So, to start back up, I'm creating a new series of posts called Terrible Movies, where I will detail all of the reasons I dislike a specific movie. Now, to clarify, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the movie or think it isn't worth watching, but it seems that modern movie plots are super lazy, or in an attempt to be "deep" end up being "stupid". For round 1 I'm going to tackle Interstellar, which, if you haven't seen it yet, you should. First of all, I say you should see Interstellar because it is good, up until the ending. It starts out very slow, and continues to have many slow moments throughout, but I'm certain this is all intentional design. The movie has an amount of tension building and release that is rare in media these days, and I really like that about it. But you should be aware that the last 20 or so minutes ruins the whole thing. I will describe a specific moment in the movie when that corruption begins, but if you don't want to know that moment (I'll make it super unspoilery), then you've been warned, the ending is garbage.
If you don't want the entire movie to be ruined by the final 20 or so minutes, then quit at the following moment, or at least know that this is where my gripes really begin:
(highlight to read, though as unspoilery as possible)
At a point late in the movie there will be a scene when a small ship is in near total blackness, being pummeled and torn apart. It should be a pretty obvious moment. This is when you should just get up and walk out of the theater. Quickly now!
(and that's it)
From this point on below, total spoilers abound, so don't read further if you haven't seen it yet and don't want the movie ruined:
Alright, before I tackle that horrific ending, the only major gripe (I have a number of smaller gripes, but those are just moments of people being/speaking stupid, which is totally realistic, so I'll let them pass) I have before the terrible ending is the moments after Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) have their fight. I have no problems with the fight (other than utter disappointment that one of them didn't take advantage of their sweet arm boosters to send a super-powered-punch), but after the fight, Dr. Mann starts returning to the ship while Cooper is dying. Once Cooper gets his communicator reattached Brand (Anne Hathaway) jumps in her ship and rushes to the rescue. How did Dr. Mann get back up the ice mountains, slowly climbing and booster jumping his way back, before Brand got to Cooper, saved him, and gets back, in a space ship? It just doesn't make sense. For the sake of the plot, I'm willing to overlook it (barely), but it is, for me, a major plot hole.
Now for that ending. My first problem is probably the most glaring, that being the breaking of the first rule of time travel. You can't go back in time to save yourself, thus allowing yourself to survive and get to a point where you can go back in time to save yourself... The entire ending of the movie, and thus retroactively the entire movie, is completely based on this impossibility. What's more infuriating, is that it does this unnecessarily. At the end I'll explain a different ending that I came up with, that actually makes sense (at least more sense), and no one has to die! Well... at least not any people. Sorry TARS.
OK, so the paradox isn't the only problem with the ending. Even allowing for such outrage, what about programming a simple watch to contain the morse code version of what is likely a very complex mathematical equation? What about that little watch's battery then lasting decades? How would Murph know when, in the repetitive cycle, the message begins and ends? And... program the second hand on a simple, non-digital, watch? Really?
Cooper finally gets to see his daughter, on her death bed, after thinking he has lost her forever. She suggests he leaves so he doesn't have to watch her die of old age. He leaves. What? What? What? The last and only chance he has to spend time with his daughter after abandoning her, and he just walks out after talking to her for about a minute? As a father that has actually lost two children, I call total BS. He would spend every last second with her he could. He isn't going to get another chance to do so, this is it. This is actually less realistic than the time paradox problem.
But wait, that's not all! The reason he leaves her? To go after a girl that is all alone on a planet nearby. Nearby. Just through that worm hole. And... why has no one else gone to see her? How do they even know that she is there? Can't that wait for a few hours/days while he actually spends some time with his daughter that he spent nearly the entire movie regretting having to leave? BLARG!
OK, OK, I'm done. There's so much garbage in that ending that I actually started laughing once the credits started. I turned to my buddy that went with me to the movie and he was laughing too. It took us a minute to be able to even talk about it, but talk we did. We were both blown away at the utter nonsense. We attempted to find better solutions to the ending. I finally did, that night, while trying to fall asleep. It isn't perfect, but for me, it's acceptable. It's even a happier ending. This ending relies on the movie's early assumptions that the worm hole was in fact created by some other creatures in an attempt to save humanity, and not the future humans that used time travel to save themselves from the extinction that would have happened if they weren't saved by... their future selves... It also takes into consideration relativity, which the earlier parts of the movie did a decent job of accounting for, but totally forgot about at the end. I'm not going into a ton of detail, just giving you the basics, but I hope you'll get the gist of the it.
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As Cooper falls towards the black hole, Brand has escaped the black hole and is in line to land on the new future home of humanity. Because of relativity, time is passing much more slowly for Cooper, magnitudes slower than it did when merely on a planet orbiting the black hole, now for every minute it is a decade to Brand, and space being as big as it is, it's going to take several minutes, if not hours, for Cooper to actually reach the event horizon.
Brand lands on the planet and sets up the process of "growing" people. She goes into hibernation for the months it will take the machines to create the people. When she wakes she and CASE take care of the growing children, teaching them about everything, including who they are, how they got here, Cooper's sacrifice to make their survival possible, and about their duty to Earth. When they get old enough she and CASE teach them about Professor Brand's attempts to solve the problem of gravity manipulation. For the most part, Brand hibernates, allowing the new humans to take care of themselves, creating a new civilization, but educated and assisted by CASE, and every few years Brand will wake and check on their progress, reminding them about their duty to Earth, and to Cooper...
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Murph, knowing now that plan A was never meant to succeed, realizes that their only hope is that plan B works and eventually the new civilization will return to save them. Efforts are made to bring as many people as possible into the "Ark", their Earth bound space station from plan A, and into hibernation, awaiting future help.
Back on the new planet, it has been centuries, and mankind has returned to the technological advancements of the modern age, and then more. The worm hole to Earth's solar system has long since closed, but they continue to wait... And finally, their satellites receive the message from TARS. As the old robot passed through the event horizon he was able to relay data before being destroyed. It's enough. Humanity gets to work on learning everything they can about gravity, because time is running very short now. Cooper wasn't too far behind TARS.
Satellites have long since been launched to orbit the black hole, and Cooper's coordinates are known. With their new knowledge of gravity they open a worm hole, for just a split second, directly in front of Cooper's ship, transporting him safely to an orbit around the new planet. Then they wake Brand.
Back on Earth the plant eating "virus" has long since eaten itself into extinction, and the world is once again starting to come alive, but it will be centuries more before it is once again habitable. We see inside the Ark, dusty hibernation machines stacked everywhere. Suddenly, the entire space station begins to shake and rise. It breaks free of the Earth and enters a worm hole near the moon, bringing them to the new home of humanity.
Murph is awoken by Cooper, the same age as her, just as he said they might be. The End.
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Alright, before I tackle that horrific ending, the only major gripe (I have a number of smaller gripes, but those are just moments of people being/speaking stupid, which is totally realistic, so I'll let them pass) I have before the terrible ending is the moments after Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) have their fight. I have no problems with the fight (other than utter disappointment that one of them didn't take advantage of their sweet arm boosters to send a super-powered-punch), but after the fight, Dr. Mann starts returning to the ship while Cooper is dying. Once Cooper gets his communicator reattached Brand (Anne Hathaway) jumps in her ship and rushes to the rescue. How did Dr. Mann get back up the ice mountains, slowly climbing and booster jumping his way back, before Brand got to Cooper, saved him, and gets back, in a space ship? It just doesn't make sense. For the sake of the plot, I'm willing to overlook it (barely), but it is, for me, a major plot hole.
Now for that ending. My first problem is probably the most glaring, that being the breaking of the first rule of time travel. You can't go back in time to save yourself, thus allowing yourself to survive and get to a point where you can go back in time to save yourself... The entire ending of the movie, and thus retroactively the entire movie, is completely based on this impossibility. What's more infuriating, is that it does this unnecessarily. At the end I'll explain a different ending that I came up with, that actually makes sense (at least more sense), and no one has to die! Well... at least not any people. Sorry TARS.
OK, so the paradox isn't the only problem with the ending. Even allowing for such outrage, what about programming a simple watch to contain the morse code version of what is likely a very complex mathematical equation? What about that little watch's battery then lasting decades? How would Murph know when, in the repetitive cycle, the message begins and ends? And... program the second hand on a simple, non-digital, watch? Really?
Cooper finally gets to see his daughter, on her death bed, after thinking he has lost her forever. She suggests he leaves so he doesn't have to watch her die of old age. He leaves. What? What? What? The last and only chance he has to spend time with his daughter after abandoning her, and he just walks out after talking to her for about a minute? As a father that has actually lost two children, I call total BS. He would spend every last second with her he could. He isn't going to get another chance to do so, this is it. This is actually less realistic than the time paradox problem.
But wait, that's not all! The reason he leaves her? To go after a girl that is all alone on a planet nearby. Nearby. Just through that worm hole. And... why has no one else gone to see her? How do they even know that she is there? Can't that wait for a few hours/days while he actually spends some time with his daughter that he spent nearly the entire movie regretting having to leave? BLARG!
OK, OK, I'm done. There's so much garbage in that ending that I actually started laughing once the credits started. I turned to my buddy that went with me to the movie and he was laughing too. It took us a minute to be able to even talk about it, but talk we did. We were both blown away at the utter nonsense. We attempted to find better solutions to the ending. I finally did, that night, while trying to fall asleep. It isn't perfect, but for me, it's acceptable. It's even a happier ending. This ending relies on the movie's early assumptions that the worm hole was in fact created by some other creatures in an attempt to save humanity, and not the future humans that used time travel to save themselves from the extinction that would have happened if they weren't saved by... their future selves... It also takes into consideration relativity, which the earlier parts of the movie did a decent job of accounting for, but totally forgot about at the end. I'm not going into a ton of detail, just giving you the basics, but I hope you'll get the gist of the it.
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As Cooper falls towards the black hole, Brand has escaped the black hole and is in line to land on the new future home of humanity. Because of relativity, time is passing much more slowly for Cooper, magnitudes slower than it did when merely on a planet orbiting the black hole, now for every minute it is a decade to Brand, and space being as big as it is, it's going to take several minutes, if not hours, for Cooper to actually reach the event horizon.
Brand lands on the planet and sets up the process of "growing" people. She goes into hibernation for the months it will take the machines to create the people. When she wakes she and CASE take care of the growing children, teaching them about everything, including who they are, how they got here, Cooper's sacrifice to make their survival possible, and about their duty to Earth. When they get old enough she and CASE teach them about Professor Brand's attempts to solve the problem of gravity manipulation. For the most part, Brand hibernates, allowing the new humans to take care of themselves, creating a new civilization, but educated and assisted by CASE, and every few years Brand will wake and check on their progress, reminding them about their duty to Earth, and to Cooper...
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Murph, knowing now that plan A was never meant to succeed, realizes that their only hope is that plan B works and eventually the new civilization will return to save them. Efforts are made to bring as many people as possible into the "Ark", their Earth bound space station from plan A, and into hibernation, awaiting future help.
Back on the new planet, it has been centuries, and mankind has returned to the technological advancements of the modern age, and then more. The worm hole to Earth's solar system has long since closed, but they continue to wait... And finally, their satellites receive the message from TARS. As the old robot passed through the event horizon he was able to relay data before being destroyed. It's enough. Humanity gets to work on learning everything they can about gravity, because time is running very short now. Cooper wasn't too far behind TARS.
Satellites have long since been launched to orbit the black hole, and Cooper's coordinates are known. With their new knowledge of gravity they open a worm hole, for just a split second, directly in front of Cooper's ship, transporting him safely to an orbit around the new planet. Then they wake Brand.
Back on Earth the plant eating "virus" has long since eaten itself into extinction, and the world is once again starting to come alive, but it will be centuries more before it is once again habitable. We see inside the Ark, dusty hibernation machines stacked everywhere. Suddenly, the entire space station begins to shake and rise. It breaks free of the Earth and enters a worm hole near the moon, bringing them to the new home of humanity.
Murph is awoken by Cooper, the same age as her, just as he said they might be. The End.
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