, the talking-head clips in Interstellar are short enough to avoid dated references.
Which reminds me: was there any reference or clue in the movie to when it was set? Nobody mentions a year, IIRC, but was there a date on a background screen or such?
Found an article stating that one of the Interstellar talking heads was Ellen Burstyn playing older Murph Cooper but the others were real Dust Bowl interviewees. So we’re both right.
You know what I didn’t like about it? The delta-V budgets of those space shuttles.
The initial launch from Earth requires a full-blown 3-stage Saturn V rocket just to get the space shuttle into Low Earth Orbit to rendezvous with the Endurance station. Fair enough.
But then, when they get to the Gargantua System, their tiny little space shuttle is carrying enough fuel to land on Miller’s Planet, take back off from Miller’s Planet and re-rendezvous with the Endurance while it was passing by on a super wide orbit – and I remind you that Miller’s Planet has a surface gravity of 1.3g, which (assuming it’s no denser than Earth) would give it an even steeper gravity well than taking off from Earth.
And then, the shuttle takes off again, and lands and takes off from a second planet (albeit one with, mercifully, only 0.8g surface gravity). Did they refuel from fuel stores aboard the Endurance station? If so, how did Endurance’s own rocket engines produce enough delta-V to boots itself, a docked space shuttle, and all that reserve space shuttle fuel, out of Earth orbit on a trajectory for Saturn in the first place? I didn’t see any modules on that thing remotely big enough for a fuel tank of this magnitude.
If they had NERVA engines or fusion engines or some other kind of magic physics drive, I could believe it. But not with the plain old chemical combustion engines like NASA uses today. And if they did have super-high-I[sub]sp[/sub] engines that could give them such insanely high delta-V budgets, why the hell did they need a Saturn V to launch from NASA H.Q.?
I think the future humans were refueling the shuttle transdimensionnally because they wanted the show to go on. They were also the ones who kept Matt Damon alive after his supplies ran out so they could watch the ensuing fisticuffs. What else would you do after you’ve rebuilt a million timelines and watched Cooper die as many times? They just wanted to skip to the good parts.
At some point Matthew McConaughey mentions being born “40 years too late or 40 years too early.” I don’t remember the exact words. I took that to mean being born 40 years after the moon exploration (and thus only being an astronaut during the Low Earth Orbit years).
I have the popular music knowledge of a grapefruit, so naturally I’d never heard of this song before. It surprised the hell out of me that a rock band would think to write a song (admittedly a folksy-sounding song) about time dilation.
I wonder if this song was one of the reasons Queen got to do the soundtrack music for Flash Gordon. (Even though the 1980 Flash Gordon movie had no time dilation in it.)
Slightly more expansive answer: I think the robot was destroyed by Mann because the ROBOT found out the truth and threatened to send the “correct” data back out towards earth, and then he booby-trapped the destroyed remains to prevent anyone in the future from accessing that information (hoping as he was that he’d get rescued because of his really lovely falsified data)
I’m another one who wants to know what the water-wave planet would look like through time-dilation, and whether they’d see “walls” or “bands” of frozen-in-time waves across the planet if they’d bothered to look. Relativity is really rough on my brain.
I’m also a little peeved that apparently no one at secret-NASA or on the spaceship noticed that everything about the water-planet’s reports was exactly identical - the time-stamp (possibly different due to time-shenanigans), the information, the readings, the location, … surely someone would notice that nothing ever changed at all from the initial report, and find that somewhat suspicious?
Near the end of the movie Cooper asks about TORS to be told that it was unsalvageable after returning from the wormhole but in the next scene Cooper is seen working on a robot whose voice and personality seems an awful lot like TORS. Did Cooper repair TORS of was that a different unit that he tweeked to be just like TORS?
We have already established that Nolan is wrong about the wormhole closing, or if that wormhole had indeed closed, Murphy’s magical gravity equation will allow us to re-open it as needed.
I thought the only signals relayed from the outposts through the wormhole back to Earth were periodic simple “yes” or “no” blips – more than once, the characters referred to it as the “thumbs up” signal. Mann kept sending a thumbs-up, Edmunds didn’t, and Miller managed to dash one off before dying but it kept repeating.
I thought the astronauts got any more complex data only upon arriving on the other side, where there was a automated relay station recording incoming (including the personal videograms from Earth) and outgoing messages. And even then, all the data wasn’t relayed; if it had, there would have been no need to retrieve the data recorder from the water planet.
I don’t know if we established that Nolan was wrong, but in the movie, it appeared that the wormhole was still open. Without the wormhole, there’s no reason to locate Cooper Station near Saturn. (For human habitation, near Earth orbit, such as one of the Lagrange points would be more useful.) And without the wormhole, Cooper has no reasonable hope of reaching Brand in that small ship.
Easily thirty minutes too long. When most people say that they mean the editing was poor, that it felt stretched out and whatnot. This is different, they should have just cut the last thirty minutes. Maybe three quarters of an hour just to be sure.
Brian May, who wrote the song, was studying for a PhD in Astrophysics at the time that Queen took off.
My major issue is the same issue that always seems to turn up when time travel gets involved: the paradoxes. In this instance, correct me if I am wrong, but future humans help past humans to do something that will save them and the planet, but to do so the future humans will need to have still survived without that help otherwise they’ll never be in the position to help past humans.
Ok, so the early stuff about the ghost doesn’t happen, or there is more focus about the bit where he taught Murph about the scientific method.
There is more drama about getting the info from the black hole, and it is sent back in a regular way. Then Cooper goes to the third planet and settles there. Back on earth they use the information to leave old earth, and many people leave for the new planet, among them his family. On the way to the new planet, their aging is slowed by freezing, so when they meet up him and Murph actually are the same age as he said in the beginning, even though she had previously passed him.
The wormhole is an accident and there are no messages or stuff like that.
We end by showing a hopeful colonization of the new planet, with the family together again, in a non-dusty green land.
