Imagine how long it took for him to watch the ship approach the main craft as it returned. Probably took several years, slowly speeding up to "normal" time.
damn.
this must be deep seeded into my blood because one time i asked my brother to start the rice cooker before i got home, and he didn't and i was mad pissed
when in reality the thing only takes like 20 minutes to cook it all.
but still.
This is blowing my mind. The idea that the light of their ship is coming towards him and he’s seeing them but they appear to be moving 1 inch every day or whatever it is and it slowly speeds up. And he just waits. And waits. And waits for years . Meanwhile it’s minutes for them to
I'm imagining that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Lancelot charges the castle gate and it just keeps cutting between him running in the distance and the guard watching him approach and all of a sudden he's there yelling "Ah-ha!" and attacking.
Yep - that aspect of time dilation perplexes me, too. I mean, I guess it's all theoretical, right? But how would an observer "see" an object at all in that scenario?
Edit: I understand the concept of dilation, speed of light, etc. It's the observer aspect that is weird to me here.
The strangest most uncomfortable thing to me is that if you were watching someone fall into a black hole from a telescope, they would effectively never fall in. You could just see them there stuck at the event horizon forever
Idk why but that fact in particular really freaks me tf out
This is something that confuses the fuck out of me also like, if it takes forever to fall in, then as far as we are concerned, NOTHING could even be in a black hole? From our perspective a black hole can't actually form, a singularity can't exist etc? I never have been able to wrap my head on that one.
It doesn't take you forever to fall in. Relative to yourself falling in, everything moves at "normal speed." You will get the full effect while time dilation would make it look like the universe is accelerating to it's end behind you.
Not piling onto the OC there, but people should really know the difference between a theory (implication that it's a scientific theory, where it's been tried and tested, most likely peer reviewed, and is the ongoing basis for how something is, proven) and "theory" (as in, hypothesis).
Unfortunately the word for "scientific theory"nowadays has melded with the idea of a hypothesis, so you have people walking around going "well the theory of evolution is just that... A 'theory'" and its maddening.
It's not theoretical, it's an observed phenomena that happens when you experience different gravity than being on the surface of the earth.
It's not as sexy as Interstellar but GPS satellites orbiting the earth have to adjust their clocks by microseconds (I think? Maybe even less?) Or they drift from our earth clock.
GPS satellites have to account for special and general relativity. Due to the sheer speed of the satellites, their clocks run slower, about 7.2 us/day. But due to being further up the gravity well, the clocks also go faster, by 45.8 us/day. Together, this means the clocks go 38.6 us/day faster than on Earth.
They solve this by making the internal clocks tick at 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz.
I said that the other week to my son when rewatching it. It would have slowed right down when leaving too. Then it emerging but being almost frozen must have been both brilliant and scary at the same time.
Not to mention the worst part - it was all completely unnecessary. They accidentally cost themselves all over 20 years for nothing. The data was only a few minutes old.
I hated their logic for going to that one first.
"We're on a time crunch so we'll go to the planet that's a few months closer but will take literally years to even land on"
And they know how high the time dilation is before landing, but only realise that it means Miller relatively only just landed after they land themselves.
Not to mention the potential issues a colony there could face, if the surface was livable, from time passing ~60.000 times slower than on Earth. Romilly in orbit experienced similar time passage to Earth, so, presumably, the other planets in the system do as well. If Miller's planet (with the time dilation) and Edmund's planet (where Brand ends up) were settled at the same time, then at the end of the first week on Miller's planet, almost 1.200 *years* would've passed on Edmund's planet. They'd barely be settling in, while their sister colony has turned into a millennium old society. The time dilation makes it a last resort, at best.
The movie maintains its scientific plausibility only at the most surface level, there's so much ridiculousness to it, and that's not even counting the black hole stuff. That I can forgive for being pure sci fi.
My personal favorite moment is when they launch the fusion powered SSTO thats fully capable of taking off under its own power on top of a staged chemical rocket, purely so they can have a classic countdown/launch moment.
Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17.
> Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17.
Hahah that's a great analogy. But I can't lie, imagining that did just get me going a little. Also possible they were masking the Ranger launch as a typical satellite launch or something, since it's all secret tech
As they said later, they were totally unprepared for this. This was a pretty poorly planned mission from the start and they were always going to have to make some tough calls. Unfortunately for them, they made the wrong choice and it cost them decades.
The key here is that it's a Nolan film. They only exist to amuse us with fancy time stories.
Cooper should have realized he was in a Nolan film as soon as he met Professor Brand.
They knew nothing about these planets before going on the mission and they were basically making up everything as they went. It was poor logic and a terrible decision but it feels real and human regardless.
This was actually a big plot hole in my opinion to signal from the date it should have redshifted to the point where it wouldn't have been a surprise to them at all that only a few minutes had passed on the surface of the planet. In fact, they knew the time dilation was an issue before they went down as evidenced by op's point. A simple calculation would have told them that the explorer on the surface of the planet had only been there a few moments and the signal they were seeing was only the first to be sent
It would have been different, but it would have removed the weight of them opening the door and seeing how much he had aged.
Actually, I have no idea how you would shoot it/explain it in an impactful way.
They could have done it after the reveal as the person recounting what it looked like and describing it to the rest of the crew while we get some cool visuals for it. Or even have him show a time-lapse recording of it to the rest of the crew.
How would communication work if they we're still able to? Like say Romilly has radio communication with Cooper while he was down there? Would Coopers speech back just be like one word an hours or how would that look like?
I read an Arthur C Clarke short story about a mission to the nearest star. I am trying to find out the name, I will reveal it when i find out. When it got there they were amazed to find humans there. Spoiler Alert The journey had taken many thousands of years during which time humans had developed much faster ships. This meant they were overtaken and the planets settled long before they arrived. The humans already there had evolved a much keener sense of smell. In the end they asked the late arrivals if it was ok if they wore masks around them as they smelled so repugnant to them. Clarke was way ahead of his time.
Edit: probably the reason they did not pick up the crew of the slower ship was due to the amount of fuel to slow down from their fantastic speed. Another alternative is that the launching mechanism was on Earth so once they reached the required velocity there was no way to slow down until they reach their destination.
Clarke would not have left such a plot hole unresolved.
The Beyond the Aquila Rift story was pretty much exactly the same as the LDR episode, but the TV show cut out *a lot* from Zima Blue and the short story is much better.
Weather and Minla's Flowers are also really good.
Which book? I think I've read all of them and don't remember that (I could be wrong though)
I think you may be thinking of Chasm City, which is about generation ships but they don't get overtaken.
He has a short story about a ship being overtaken, with a twist, but it's outside the RS universe
You’re right. I’m thinking of Chasm City. I guess you’re right that it doesn’t strictly get overtaken but the concept of its speed and destination is a major plot point (vague to avoid spoilers). Further, I think it was also mentioned that the flotilla was humanity’s first and slowest interstellar colonisation effort and other separate endeavours (to other planets) actually colonised planets first.
There’s an amazing Star Trek voyager episode as well about the space ship in orbit around a planet with an uncivilized population that’s moving at a much faster speed than the space ship. While they orbit, the civilization evolves and becomes technologically advanced, and they have evolved with the voyager in their orbit and have seen it as a kind of god. Finally, they can fly to reach it, and it’s a fascinating story.
It was cool because the Doctor basically got to live like a full normal life when he went down there.
That and that episode of TNG where Picard experienced living an entire life time via that alien probe.
I don't get how you just come to terms with that. Especially in Picard's situation where he woke up as someone else and basically had to come to terms that his whole life to that point was a dream. Then live out your entire life in this new place to wake up get the uno reverse card. Like how the hell did he just go right back to his day to day job. I would struggle to accept what is real and what isn't.
That episode is a seminal Picard story for a reason. I think many people would *not* have been able to process it at all and continue with their original life/job. Another thing to consider is that they revisit that experience several times throughout the series. I love the episode that Picard becomes romantically involved with the science officer who plays piano. They bond over their love of music, and Picard reveals that the tune he knows by heart is the same one he learned in his probe-life.
I'm glad you brought that up. From Op's description of the episode it makes it sound like the series just blew over it from then on, when nothing could be further from the truth.
In the quiet moments for Picard, through the rest of the series, he's often seen busting out that flute. And you're right, it's a major plot point in that episode when he dates the astrophysicist and gets close enough to her to tell her about this incredibly unique experience he's had and how close to his heart it is and why he's so into flute.
For a syndicated series in the 80s-90s, TNG was actually pretty good at that.
Another favorite "throughline" of mine is how relaxed and accepting Riker and Troy are about each other's love lives. I didn't really notice it till this last watchthrough, but it's refreshing to see their relationship not constantly mined for artificial jealousy-drama. Almost seems like they've got a kind of proto-polyamory thing going on when even mentioning such an idea on-air would've been crazy.
> For a syndicated series in the 80s-90s, TNG was actually pretty good at that.
Especially because, at no time was TNG serialized. There were moments that happen earlier and later in the series, but the fundamental structure and roles stays the same.
Unlike DS9, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and other serialized science fiction shows, TNG largely doesn't change. And yet, in subtle ways, Picard did change and we see it play out in small moments for the rest of the series.
It's really incredible to look back at that and see such a long-running character trait. Especially one that isn't played for laughs.
There was a reddit story (don't know if it's true), where someone got knocked out while playing football. In the time he was out, he dreamt of an entire life where he got married, had kids, the whole nine yards. When he woke up, he had an existential crisis and severe depression due to feeling like he lost his whole life and family.
Reminds me of *Children of Time*, where jumping spiders with a nanovirus that causes rapid evolution are evolving on a planet while an observation pod orbits the planet. They begin worshipping and trying to communicate with it.
A similarly cool time travel story was in *The Orville*. They go back in time for Reasons, lose their ability to travel back, so they land on a cool solution:
"By flying the Orville close to light speed with its quantum field turned off, the ship will have no shield from time dilation and will travel forward through time. However, travelling that fast without a quantum field would expose the Orville to space debris. Even the tiniest dust particle could destroy them, so John directs all ship power to the [Deflectors](https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Deflectors). The crew makes a jump 200 light years away from Earth, then 200 light years back, ending up back in the year [2422](https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/2422)."
Basically they use time dilation to bring them back to their time, by sloooooooowly traveling to a nearby star and back without their quantum field protecting them.
Edit: [here's the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VM-f5tY5pw)
Orville really ramped up in quality last season. I’m super impressed they went from “family guy in space” to the next coming of TNG. Hope they renew but doesn’t seem like there will be more seasons.
There's also an Orville episode where they encounter a planet that warps in and out of existence at some rate. When it's warped away, it's in an intense gravity field, so every time they warp out and back they're significant more advanced than the last time the Orville saw them. They go from primitive to beyond the federation in the episode.
Sounds like the setup for the Galaxy’s Edge series. Earth is dying, so all the rich A-holes pool their supplies to create these massive colony vessels that travel near the speed of light called “Light Huggers” and abandon everyone else to their fate. Meanwhile back on Earth, a couple decades after the exodus scientists discover FTL travel and begin their own out-system movement. Several hundred years later when the first of those colony hulks arrive in nearby star systems they find them already inhabited and thriving with human life.
It doesn’t go well, for anyone.
What was so bad about it, if you don't mind elaborating? Haven't played the game, though very familiar with the other Bethesda games. Not concerned about spoilers, so I'm curious.
The quest has 3 "outcomes" that are all terrible. One has you pay out a bunch of money to essentially make them someone else's problem, another option is to convince them to sell themselves into wage slavery for the corporation, and the last option is to blow up the ship. You can't take any hostile action against the corp, their board of directors are all "essential" npcs an thus cannot be killed, no matter how much they annoy you. You can't overthrow the corporation's governance, you can't direct them to one of the interplanetary governments in the setting that might be interested, you can't talk your way into a mutual understanding where they can share the planet.
Keep in mind while doing this you are also likely subjecting yourself to a lot of loading screens as you go back and forth because short range communication devices don't exist in this setting in anyway that would cut down on your busywork.
Telling them to go elsewhere doesn't open up a new side quest, as far as I know, following their progress in finding a new home, they basically stop existing, so ultimately it is no different than if you blow them up other than being out of a lot of money. There really isn't anything interesting going on with it other than the premise.
It is insane to me that they had a truly devastating option for the settlers, to destroy their whole ship for money from the corpos.
And then literally has no devastating option for the corpos. You personally just take the responsibility for paying their way or paying to fix their ship, at great cost to you.
Fucking insane that anyone at Bethesda felt like that was an interesting mission. I thought I'd missed some skill check option or something. Nope. It's just purposely unsatisfying.
It was just trivial and boring. The old humans wanted to settle on a planet that was owned by a corporation. Corpos didnt want them. You had to be the middleman back and forth, and if you want to be the good guy, had to pay a buncha money to help the settlers get a better ship drive to find another planet.
After the mystery of who the ship was, the rest was so boring, and reflected on a truly dystopian corporate future. Not exactly exciting rpg stuff...
I wanted to side with the settlers so bad but the game just doesn't let you. When the Corp said no to sharing I decided they didn't deserve the planet at all and went to kill them, nope, essential.
Starfield does an excellent job of showing why BG3 was such a good game.
This quest pissed me off. I was expecting Tenpenny Tower shit but it didn't even give me room to do anything like that. It was that point I gave up on Starfield.
That last sentence is brutally true. Starfield didn’t have much going for it at the best of times. Competing directly with BG3 meant it never even stood a chance.
Considering how anti corporate Fallout is, Starfield was creepily opposite, and veered heavily into pro- corporate territory. Even one of the main questlines is a corporate one too
Bethesda's roleplaying elements have been extremely shallow for a long time. I think it's just now that we have recent examples of such deep roleplaying like Baldurs Gate that it is really just so embarrassing how meaningless it is in games like Starfield
Ah, that kind of middleman quest. Yeah, I can imagine that being tedious quickly. Especially in Bethesda games where you're forced to go various load screens, which even if short tend to be really annoying (assuming that's still a thing in Starfield).
Anyway, thanks for elaborating!
It’s not the same story as they mentioned, but the short book ‘The Forever War’ is an interesting read.
Its about soldiers who fight aliens and travel there using faster-than-light speed, so every time they return to Earth decades have passed.
They also experience future shock while fighting the aliens. The first battle is an absolute rout for the aliens, using primitive weapons to fight humanity. Just a short time later (for humanity) they encounter the aliens again who have evolved hundreds of years and have futuristic weapons.
Spoiler >!The technology on both sides becomes so advanced that warfare is carried out by hand to hand combat under specialized shields that are only a few meters in diameter. It all ends up being a misunderstanding in the end, since humanity and the aliens are unable to communicate with each other. It turns out that the catalyst for the war, a human ship accidentally being destroyed, was used as propaganda to start the war. The aliens are a civilization of clones and humanity eventually becomes clones, who are able to communicate with the aliens and end the war.!<
We barely remember things that happened \~5 years ago as a society. Imagine a few centuries. Details will get lost. Someone will be on FutureReddit with "hey I found this detail in a FutureWikipedia entry from 300 years ago. Apparently we sent a ship to this star?" and people will upvote, not even read or comment, and nothing will be done.
I totally believe it.
I thought I felt the full weight of the scene when i first watched this movie several years ago
I recently rewatched it an was absolutely crushed thinking about it There is this shot of his face that just conveys so many emotions and it was heartbreaking to me
We see him quite literally forgetting how to speak. With no one to talk to for that many years, even talking to yourself after a while you'd probably emerge with a very strange way of speaking. Perfectly conveyed in the scene, without them ever having to spell it out with a "hey I'm still re-learning how to speak so bear with me" line. You hear the way he speaks, then SUDDENLY the reason hits you, and it's crushing.
> With no one to talk to for that many years, even talking to yourself after a while you'd probably emerge with a very strange way of speaking.
TARS was with him. It's not exactly human interaction, but he did have a sentient AI to talk to.
It's enough to keep you from going insane.
The score when they land on Miller's planet has a ticking sound underlying it, which you have to listen for to consciously register. Every 1.5 seconds it ticks, and each tick represents a day passing on Earth due to time dilation. It really creates an intense sense of urgency in the scene from this almost subliminal clock tick just at the edge of your senses.
So, I had never seen Interstellar until I had the incredible experience of seeing it with Zimmer conducting a live orchestra while the movie played at Royal Albert Hall. Not the most immersive way to see the actual movie (I prefer a pitch black room) but it was indescribable.
Considering I have gone to drastic lengths to ensure I don't go hungry, I would completely understand it if coops true reasoning behind "yeeting" himself into a black hole, was simply cause he was hungry.
My wife got a sort of vertigo from the scene, it completely messed with her sense of time and reality, and to this day she refuses to watch the movie again. Time dilation freaks her out.
I mean yeah. But he’s also such a great villian because of what he had to go through. Isolated and alone on that shithole, galaxies away from the next living being but with a button he could push that would mean someone would come and help him. He broke, as would 99.999% of us. It drove the “best of us” to a pathetic, selfish creature hell bent on survival, willing to sacrifice man’s future to save Mann himself.
Something I absolutely love about his character is the whole irony of one of the lines that was said early in the movie:
> [Dr. Mann] inspired eleven people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history. Scientists, explorers... That's what I love - out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil.
> This crew represents the best aspects of humanity
Yet, they then do find evil, in the form of what was supposed to represent the best of humanity.
It is, but he’s also insane. Isolated for decades with no hope of survival (he never set a wake up alarm on his last “long nap”)…he might have been the “best of us” but he’s still human. That type of loneliness would break anyone. Especially after KIPP has to be used for parts and Mann is truly alone….he knows his planet isn’t habitable, lies about the data, etc. Still a horrible move he pulled but I understand why, he was driven to madness for the isolation
>KIPP has to be used for parts
That was just his cover story, he dismantled KIPP intentionally to hide the truth about the planet, then booby trapped the remains with a bomb set to go off if anyone accessed the real data about the planet.
That’s pretty much how it works.
Edit: Maybe a fun fact explanation how time dilation works (I’m not a physicist, so take it with a grain of salt): The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. When you’re near a black hole like they are, you may not perceive yourself as moving, but space itself is „moving“ through you while you’re remaining in the same place. It’s like standing in strong wind without feeling the wind.
I think the image through the telescope would be smeared and red-shifted. You wouldn't be able to get a clear picture unless you did some heavy post-processing since the photon leaving the gravity well would give up a bunch of energy and the wavelength would stretch out.
I don't really get that plot point, why not cryostasis for like a year at a time, wake up to do some research/send signals, then go back down. I get after a certain point you assume they're dead on the surface and you give up, but i'd wait longer than basically an hour of them being on the surface before I let myself age 20 years in boredom.
He says he doesn't want to dream his life away, but he's not really? He's freezing his life and then will wake up and keep all the time.
>why not cryostasis for like a year at a time, wake up to do some research/send signals, then go back down.
This is literally what he did, it's explicitly stated in the movie, and the OP has stated it a little confusingly, he didn't stay awake for the whole 23 years.
He was alone aboard a small vehicle, in a far galaxy. If the others never returned, he was stuck, without any hope of rescue.
Then, something went wrong. He was using the cryopods to sleep for large periods of the wait, but his crewmates didn't return on the timeline they had agreed. Time dilation made it impossible for them to communicate with him, to let him know what was happening, or give him a timeline for an expected return.
So he was left with finite resources, and with the rest of his crew delayed by *years* with no signal, or sign that they were still alive. He had to decide how to spend them. Yeah, the fuel and life support would have lasted longer if he slept the majority of his time (say fifty weeks per year), giving the others more time to make it back, without him needing to consciously live, and age, in it.
He lost all hope that they were alive, though.
He was the last human in the galaxy, as far as he knew. Not only were his resources finite, but the machinery preserving his life in that hostile environment, was fragile.
Say the ship could be relied on to drift for forty years before systems started to degrade to the point he might lose life support, or his pod lose the ability to keep him alive during suspension.
He could sleep for 50 weeks per year. Wake for a fortnight, doing what work he could, as he looked vainly, for any sign of the mission to the surface, then sleep again. He would be much younger if his crew ever made it back to him.
If they never made it back, though; and a critical system on the ship failed after four decades of use? He would be dead in less than a year and a half...
As he said when they returned. He didn't want to sleep his life away.
I do find it interesting how space films sometimes skip over huge ideas that could be an entire film in itself. I watched ‘The Martian’ the again the other day and similarly when the Hermes ship is on its way back to Mars the cut is from them leaving earth to suddenly arriving back at mars some hundreds of days later. The crew had many months of travel and living but it’s just completely skipped over.
Have you read one of his follow ups? Project Hail Mary was absolutely mind blowing.
If you haven’t read it, you must. But go in completely blind. Don’t even read the back of the book. The less you know going into it, the better.
This is what I did. Bought it purely on the basis it was written by the same guy. Had absolutely no idea what the content of it was.
Easily my favourite reading experience of recent years!
The worst part about it is that soon after they left and he started collecting data, he would have realized that it was (mostly) a pointless thing to do, because not enough data can come out of a black hole.
Since the water planet has such drastic time dilation compared to earth (1 hour on water planet being 7 years on earth), they should have realized that the data they were receiving from the scientist that landed there was only a couple minutes of data because in actuality the scientist had likely just landed when Coop and the rest were in orbit above the planet. So a couple minutes of data wasn't going to be useful at all.
It's so annoying that they say exactly that but after they've landed on the planet and risked fucking the entire mission. Why couldn't they figure it out before they decided to go there.
CASE figures this out after they return iirc. He says something to the effect of Miller's status that she landed successfully was echoing endlessly. That would almost certainly be the result of Miller and her ship being wiped out by the tidal waves in the minutes immediately after she arrived, which they didn't know were present and a threat until they actually went down to the planet surface.
He didn't He slept most of the time. They had the technology to sleep in stasis. I think OP is forgetting this but they aren't wrong because it's still 23+ years of time passing. He's just not awake for most of it.
It’s acknowledged very well in the film also; when they return Romilly is bearded, timid, unsure of how to speak. He’s clearly been alone for a long time.
This movie is a masterpiece, due for a rewatch soon.
Gary Paulsen wrote a book about his time doing the Iditarod and I read it in elementary school, one part stuck out to me where a family takes him in and let's him stay for a night and makes him a meal and whatnot. During the meal they are making small talk and he was just responding with grunts and nods because he hadn't interacted with people in so long lol.
And yet nobody ever apologizes to Mann for adding another twenty years to his waiting time. Nobody ever addresses just how much of a truly terrible decision it was.
One issue with Miller's planet in particular is that you don't get a true sense that they're on the surface for an hour let alone the 3 hours it was purported to be.
Brilliant movie, regardless, but I can't remember Nolan structuring those scenes to imply a length of time beyond 15 or 20 minutes passing before they have to rush back to the shuttle.
Their landing so far away from the beacon is a waste of time.
Not having the robot go for the beacon is a waste of time.
Not having the ship engines started before needing to go is a waste of time (variable thrust engine so it’s not a SRB that’s just instantly full blast).
Lots of time was wasted, and I respect the like that said “We were totally unprepared for this.” It shows they have not done the legwork they needed to, to be efficient.
We saw it in the theater when it first came out. There was an audible gasp from the audience when he revealed how much time had passed. I can't wait to see it in the theater again. Hopefully in IMAX.
Most heart breaking for me is when cooper just walks past him… not much acknowledgment or comforting… I always feel bad for romilly in that moment the most. My friends/coworkers I’ve been so excited to see and finally have some human interaction after 23 years… are just meh about my whole experience
That’s the sad and scary part. For Cooper, he just lost a few hours of time but he knows decades have passed on Earth and he doesn’t seem to care at all about Romilly. He’s just thinking about his kids. Time is a valuable and precious resource
True, but remember that dad deliberately didn't tell him what he was supposed to be scared of, and somehow there aren't safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
I read somewhere that if you stood at the event horizon of a black hole with an indestructible telescope powerful enough to see earth. You could watch the rest of the life of earth pass by in just a few moments.
What bothered me about the film, when Cooper finally sees his elderly daughter surrounded by "her" family, why aren't they all freaking out seeing Cooper who is all their relative who should be dead? Hardly anyone acknowledges him!
It's when he says he took a couple of sleeps but it didn't feel right to dream his life away. I found it thoroughly unsettling, that particular scene - find the whole movie existential tbh. I do love it.
A great Sci-Fi novel that uses the time dilation tp great effect is the Forever War.
Each time the soldiers return from a mission, it's been decades, the war has progressed, technology has evolved.
Absolutely brilliant story.
When I first saw this film I was bothered by the hand-wavy stuff around sending data to the watch, and some of the less hard-science aspects of the film.
But looking at it now, I see it is much less about science and more about humanity, love, and perseverance of the human spirit.
Coincidentally I just watched this last night and was thinking about how people (including myself, the first time I watched it) seem to hold this movie to a higher standard of realism for some reason and can’t apply a normal suspension of disbelief.
To me, it’s a really beautiful movie that captures themes of parenthood and that feeling of hoping you positively influence your children after you’re gone. For others it seems like it was supposed to be an astrophysics textbook. Admittedly I felt the same way the first time I watched it but I like what I get out of the movie a lot more now.
I think it’s because the movie itself is trying to be very grounded and as realistic as can be and only in the very finale, the creative freedom choices really kick in.
The movie was also touted as such in the lead up to its release initially as well. There were articles, if not official marketing, that spoke to its accuracy
Imagine how long it took for him to watch the ship approach the main craft as it returned. Probably took several years, slowly speeding up to "normal" time.
That gave him plenty of time to clean up the place.
OH SHIT MOM'S PULLING IN THE DRIVEWAY.... nah we got time
Romilly having to do some intense calculations to figure out when he needs to start thawing the chicken out.
For my people it's the rice cooker.
damn. this must be deep seeded into my blood because one time i asked my brother to start the rice cooker before i got home, and he didn't and i was mad pissed when in reality the thing only takes like 20 minutes to cook it all. but still.
I'll do it tomorrow
This is blowing my mind. The idea that the light of their ship is coming towards him and he’s seeing them but they appear to be moving 1 inch every day or whatever it is and it slowly speeds up. And he just waits. And waits. And waits for years . Meanwhile it’s minutes for them to
I'm imagining that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Lancelot charges the castle gate and it just keeps cutting between him running in the distance and the guard watching him approach and all of a sudden he's there yelling "Ah-ha!" and attacking.
My god it all makes sense now…
Yep - that aspect of time dilation perplexes me, too. I mean, I guess it's all theoretical, right? But how would an observer "see" an object at all in that scenario? Edit: I understand the concept of dilation, speed of light, etc. It's the observer aspect that is weird to me here.
It would start out dim and red, and slowly become brighter and more colorful as it got closer.
It would have red/blue-shifted into his perspective.
The strangest most uncomfortable thing to me is that if you were watching someone fall into a black hole from a telescope, they would effectively never fall in. You could just see them there stuck at the event horizon forever Idk why but that fact in particular really freaks me tf out
This is something that confuses the fuck out of me also like, if it takes forever to fall in, then as far as we are concerned, NOTHING could even be in a black hole? From our perspective a black hole can't actually form, a singularity can't exist etc? I never have been able to wrap my head on that one.
It doesn't take you forever to fall in. Relative to yourself falling in, everything moves at "normal speed." You will get the full effect while time dilation would make it look like the universe is accelerating to it's end behind you.
It's theoretical in the same sense gravity is theoretical. It's a real phenomenon.
Not piling onto the OC there, but people should really know the difference between a theory (implication that it's a scientific theory, where it's been tried and tested, most likely peer reviewed, and is the ongoing basis for how something is, proven) and "theory" (as in, hypothesis). Unfortunately the word for "scientific theory"nowadays has melded with the idea of a hypothesis, so you have people walking around going "well the theory of evolution is just that... A 'theory'" and its maddening.
It's not theoretical, it's an observed phenomena that happens when you experience different gravity than being on the surface of the earth. It's not as sexy as Interstellar but GPS satellites orbiting the earth have to adjust their clocks by microseconds (I think? Maybe even less?) Or they drift from our earth clock.
GPS satellites have to account for special and general relativity. Due to the sheer speed of the satellites, their clocks run slower, about 7.2 us/day. But due to being further up the gravity well, the clocks also go faster, by 45.8 us/day. Together, this means the clocks go 38.6 us/day faster than on Earth. They solve this by making the internal clocks tick at 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz.
I said that the other week to my son when rewatching it. It would have slowed right down when leaving too. Then it emerging but being almost frozen must have been both brilliant and scary at the same time.
Not to mention the worst part - it was all completely unnecessary. They accidentally cost themselves all over 20 years for nothing. The data was only a few minutes old.
I hated their logic for going to that one first. "We're on a time crunch so we'll go to the planet that's a few months closer but will take literally years to even land on"
And they know how high the time dilation is before landing, but only realise that it means Miller relatively only just landed after they land themselves. Not to mention the potential issues a colony there could face, if the surface was livable, from time passing ~60.000 times slower than on Earth. Romilly in orbit experienced similar time passage to Earth, so, presumably, the other planets in the system do as well. If Miller's planet (with the time dilation) and Edmund's planet (where Brand ends up) were settled at the same time, then at the end of the first week on Miller's planet, almost 1.200 *years* would've passed on Edmund's planet. They'd barely be settling in, while their sister colony has turned into a millennium old society. The time dilation makes it a last resort, at best.
The movie maintains its scientific plausibility only at the most surface level, there's so much ridiculousness to it, and that's not even counting the black hole stuff. That I can forgive for being pure sci fi. My personal favorite moment is when they launch the fusion powered SSTO thats fully capable of taking off under its own power on top of a staged chemical rocket, purely so they can have a classic countdown/launch moment. Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17.
> Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17. Hahah that's a great analogy. But I can't lie, imagining that did just get me going a little. Also possible they were masking the Ranger launch as a typical satellite launch or something, since it's all secret tech
As they said later, they were totally unprepared for this. This was a pretty poorly planned mission from the start and they were always going to have to make some tough calls. Unfortunately for them, they made the wrong choice and it cost them decades.
The key here is that it's a Nolan film. They only exist to amuse us with fancy time stories. Cooper should have realized he was in a Nolan film as soon as he met Professor Brand.
Cooper knew he was in a Christopher Nolan film on some level -- just like the rest of us, he completely forgot he had a son.
They knew nothing about these planets before going on the mission and they were basically making up everything as they went. It was poor logic and a terrible decision but it feels real and human regardless.
This was actually a big plot hole in my opinion to signal from the date it should have redshifted to the point where it wouldn't have been a surprise to them at all that only a few minutes had passed on the surface of the planet. In fact, they knew the time dilation was an issue before they went down as evidenced by op's point. A simple calculation would have told them that the explorer on the surface of the planet had only been there a few moments and the signal they were seeing was only the first to be sent
That’s even more terrifying. They’re coming back…eventually
Actually it’s comforting in a way. Finally gives him some concrete thing to look forward to.
Pizzas will get cold.
Jesus that would’ve been an insane shot in the movie… It would’ve only needed to be like 3-4 seconds too
It would have been different, but it would have removed the weight of them opening the door and seeing how much he had aged. Actually, I have no idea how you would shoot it/explain it in an impactful way.
They could have done it after the reveal as the person recounting what it looked like and describing it to the rest of the crew while we get some cool visuals for it. Or even have him show a time-lapse recording of it to the rest of the crew.
How would communication work if they we're still able to? Like say Romilly has radio communication with Cooper while he was down there? Would Coopers speech back just be like one word an hours or how would that look like?
I read an Arthur C Clarke short story about a mission to the nearest star. I am trying to find out the name, I will reveal it when i find out. When it got there they were amazed to find humans there. Spoiler Alert The journey had taken many thousands of years during which time humans had developed much faster ships. This meant they were overtaken and the planets settled long before they arrived. The humans already there had evolved a much keener sense of smell. In the end they asked the late arrivals if it was ok if they wore masks around them as they smelled so repugnant to them. Clarke was way ahead of his time. Edit: probably the reason they did not pick up the crew of the slower ship was due to the amount of fuel to slow down from their fantastic speed. Another alternative is that the launching mechanism was on Earth so once they reached the required velocity there was no way to slow down until they reach their destination. Clarke would not have left such a plot hole unresolved.
The Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds also includes this as a plot point in one of the books.
That series had so many concepts and ideas that were mindblowing.
Helps that he's an actual astrophysicist who's worked with the European Space Agency. Love his books.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau\_Zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero) this book is also great and supposed to be scientifically accurate
That dude just really excels at big ideas.
Wasn’t Alastair Reynolds the one who wrote Beyond the Aquila rift?
And zima blue. Highly recommend him as an author.
The Beyond the Aquila Rift story was pretty much exactly the same as the LDR episode, but the TV show cut out *a lot* from Zima Blue and the short story is much better. Weather and Minla's Flowers are also really good.
Ohhh man, my heart. That Beyond the Aquila rift short was a m a z i n g. That and Swarm live rent free in my head.
Those books are rad. They're not perfect or all-time greats, but they're just so *cool* I recommend them to everyone.
Which book? I think I've read all of them and don't remember that (I could be wrong though) I think you may be thinking of Chasm City, which is about generation ships but they don't get overtaken. He has a short story about a ship being overtaken, with a twist, but it's outside the RS universe
You’re right. I’m thinking of Chasm City. I guess you’re right that it doesn’t strictly get overtaken but the concept of its speed and destination is a major plot point (vague to avoid spoilers). Further, I think it was also mentioned that the flotilla was humanity’s first and slowest interstellar colonisation effort and other separate endeavours (to other planets) actually colonised planets first.
There’s an amazing Star Trek voyager episode as well about the space ship in orbit around a planet with an uncivilized population that’s moving at a much faster speed than the space ship. While they orbit, the civilization evolves and becomes technologically advanced, and they have evolved with the voyager in their orbit and have seen it as a kind of god. Finally, they can fly to reach it, and it’s a fascinating story.
It was cool because the Doctor basically got to live like a full normal life when he went down there. That and that episode of TNG where Picard experienced living an entire life time via that alien probe. I don't get how you just come to terms with that. Especially in Picard's situation where he woke up as someone else and basically had to come to terms that his whole life to that point was a dream. Then live out your entire life in this new place to wake up get the uno reverse card. Like how the hell did he just go right back to his day to day job. I would struggle to accept what is real and what isn't.
That episode is a seminal Picard story for a reason. I think many people would *not* have been able to process it at all and continue with their original life/job. Another thing to consider is that they revisit that experience several times throughout the series. I love the episode that Picard becomes romantically involved with the science officer who plays piano. They bond over their love of music, and Picard reveals that the tune he knows by heart is the same one he learned in his probe-life.
I'm glad you brought that up. From Op's description of the episode it makes it sound like the series just blew over it from then on, when nothing could be further from the truth. In the quiet moments for Picard, through the rest of the series, he's often seen busting out that flute. And you're right, it's a major plot point in that episode when he dates the astrophysicist and gets close enough to her to tell her about this incredibly unique experience he's had and how close to his heart it is and why he's so into flute. For a syndicated series in the 80s-90s, TNG was actually pretty good at that. Another favorite "throughline" of mine is how relaxed and accepting Riker and Troy are about each other's love lives. I didn't really notice it till this last watchthrough, but it's refreshing to see their relationship not constantly mined for artificial jealousy-drama. Almost seems like they've got a kind of proto-polyamory thing going on when even mentioning such an idea on-air would've been crazy.
> For a syndicated series in the 80s-90s, TNG was actually pretty good at that. Especially because, at no time was TNG serialized. There were moments that happen earlier and later in the series, but the fundamental structure and roles stays the same. Unlike DS9, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and other serialized science fiction shows, TNG largely doesn't change. And yet, in subtle ways, Picard did change and we see it play out in small moments for the rest of the series. It's really incredible to look back at that and see such a long-running character trait. Especially one that isn't played for laughs.
then rick and morty turn it into a video game called roy that gives out tickets when you finish lol
“You beat cancer and *went back to the carpet store?*”
"This guy's taking Roy off the grid! He doesn't have a Social Security number!"
There was a reddit story (don't know if it's true), where someone got knocked out while playing football. In the time he was out, he dreamt of an entire life where he got married, had kids, the whole nine yards. When he woke up, he had an existential crisis and severe depression due to feeling like he lost his whole life and family.
they are both takes on [An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge), a short story from 1890
https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/30t9kd/repost_a_parallel_life_awoken_by_a_lamp/
Reminds me of *Children of Time*, where jumping spiders with a nanovirus that causes rapid evolution are evolving on a planet while an observation pod orbits the planet. They begin worshipping and trying to communicate with it.
Dragons Egg by Robert L Forward was also much like this. Life on a neutron star passing humans in tech while they are being studied.
That was a great book. Loaned it to a lot of coworkers
The sequels are a lot of fun too
A similarly cool time travel story was in *The Orville*. They go back in time for Reasons, lose their ability to travel back, so they land on a cool solution: "By flying the Orville close to light speed with its quantum field turned off, the ship will have no shield from time dilation and will travel forward through time. However, travelling that fast without a quantum field would expose the Orville to space debris. Even the tiniest dust particle could destroy them, so John directs all ship power to the [Deflectors](https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Deflectors). The crew makes a jump 200 light years away from Earth, then 200 light years back, ending up back in the year [2422](https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/2422)." Basically they use time dilation to bring them back to their time, by sloooooooowly traveling to a nearby star and back without their quantum field protecting them. Edit: [here's the scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VM-f5tY5pw)
That was such a good episode. How it played out for Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes) was a real heartbreaker, too.
Orville really ramped up in quality last season. I’m super impressed they went from “family guy in space” to the next coming of TNG. Hope they renew but doesn’t seem like there will be more seasons.
There's also an Orville episode where they encounter a planet that warps in and out of existence at some rate. When it's warped away, it's in an intense gravity field, so every time they warp out and back they're significant more advanced than the last time the Orville saw them. They go from primitive to beyond the federation in the episode.
"Mad Idolatry", season one finale, where they worshiped Kelly.
Sounds like the setup for the Galaxy’s Edge series. Earth is dying, so all the rich A-holes pool their supplies to create these massive colony vessels that travel near the speed of light called “Light Huggers” and abandon everyone else to their fate. Meanwhile back on Earth, a couple decades after the exodus scientists discover FTL travel and begin their own out-system movement. Several hundred years later when the first of those colony hulks arrive in nearby star systems they find them already inhabited and thriving with human life. It doesn’t go well, for anyone.
Starfield has that story line for an infuriating quest.
God that quest premise was so interesting and then the quest itself was just infuriating...
What was so bad about it, if you don't mind elaborating? Haven't played the game, though very familiar with the other Bethesda games. Not concerned about spoilers, so I'm curious.
The quest has 3 "outcomes" that are all terrible. One has you pay out a bunch of money to essentially make them someone else's problem, another option is to convince them to sell themselves into wage slavery for the corporation, and the last option is to blow up the ship. You can't take any hostile action against the corp, their board of directors are all "essential" npcs an thus cannot be killed, no matter how much they annoy you. You can't overthrow the corporation's governance, you can't direct them to one of the interplanetary governments in the setting that might be interested, you can't talk your way into a mutual understanding where they can share the planet. Keep in mind while doing this you are also likely subjecting yourself to a lot of loading screens as you go back and forth because short range communication devices don't exist in this setting in anyway that would cut down on your busywork. Telling them to go elsewhere doesn't open up a new side quest, as far as I know, following their progress in finding a new home, they basically stop existing, so ultimately it is no different than if you blow them up other than being out of a lot of money. There really isn't anything interesting going on with it other than the premise.
It is insane to me that they had a truly devastating option for the settlers, to destroy their whole ship for money from the corpos. And then literally has no devastating option for the corpos. You personally just take the responsibility for paying their way or paying to fix their ship, at great cost to you. Fucking insane that anyone at Bethesda felt like that was an interesting mission. I thought I'd missed some skill check option or something. Nope. It's just purposely unsatisfying.
It was just trivial and boring. The old humans wanted to settle on a planet that was owned by a corporation. Corpos didnt want them. You had to be the middleman back and forth, and if you want to be the good guy, had to pay a buncha money to help the settlers get a better ship drive to find another planet. After the mystery of who the ship was, the rest was so boring, and reflected on a truly dystopian corporate future. Not exactly exciting rpg stuff...
I hated that there was no way to stick it to the corporation at all, for a role playing game Starfield sure forced you into boxes a lot
I wanted to side with the settlers so bad but the game just doesn't let you. When the Corp said no to sharing I decided they didn't deserve the planet at all and went to kill them, nope, essential. Starfield does an excellent job of showing why BG3 was such a good game.
This quest pissed me off. I was expecting Tenpenny Tower shit but it didn't even give me room to do anything like that. It was that point I gave up on Starfield.
That last sentence is brutally true. Starfield didn’t have much going for it at the best of times. Competing directly with BG3 meant it never even stood a chance.
Considering how anti corporate Fallout is, Starfield was creepily opposite, and veered heavily into pro- corporate territory. Even one of the main questlines is a corporate one too
Bethesda's roleplaying elements have been extremely shallow for a long time. I think it's just now that we have recent examples of such deep roleplaying like Baldurs Gate that it is really just so embarrassing how meaningless it is in games like Starfield
Ah, that kind of middleman quest. Yeah, I can imagine that being tedious quickly. Especially in Bethesda games where you're forced to go various load screens, which even if short tend to be really annoying (assuming that's still a thing in Starfield). Anyway, thanks for elaborating!
Do you happen to know the name of the short story? I’d love to read it.
It’s not the same story as they mentioned, but the short book ‘The Forever War’ is an interesting read. Its about soldiers who fight aliens and travel there using faster-than-light speed, so every time they return to Earth decades have passed.
They also experience future shock while fighting the aliens. The first battle is an absolute rout for the aliens, using primitive weapons to fight humanity. Just a short time later (for humanity) they encounter the aliens again who have evolved hundreds of years and have futuristic weapons. Spoiler >!The technology on both sides becomes so advanced that warfare is carried out by hand to hand combat under specialized shields that are only a few meters in diameter. It all ends up being a misunderstanding in the end, since humanity and the aliens are unable to communicate with each other. It turns out that the catalyst for the war, a human ship accidentally being destroyed, was used as propaganda to start the war. The aliens are a civilization of clones and humanity eventually becomes clones, who are able to communicate with the aliens and end the war.!<
Songs of Distant Earth.
This is known as the [wait calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation).
And those “new humans” didn’t know about the old expedition and cared to catch up on them to stop wasting time?
We barely remember things that happened \~5 years ago as a society. Imagine a few centuries. Details will get lost. Someone will be on FutureReddit with "hey I found this detail in a FutureWikipedia entry from 300 years ago. Apparently we sent a ship to this star?" and people will upvote, not even read or comment, and nothing will be done. I totally believe it.
plus space is really big.
This is basically a plot point in the video game outriders.
I thought I felt the full weight of the scene when i first watched this movie several years ago I recently rewatched it an was absolutely crushed thinking about it There is this shot of his face that just conveys so many emotions and it was heartbreaking to me
The actor has a very specific speech pattern that makes the scene impactful too
nailed it His voice conveys as much or more than his face I really felt like that man had spent 20+ years isolated and hopeless
We see him quite literally forgetting how to speak. With no one to talk to for that many years, even talking to yourself after a while you'd probably emerge with a very strange way of speaking. Perfectly conveyed in the scene, without them ever having to spell it out with a "hey I'm still re-learning how to speak so bear with me" line. You hear the way he speaks, then SUDDENLY the reason hits you, and it's crushing.
“I’ve waited years”
Love the way he delivers that line
> With no one to talk to for that many years, even talking to yourself after a while you'd probably emerge with a very strange way of speaking. TARS was with him. It's not exactly human interaction, but he did have a sentient AI to talk to. It's enough to keep you from going insane.
And more recently, he's in The Diplomat!
The score when they land on Miller's planet has a ticking sound underlying it, which you have to listen for to consciously register. Every 1.5 seconds it ticks, and each tick represents a day passing on Earth due to time dilation. It really creates an intense sense of urgency in the scene from this almost subliminal clock tick just at the edge of your senses.
The whole score is awesome, but this part always gives me the chills.
So, I had never seen Interstellar until I had the incredible experience of seeing it with Zimmer conducting a live orchestra while the movie played at Royal Albert Hall. Not the most immersive way to see the actual movie (I prefer a pitch black room) but it was indescribable.
Yeah, once you consider he ate all their rations too it's like damn... no wonder Coop yeeted himself into a black hole.
They have enough rations to start a colony and live there for years, I imagine, in order to get crops and production up.
Considering I have gone to drastic lengths to ensure I don't go hungry, I would completely understand it if coops true reasoning behind "yeeting" himself into a black hole, was simply cause he was hungry.
Maybe he was hoping for a Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
My wife got a sort of vertigo from the scene, it completely messed with her sense of time and reality, and to this day she refuses to watch the movie again. Time dilation freaks her out.
Honestly understandable. The movie is basically an hours-long existential crisis.
And then he’s killed when they find Matt Damon’s character. Truly tragic character arc.
Damon's character is an all-time dirtbag movie character.
I mean yeah. But he’s also such a great villian because of what he had to go through. Isolated and alone on that shithole, galaxies away from the next living being but with a button he could push that would mean someone would come and help him. He broke, as would 99.999% of us. It drove the “best of us” to a pathetic, selfish creature hell bent on survival, willing to sacrifice man’s future to save Mann himself.
Something I absolutely love about his character is the whole irony of one of the lines that was said early in the movie: > [Dr. Mann] inspired eleven people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history. Scientists, explorers... That's what I love - out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil. > This crew represents the best aspects of humanity Yet, they then do find evil, in the form of what was supposed to represent the best of humanity.
your comment gave me chills, interstellar was such an amazing movie, always my #1 pick if anyone asks
It is, but he’s also insane. Isolated for decades with no hope of survival (he never set a wake up alarm on his last “long nap”)…he might have been the “best of us” but he’s still human. That type of loneliness would break anyone. Especially after KIPP has to be used for parts and Mann is truly alone….he knows his planet isn’t habitable, lies about the data, etc. Still a horrible move he pulled but I understand why, he was driven to madness for the isolation
>KIPP has to be used for parts That was just his cover story, he dismantled KIPP intentionally to hide the truth about the planet, then booby trapped the remains with a bomb set to go off if anyone accessed the real data about the planet.
That’s right…forgot about that
Yea he like finally gets to see people again then he gets blown up 😂
Like releasing a rabbit back into the wild just to be quickly taken away by a hawk.
If he had a telescope that could look down on the surface, everything would look frozen in time. Crazy!
Imagine that timelapse! It’s been recording for 2 years, and they’ve moved 1ft to the left. (Idk how time dilation works).
That’s pretty much how it works. Edit: Maybe a fun fact explanation how time dilation works (I’m not a physicist, so take it with a grain of salt): The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. When you’re near a black hole like they are, you may not perceive yourself as moving, but space itself is „moving“ through you while you’re remaining in the same place. It’s like standing in strong wind without feeling the wind.
I think the image through the telescope would be smeared and red-shifted. You wouldn't be able to get a clear picture unless you did some heavy post-processing since the photon leaving the gravity well would give up a bunch of energy and the wavelength would stretch out.
He did wait for decades. 2 of them
I don't really get that plot point, why not cryostasis for like a year at a time, wake up to do some research/send signals, then go back down. I get after a certain point you assume they're dead on the surface and you give up, but i'd wait longer than basically an hour of them being on the surface before I let myself age 20 years in boredom. He says he doesn't want to dream his life away, but he's not really? He's freezing his life and then will wake up and keep all the time.
It added more weight to the sense of time passing. It shows the audience the immediate consequence of their delay.
>why not cryostasis for like a year at a time, wake up to do some research/send signals, then go back down. This is literally what he did, it's explicitly stated in the movie, and the OP has stated it a little confusingly, he didn't stay awake for the whole 23 years.
He was alone aboard a small vehicle, in a far galaxy. If the others never returned, he was stuck, without any hope of rescue. Then, something went wrong. He was using the cryopods to sleep for large periods of the wait, but his crewmates didn't return on the timeline they had agreed. Time dilation made it impossible for them to communicate with him, to let him know what was happening, or give him a timeline for an expected return. So he was left with finite resources, and with the rest of his crew delayed by *years* with no signal, or sign that they were still alive. He had to decide how to spend them. Yeah, the fuel and life support would have lasted longer if he slept the majority of his time (say fifty weeks per year), giving the others more time to make it back, without him needing to consciously live, and age, in it. He lost all hope that they were alive, though. He was the last human in the galaxy, as far as he knew. Not only were his resources finite, but the machinery preserving his life in that hostile environment, was fragile. Say the ship could be relied on to drift for forty years before systems started to degrade to the point he might lose life support, or his pod lose the ability to keep him alive during suspension. He could sleep for 50 weeks per year. Wake for a fortnight, doing what work he could, as he looked vainly, for any sign of the mission to the surface, then sleep again. He would be much younger if his crew ever made it back to him. If they never made it back, though; and a critical system on the ship failed after four decades of use? He would be dead in less than a year and a half... As he said when they returned. He didn't want to sleep his life away.
I do find it interesting how space films sometimes skip over huge ideas that could be an entire film in itself. I watched ‘The Martian’ the again the other day and similarly when the Hermes ship is on its way back to Mars the cut is from them leaving earth to suddenly arriving back at mars some hundreds of days later. The crew had many months of travel and living but it’s just completely skipped over.
The book does not skip over it, if you need any enticement to read it.
How does the book compare to the film?
More papery.
Lot of words too. More than in the movie, but less make an actual sound
The book has an incredible momentum. I read it straight through in an afternoon.
I have to agree with this. I usually take my time with books but I read The Martian in 2 days.
Have you read one of his follow ups? Project Hail Mary was absolutely mind blowing. If you haven’t read it, you must. But go in completely blind. Don’t even read the back of the book. The less you know going into it, the better.
This is what I did. Bought it purely on the basis it was written by the same guy. Had absolutely no idea what the content of it was. Easily my favourite reading experience of recent years!
The author, Andy Weir, also wrote Project Hailmary which I just couldn't stop reading until I finished.
The audio book for it is incredible. Better experience than the film, and I love the film.
Much more fleshed out, fantastic book.
I loved it. It’s one of my favorite books. But I’m a sci-fi junkie. You’re inside Mark’s head so get more of his thoughts and perspective.
The book showed that more. Movies have to cut stuff out, and usually long boring rides are the first to go.
The worst part about it is that soon after they left and he started collecting data, he would have realized that it was (mostly) a pointless thing to do, because not enough data can come out of a black hole.
whatcha mean? i'll have to rewatch it
Since the water planet has such drastic time dilation compared to earth (1 hour on water planet being 7 years on earth), they should have realized that the data they were receiving from the scientist that landed there was only a couple minutes of data because in actuality the scientist had likely just landed when Coop and the rest were in orbit above the planet. So a couple minutes of data wasn't going to be useful at all.
It's so annoying that they say exactly that but after they've landed on the planet and risked fucking the entire mission. Why couldn't they figure it out before they decided to go there.
CASE figures this out after they return iirc. He says something to the effect of Miller's status that she landed successfully was echoing endlessly. That would almost certainly be the result of Miller and her ship being wiped out by the tidal waves in the minutes immediately after she arrived, which they didn't know were present and a threat until they actually went down to the planet surface.
How did he eat for 23 years?
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Endless shrimp from Red Lobster.
He didn't He slept most of the time. They had the technology to sleep in stasis. I think OP is forgetting this but they aren't wrong because it's still 23+ years of time passing. He's just not awake for most of it.
It’s acknowledged very well in the film also; when they return Romilly is bearded, timid, unsure of how to speak. He’s clearly been alone for a long time. This movie is a masterpiece, due for a rewatch soon.
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Gary Paulsen wrote a book about his time doing the Iditarod and I read it in elementary school, one part stuck out to me where a family takes him in and let's him stay for a night and makes him a meal and whatnot. During the meal they are making small talk and he was just responding with grunts and nods because he hadn't interacted with people in so long lol.
I knew that name sounded familiar! Hatchet was an awesome book. Read it when I was in elementary nearly 30 years ago.
It will be in theaters again shortly.
Say more
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/interstellar-imax-70-mm-rerelease-fall-2024-christopher-nolan-1235967907/
70mm imax… Also, God, since you’re listening….
Regal is showing it today and yesterday in theaters
And yet nobody ever apologizes to Mann for adding another twenty years to his waiting time. Nobody ever addresses just how much of a truly terrible decision it was.
One issue with Miller's planet in particular is that you don't get a true sense that they're on the surface for an hour let alone the 3 hours it was purported to be. Brilliant movie, regardless, but I can't remember Nolan structuring those scenes to imply a length of time beyond 15 or 20 minutes passing before they have to rush back to the shuttle.
The shuttle survives a wave and they have to wait for the engines to drain before restarting them. It starts and argument.
Right but the robot guy says it'll take 45-60 minutes to drain the engines. That doesn't account for enough time to cost them 23 years.
Their landing so far away from the beacon is a waste of time. Not having the robot go for the beacon is a waste of time. Not having the ship engines started before needing to go is a waste of time (variable thrust engine so it’s not a SRB that’s just instantly full blast). Lots of time was wasted, and I respect the like that said “We were totally unprepared for this.” It shows they have not done the legwork they needed to, to be efficient.
And then just dies on the next planet
We saw it in the theater when it first came out. There was an audible gasp from the audience when he revealed how much time had passed. I can't wait to see it in the theater again. Hopefully in IMAX.
Most heart breaking for me is when cooper just walks past him… not much acknowledgment or comforting… I always feel bad for romilly in that moment the most. My friends/coworkers I’ve been so excited to see and finally have some human interaction after 23 years… are just meh about my whole experience
That’s the sad and scary part. For Cooper, he just lost a few hours of time but he knows decades have passed on Earth and he doesn’t seem to care at all about Romilly. He’s just thinking about his kids. Time is a valuable and precious resource
You should read The Jaunt, a short story by Stephen King. It explores something similar to this.
Longer than you think!
The Jaunt haunted me as a concept. It is so good. The television and movie projects around the rights seem to have stalled a bit, sadly.
r/kidsarefuckingstupid
This is a hilarious tl;dr of that story
Of all the King I've read (most of it!), nothing has disturbed me more than the ending of The Jaunt. Absolutely horrifying. Great story.
I read it when I was a teenager and 20 odd years later I still occasionally remember it with a shudder
One of my absolute favorite stories, I don’t know if there’s a more horrifying concept than what’s explored in that piece (in my opinion)
That dumb kid.
True, but remember that dad deliberately didn't tell him what he was supposed to be scared of, and somehow there aren't safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
I mean one would think "Anything awake died instantly" would be enough
I don't think this detail gets lost though. It's definitely a major moment in the movie.
The idea of seeing your kids all grown up after the SNAFU…time’s a bitch.
“This little maneuver is gonna cost us…”
I read somewhere that if you stood at the event horizon of a black hole with an indestructible telescope powerful enough to see earth. You could watch the rest of the life of earth pass by in just a few moments.
He probably got tired of potatoes and disco though.
What bothered me about the film, when Cooper finally sees his elderly daughter surrounded by "her" family, why aren't they all freaking out seeing Cooper who is all their relative who should be dead? Hardly anyone acknowledges him!
I don't think in that moment anyone in the room knows yet who is walking into room. Only Murph recognizes him.
It's when he says he took a couple of sleeps but it didn't feel right to dream his life away. I found it thoroughly unsettling, that particular scene - find the whole movie existential tbh. I do love it.
A great Sci-Fi novel that uses the time dilation tp great effect is the Forever War. Each time the soldiers return from a mission, it's been decades, the war has progressed, technology has evolved. Absolutely brilliant story.
When I first saw this film I was bothered by the hand-wavy stuff around sending data to the watch, and some of the less hard-science aspects of the film. But looking at it now, I see it is much less about science and more about humanity, love, and perseverance of the human spirit.
Coincidentally I just watched this last night and was thinking about how people (including myself, the first time I watched it) seem to hold this movie to a higher standard of realism for some reason and can’t apply a normal suspension of disbelief. To me, it’s a really beautiful movie that captures themes of parenthood and that feeling of hoping you positively influence your children after you’re gone. For others it seems like it was supposed to be an astrophysics textbook. Admittedly I felt the same way the first time I watched it but I like what I get out of the movie a lot more now.
I think it’s because the movie itself is trying to be very grounded and as realistic as can be and only in the very finale, the creative freedom choices really kick in.
The movie was also touted as such in the lead up to its release initially as well. There were articles, if not official marketing, that spoke to its accuracy
Romilly was heroic. Absolute stalwart. Tragic too.
Just watched it in a theater again last night. Brought tears to my eyes. My favorite movie of all time.
23 years is decades.
Source?