But what if love is just biological gravity, midichlorians attracting each other through spacetime using the Force? It all makes sense now.
I figured the writers wrote themselves into a corner. Already stuck with 3 hours of previous material, they gave up and threw this plot turd in.
I really liked the robots. What does it say when that’s the only positive that really stands out?
Even the robots looked like the Monolith. The whole thing was a pastiche of themes from other films. Even the planets might as well have been named Waterworld and Hoth. The plot holes every two minutes are the only thing that held it together, no point in trying to list them all.
Apparently the Power Of Love, transmitted through the fifth dimension that somehow the humans will evolve into (and let’s leave the paradoxes alone), was how Coop learned Edmunds was dead and Anne Hathaway was alone and free for the taking. I did feel sorry for her as an actor, having to make that noble speech.
Good use of the bass speakers in the IMAX version, at least.
The sound system at my theater was not up to the task of the bass soundtrack. Every once in a while it just sounded like a truck hit the theater next door.
I saw it in IMAX and really enjoyed the experience of seeing it.
However, I can’t say I have any desire to ever see it again. I’m plopping it into my brain library of films that were turds.
Saw it today. Loved it. Loved the IMAX experience. Loved the acting. I even thought the tesseract time travel arc was a quite clever way to tie the movie together.
I really enjoyed the thing that many folks in this thread hated the most: love as transcendent. I know folks want Spock-ian only logic and rationality sci-fi, but I tend to like it when emotions are strongly considered. And you know, love did end up conquering time and space (or at least playing around with it) in the black hole tesseract.
It’s not that sci-fi has to be cold and mathematical. For me it just has to keep then suspension of disbelief going. The chrono love scene was so jarring it took me out of the movie, personally.
By contrast I thought the robot love story in blade runner was touching and didn’t feel forced. Even the AI in She and Transcendent seemed believable.
The human love speech in interstellar seemed more fitting coming from a maladjusted twilight vampire than a grown scientist woman.
I dunno what that says. Maybe I just don’t understand our species as much as I hoped.
PS even in trek, love is less odd… Data has his moments of emotionality, Spock too when he’s in Vulcan-heat. They don’t go on an odd tirade about interdimensional love when that happens, they just flirt and mate – not with each other.
Basically: Why does love need to conquer anything? It can exist perfectly in the realm of the not-supernatural.
I guess I just didn’t see anything wrong with her quote on love. I considered it quite powerful and in many ways true. The reasons she does let her emotions overflow is that, yes, love is quite powerful and can even transcend the dimensions of time and space - she loves someone who was quite beyond time and space from her original location (Earth) and it may indeed have colored her view. Though the idea of trusting things we may not be able to understand is all in bedded within the movie. (The interesting thing is that she was right on which planet was probably the better choice)
I simply don’t see what’s so objectionable about that.
“What’s wrong with the quote” is a fair question. This is my opinion only: (hope you don’t think this is overly argumentative; I just think it’s an interesting discussion)
So it is powerful and observable, and thus transcendental? Why? That is my primary gripe with it: The movie makes no attempt to explain, or emote, this transcendental aspect of love beyond a woman who longs for her partner and almost jeopardizes the future of all humanity in doing so. The love we see is that of the most mundane, ridiculous Hollywood sort, that of two people separated by a long time who are still crazy in love. There isn’t anything transcendental about that; it is the quintessential cliche of movie romance.
Diarrhea is powerful and observable too. Should it be the sixth dimension? Hunger? Lust? Sleepiness?
Even Cooper’s response is bizarre. Social utility does not cease because the object of one’s affection dies. It’s like asking what the utility of breast milk is if the baby dies – unexpected shit happens and we need a while to adjust back. Those phenomena can easily be attributed to the imprecision of evolution. And there’s often social utility still, in extended family units and social in-groups, even if a beloved member dies.
I have nothing against romances in general. Hell, I loved The Notebook. But in Interstellar it just feels forced. That speech came out of nowhere. There was no development of this romance, or this idea, beforehand, no sappy music, no buildup of emotion for the audience to empathize with… Anne Hathaway’s character wasn’t the sappy sort before or much after that, and to have her suddenly spring that on us, completely changing her character in a few seconds, was too much.
The thing is: She’s not a teenaged poet. She is supposed to be a space-time scientist, and an interdimensional exobiologist. Love and attraction should be part of her bread and butter. If she feels that there is something truly uniquely transcendental about this one particular aspect of human emotion, the movie owes it to us to show or explain that in the way that they did with the tesseract and gravity. Just throwing that speech in there willy-nilly isn’t enough. “Gravity transcends time; let us spend two hours showing you how. Oh, by the way, love transcends spacetime too. Just believe us, k?”
Contrast Brand’s love with Cooper’s love for his daughter. There was a very believable buildup of love there, and a tremendously difficult moment when he knows he has to leave her even as she’s begging him to stay. All throughout the movie he thinks of her, all across spacetime he is making very difficult decisions for her future, even as she hates him for it. That is a sort of transcendental love, yet Cooper never feels the need to put it into a sappy bad speech – he just does it, and cries a bit, as any believable human would.
So in short: Love is mighty powerful enough as an everyday human experience. When you try to make it even more than that, you have to satisfy the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” principle and really move the audience to believe it, through either a powerful emotional experience or a satisfying scientific explanation (or ideally, in the best sci-fis, both). This particular speech was just wholly unconvincing.
And also, the movie just ignores the difficult question of Brand’s actual love life post-wormhole. If she’s dimension-hopping at the end, she runs into the possibility of encountering a billion billion Wolfs and as many Brand clones competing for him, and all the other usual time travel paradoxes. If she truly believed love is transcendental, her despair and longing made no sense because she’s basically surrounded by an infinite number of her lovers…
Well put Reply, but also, simply, the logic doesn’t work.
If “I can love someone across the vast expanses of time and space” is proof that love is transcendent, then pretty much all mental phenomena are transcendent.
e.g. I want to punch Stalin in the face, therefore hate and aggression transcend space and time.
Similarly the other speech about how a parent’s love means they fight/try harder than a robot was nonsense.
I basically just want to applaud everything **Reply **said. It’s a perfect explanation of why that scene specifically didn’t work, and honestly, why the movie as a whole (especially the ending) was so jarring to a lot of people.
(Incidentally, her impassioned screed about love being transcendental doesn’t alter the fact that her lover is also dead, and there’s no indication that she got to spend any time with him alive instead of simply finding him dead on the surface when she finally got there.)
This was my beef too.
A movie that handled the love-as-a-natural-force theme a lot better was Contact. Jodie Foster’s character was as ambitious, rational, and empirical-minded as we’re supposed to believe Brand was; it was only when she was challenged with a experience of questionable objectivity that we see the love-as-a-force theme win out over her belief in the superiority of hard data.
Brand, in contrast, has no story arc that explains why she embraces the love-as-a-force paradigm. So it feels shoehorned into an otherwise non-emotional personality.
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m also bothered that Cooper blithely intuited that she was love struck. We’re not given any reason to believe he is especially skilled at peering into people’s hearts and minds previous to this discovery; in fact, we’re led to believe he’s prefers data over hunches. So what data did he use to figure out Brand’s motivation? None that was shared with us. How convenient!
When watching that scene, I cringed because, in the real world, he could’ve easily been wrong. Accusing a female scientist that her judgment was dangerously clouded by luuurve? Yeah, that doesn’t smack of sexism at all. If you’re gonna make accusations like that, fine, but you know, at least have some hard evidence. He didn’t, no one called him on it, and that made the scene pretty awful to me. Her speech just sealed the awfulness.
I believe that someone back at the NASA base told him that there was a rumor that Dr. Brandt and Dr. Mann were an item.
And that’s the divide, I guess - to me Reply’s post didn’t seem to refute anything really.
There isn’t? The power of love to exist in such strength, even with the separation that large and with the feeling that is bigger than anything else going on at the moment is something really transcendental, isn’t it?
The idea was mentioned - Cooper asks the computer if Brand and Edmundson had a thing - the computer refuses to say, but tells Cooper all he needs to know (the whole “you have a bad poker face” line).
But, I would argue that the speech seemingly coming out of nowhere is what argues FOR the transcendence of love. Someone who we assume to governed by cool rationality isn’t impervious to the power of love over our lives. In that it exerts such a force on her - even if she rationally knows that Edmundson is probably dead.
They don’t have to show us. We know it in our bones. We do crazy shit for love. It governs us in many ways.
The entire premise of the movie may actually be summed up in Brand’s speech there. Plan A was a ruse concocted because the elder Brand knew the power of love for one’s immediate bonds, and less of a reason to risk life and limb for abstract ‘humanity’. Dr. Mann references it in his rambling talk about the survival instinct (right before he jacked the spaceship). Cooper’s love for his daughter is plain. Why is it such a stretch that younger Brand may not experience the same sorts of love for someone else - enough that she desperately wants to go to her planet.
Whereas the difference is that I found the speech to be one of, if not the, most powerful scenes in the entire movie. It deeply affected me.
Maybe its a difference that cuts between those who may be spiritual and those who are not. In my atheist days I may have scoffed at it, but in my religious days now, I find it almost a given that love transcends all. So the speech is powerful and affective, but also deeply true.
Okay, I must have missed this rumor. Let’s hope he had more to go on than just a rumor.
He tried to verify it with the robot TARS (the scene with the “discretion setting” and Cooper figures it out even if TARS doesn’t go on and say it).
But we know that love can make us do irrational things. That’s not a shocker at all. That doesn’t make it akin to the 5th dimension, though. Not any more than lust–which can make us to even more irrational things than love!
It’s not a stretch to believe love could make her want to go to Mann’s planet. What’s a stretch is that she would let this desire overrule anything else, even if came at the expense of the mission. What’s also a stretch is that she would conflate love with a property of physics, in attempt to rationalize her desire.
Edmondson’s planet. And is that really a stretch? I don’t think so at all.
This TOR article is great reading on love as a force in sci-fi (though it didn’t like the speech as much as I did):
Also has a great quote from Firefly (about the first rule of flying [love]), so that’s a bonus :).
I don’t agree. I think she resorted to an emotional argument after the logical one clearly failed.