I actually liked the movie, but this was the one scene that stopped me in my tracks and took me out of the film.
Anyway, did anyone else notice “The Stand” by Stephen King displayed prominently on the bookcase?
Not only the Stand but a few of those Outlander time travel romance novels my daughter used to read. I would bet Murphy’s bookcase was well salted with time travel and apocalyptic stories.
I liked it a lot.
It makes me wonder how Einstein and others figured all this stuff out. (theory of relativity, and so on)
I bet he had a watch that ticked oddly.
Saw it this weekend. Really enjoyed it. A good combination of solid-science sci-fi and weird mysticism that (at least) doesn’t appear to break any major scientific laws. Fun stuff, and very well crafted.
Within the context of the story, it’s more likely that “Future Man” would send a wormhole/build the tessaract at precisely the single moment in history when mankind needed it most than aliens, by happenstance, doing the same.
From Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
Scientist 1: Einstein was right!
Team Leader: Einstein was probably one of them.
It had too many implausbile human elements for me to strongly recommend this movie to anyone who likes good storytelling.
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How secret could NASA’s location really be, when it’s located in the middle of a cornfield within driving distance of civilization? It should have been placed in the desert somewhere.
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NASA made a big deal interrogating Cooper about how he discovered their secret location, and he never tells them the truth. And then the issue is dropped and forgetten as soon as the subject shifts to the mission. Like, okay?
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NASA has invested all this time and money to send a crew through the wormhole, but they don’t have a pilot already lined up for this mission? How convenient then that Cooper conveniently plops into their lap like a gift from the gods! What were they planning to do without him?
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Ann Hathaway’s character presents as clinical, unemotional, and hardnosed. But we’re supposed to not only believe that she’s so love struck that she discards logical thought as soon as tough decisions have to be made, but also that Cooper is astute enough to intuit that she’s love struck in the complete absence of any data? Cooper, the unapologetic scientist who misses the STAY clue his daughter pointed out to him, who was taken surprise by Mann’s trickery, and who was shocked that there was no Plan A for failure to smell the bullshit himself? I’m not buying that this guy guessed that Brandt was in love with an off-screen character.
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Maybe I missed it, but why don’t we see Cooper struggle at all with his decision to leave? Not that there’s any doubt he would go, but you would think that the whole love of a father thing would mean there’d be at least half a scene with him pondering all the memories he was going to miss. The ethics of leaving behind kids who have already lost a mother to be cared for by an old man who very well might be on his last lung…where was his struggle with this? He was seemingly on that shuttle less than a day after discovering NASA.
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When he greets his daughter at the end, none of her children and grandchildren respond to him as though they are overjoyed at seeing their famous ancestor alive and walking around. They look at him as though he’s nothing special, and then his daughter sends him away. WTF?!
7… Plus all the stuff everyone else mentioned.
And here’s another thing that just now started to bug me. Mann’s reasoning for killing Cooper and running off to the docking station made no sense. I understand why he signaled that the planet was potentially hospitable; he wanted to be rescued. But once they’d come, there would be no real harm in telling them the truth about the planet being lifeless. At worse they would have chewed him out, but they would’ve gotten over it. Since they’d lost that guy back on the water world, adding Mann to the crew would have cost them nothing.
This plot twist was interesting, but it was contrived. The only purpose it seems to have served was to validate Brandt’s decision to go to Edmund’s planet. And also conjure up memories of 2001.
There was a reddit thread that pointed out an interesting plot hole. Matthew McConaughey plays an astronaut named Cooper and, in one of the video diaries, his son shows him his new grandson who he says he named Coop after him. Then, at the end of the movie, Cooper is confused that the space station is named Cooper station and it’s revealed that it’s named after his daughter, Murphy Cooper, meaning Cooper is his last name. So does that mean Cooper now has a grandson that had to go through life named Coop Cooper?
Another thing that puzzled me was why he sent the message “STAY” through the bookcase in the black hole. This puzzled me for two reasons:
- It’s pointless because he knows what is going to happen. His daughter will draw attention to it and he will ignore it. So why bother sending it again? He’ll only end up back in the black hole again in the next incarnation. Is he going to send “STAY” every time and remain in some kind of eternal loop?
He should have sent the message “GO” to try and break the timeline. At the very least his daughter would have thought the bookcase ghost wants him to go and maybe then she wouldn’t have gone into a thirty year tantrum. She would have started sending him video messages earlier and maybe would have got started on the gravity equation earlier and come up with a solution.
- Why did he want to tell his earlier self to stay anyway? What would have been achieved through that? The earth is dying anyway so it’s a last ditch attempt to save humanity. There’s no point in him staying - that would just be giving up (which isn’t in his character). Might as well give it a try. And it was all going quite well really. Surprisingly well considering. He’s been on several planets, experienced relativity and flown into a black hole and was still alive. And, after all that, he gets the chance to send one message back to his younger self and the message he chooses to send is “Don’t bother”? Seems like he’s got a chance to reboot every time if he can think of a better message to send. He should send the message “GO BUT DON’T TRUST MANN”
And 3: What suddenly compelled him to signal NASA’s coordinates? One minute he was pushing out STAY in a weepy panic, then the next minute he wanted to make sure his past self knew where NASA was so he’d leave. People don’t behave like this.
What you are missing is Mann went crazy.
He says at one point (maybe after he’s already busted up Cooper’s helmet, although I can’t remember for sure) that he never imagined his planet would be uninhabitable, and that it wouldn’t be the one to colonize. He wanted to not just be the brave astronaut that led the 12 astronauts to space, but for the new Mann planet to be the next Earth. So I’m guessing his thought process was something like this:
[ul]
[li]He lands on his planet.[/li][li]He sends out the good data, maybe from false optimism, or he already made his plan to get people to rescue him[/li][li]He finds out from his rescuers that most of the planets are no good, but that Edmund’s planet might be viable.[/li][li]He’ll take the space craft, go to Edmund’s planet, implement Plan B.[/li][li]He’ll be able to live, and to pass down the story about how he saved all of the human race. [/li][/ul]
This is just my speculation, but I could see his thought process being something like that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Cooper need the big Endurance spacecraft to get back to Earth? As far as everyone but Mann knew, it would be fine for Cooper to take that to get back to Earth, they had everything the needed down on the planet to implement plan B.
But Mann actually needed to get to Endurance to take it over to Edmund’s planet. If Mann had just tried to explain to Cooper that he sent out false data, that the planet was lifeless, and that they all needed to go over to Edmund’s planet and that Cooper could never go back to Earth, Mann could see that Cooper would have done more than just chew him out. Cooper would have been extremely angry and have maybe killed him out of anger, or convinced the others that Mann needed to die because he was crazy and dangerous to the mission.
If Cooper had died on the water planet instead of Doyle, I think your idea would have maybe worked. He could have maybe convinced them to just pack back up and head over to Edmund’s planet. Especially since they’ve been with NASA much longer than Cooper and all think of Mann as this great heroic figure. But Cooper was much more of a wildcard to Mann.
Mann could’ve told Cooper the truth: that there was no Plan A. Sure this would’ve been hard for Cooper to take and maybe he would have disbelieved him, but he certainly could’ve persuaded the others to accept it, since the impossibility of returning home was science-based. The chain of logic that leads to “murder as the only option!” is not convincing when you consider that Mann had been alone for an untold number of years. Maybe he was ruthless and evil beneath it all, but I don’t think his tears of relief had been a ruse. He was happy to see people after his solitude. So for him to almost instantly try to kill them all off so she could hightail it to another planet of questionable safety is hard to swallow.
Also, if it can be assumed that a man like Cooper would be so determined to reunite with his kids that he’d be willing to kill Mann for standing in his way, then the fact that he agreed to go on this mission in the first place is paradoxical. Papa Bears don’t leave their kids behind to go on journeys as risky as this one.
And also, Mann was willing to accept 50:50 odds in killing himself while trying to kill Cooper. That sounds like the actions of a man whose survival instincts aren’t all that high, and yet, they were apparently high enough to send false signals to attract rescue. He was that willing to accept the risk of killing or hurting himself, having a difficult conversation should’ve been a viable option next to murder. Yes Cooper was a “wildcard”, but not an escaped felon.
I can overlook one or two internal inconsistencies, but all the characters in this movie seem riddled with them in ways that suggest incompetent writing.
I picked up on that in the theater. I just assumed it was a family nickname (calling him by his last name like they called his dad “Coop”) but they didn’t want to call the first child that, since she was a girl and/or in case dad was still living. Or the kids took his wife’s last name.
So yeah we finally saw it last night. It’s an enjoyable yarn, and yes a lot of complaints in this thread are valid. Definitely longer than it needed to be. The whole drone scene at the beginning, how long was that? Driving a truck roughshod through a cornfield is kind of cool (for a guy who never really grew up, maybe), but all of that could’ve been replaced with something else to establish the McConaughey character as being more than a farmer, that there’s more to him than what you see.
It really was worth seeing it in IMAX with an excellent sound system. San Francisco’s Metreon was a very good venue (the seats are a little tired, an issue with a 3-hr movie). The screen was good and the sound system excellent. Projector noise was somewhat intrusive. We were in row H, center seats and that seat location seemed about perfect for viewing. But those seats need upgrading, really. The sound levels got briefly loud in some parts, but at all times the dialogue was clear.
Didn’t mean to dwell on the theater…
Great visuals to augment a decent story. And I liked the casting. Lithgow, Caine, Grace, and Chastain as a scientist? (that worked well enough), and McConaughey was great, although sometimes mumbling. I’m not a big Hathaway fan, but she’s okay here.
Overall it was an enjoyable yarn, a somewhat simplistic overall story line yet coupled with complex relativity aspects. It was fun. And well worth it on the big screen with excellent sound.
It was a decent movie.
What it really did is remind me why Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the greatest sci-fi film ever.
So this recently. Good visuals. Some plot holes.
In regards to the “Love transcends space & time” stuff, I figure the writers wanted to through something in there that would appeal to those audience members who want to believe that Humans have “something special” about them that defies quantification.
Humans are among the few animals that can occasionally override instinct with intellect. It’s what makes us able to go and explore some of the most hostile environments in the first place! 
But no. I don’t believe that love transcends space-time.