Time dilation. The fifth dimension. Gravity's ability to transcend time and space. Yep,
if you watched Christopher Nolan's sci-fi epic "Interstellar" and ended up with more questions
than answers, you are not alone. Here are the most confusing moments of "Interstellar" explained.
Professor Brand is the father of astronaut Dr. Amelia Brand and has dedicated his entire life
and career to solving the gravity equation. Once he passes away, Murph takes on the responsibility
of searching for the answer, but throughout the movie, it is never made clear what exactly
they have been after. What is apparent is the purpose: once this mysterious equation is solved,
humans will be able to use gravitational anomalies to manipulate gravity and to safely get everyone
off the planet. The snag in the plan is that data from inside a black hole is needed to complete
it. No one has ever seen inside a black hole so there was no way to get the data... until Cooper.
For obvious reasons, the movie couldn't get into the gritty scientific details of the
fake equation, but what is important to know is that anomalies are crucial to the solution.
And a black hole is the biggest anomaly of all. When Coop goes inside the black hole
Gargantua at the end of "Interstellar" and transmits that data to Murph,
she is finally able to solve the equation and save humanity.
The opening 30 minutes of "Interstellar" are confusing on the first watch through and perhaps
even after a repeat viewing. During that first act, you might be left wondering what this whole
ghost story has to do with space travel and saving the human race. Well, as it turns out,
everything. By the end of the movie, you will learn that Cooper is the ghost — or gravitational
anomaly — trying to communicate with Murph through time while he is in the tesseract.
When Coop is inside the tesseract, he realizes he can communicate with young Murph via the
bookshelf. We see the mirror image of an earlier scene where the "ghost" spells
out the word "stay" through Morse code. Here, we learn that it is actually Cooper
trying to convince himself not to leave Murph behind. At this point in the story,
Cooper regrets ever leaving and tries to change the past, although it cannot be done.
Coop can travel through the dimension of time, though, and he uses the bookshelf to communicate
the solution to Professor Brand's formula when she visits the house in the present timeline.
Perhaps the single most confusing moment of "Interstellar" is the significance of the
watch that Cooper gives to Murph when she is a child. In a moment of anger, she breaks it,
but it stays in the house for years. When Cooper goes into Gargantua and winds up in the tesseract,
he sends Murph a coded message that solves the gravity equation. He does this by using
gravity — which is a force that transcends time, according to the film — to move the hands
of the watch and communicate with Murph in Morse code. By manipulating gravity,
he can cause the broken watch to tick in code and transmit the information to save humanity.
There are many theories as to how exactly this works because the film never explains it cleanly.
Since time isn't passing for Coop, he can potentially spend as much
time as he wants — perhaps even years — transmitting what he needs Murph to know.
Considering all of the time she loses while he's away though, perhaps the watch as a
medium is really just a symbol of his urgency to finish the mission and reunite with his daughter.
Back in 2014, it wasn't advertised that Matt Damon would make an appearance in "Interstellar". So,
when he showed up on an icy planet as the stranded scientist Dr. Mann,
Nolan fans were shocked by the surprise. But, as Cooper and Mann spend more time together,
Cooper starts to realize that Mann is more than a little shady.
As it turns out, Mann has faked the data that indicates life on the planet is possible.
If he'd told the truth, he would have been left to die. Instead, he lies and waits in cryosleep until
another NASA team inevitably shows up to respond to his signal. Mann's plan is then to hijack the
ship of whoever comes for him and leave them stranded. This selfish act of self-preservation
very likely could have ended in Mann in eternal cryosleep. So why was that the plan?
In "Interstellar", Mann represents the human drive to stay alive.
"Don’t judge me Cooper. You were never tested like I was. Few men have been."
He goes to extremes and would rather potentially wait in cryosleep for
thousands of years instead of dying. His plan has a major flaw,
but it is a risk he is willing to take since the alternative is freezing to death.
One of the most confusing moments of "Interstellar" has nothing to do with
interdimensional travel or quantum physics. It is instead a choice made by Murph as the film
reaches its climax. While riding in the car away from the childhood home, Murph jumps out of the
truck and then proceeds to light her brother Tom's cornfield on fire. At this point in the timeline,
those crops are vital to the survival of not just her family, but the entire remainder of the human
race. So why such an extreme action from a character who genuinely loves her brother?
This weird out-of-character moment makes more sense when you realize Murph is merely buying
time and using this scorched Earth measure as a desperate distraction. She needs to go back
inside the house to finish what she started as a child. From an earlier scene, we already know
that Tom will no longer listen to Murph. So, she needs to do something extreme to distract
him while she tries to find the solution to her equation. Luckily, she does manage to figure out
how to save the planet in that 15-minute window she's created for herself. Otherwise, Tom would
be mighty upset upon returning to the farm, and the whole family would be much worse off.
A major twist in the second half of "Interstellar" is that the elder Dr. Brand, who sends his own
daughter and Cooper on the mission, knows everyone still on Earth is doomed to die.
NASA first sends the explorers into space with a Plan A and a Plan B, devised by Dr. Brand. Plan
A is to find a habitable planet and then, once Brand solves his gravity equation back on Earth,
send the planet's remaining population to that new home. However, Brand actually
doesn't plan on solving the equation and knows it is going to be Plan B all along.
"Each iteration is an attempt to prove its own proof. It’s recursive. It’s nonsensical."
In the case of Plan B, Cooper and the others will find a suitable habitat to rebuild humanity with
thousands of frozen embryos, thus keeping the human race alive but dooming Earth.
Brand knows Coop will not go through with the mission if he tells him the truth.
He can't tell his daughter for the same reason,
but on an even deeper level, he can't face telling her what he has done. So,
he keeps that a secret until his dying breath when he finally reveals the dark truth to Murph.
Even fans of Nolan's film catalog have called out "Interstellar" for being ridiculous to a
fault with certain conceits. One of these moments is the movie's final twist where Cooper doesn't
just survive a black hole encounter but finds himself transcending linear time.
The scene inside the tesseract requires serious suspension of disbelief to make sense.
Throughout the film, Coop and Murph repeatedly refer to a mysterious "they" that they believe
to be communicating with them — prompted mostly by the "ghost" and its messages.
This is the central mystery that wraps up in the tesseract scene,
where it is revealed that Cooper is the one communicating with Murph through the bookshelf.
This scene also explains what the tesseract is and who built it.
As it turns out, "they" did, and "they" are humans from an unspecified number of
generations in the future. At that untold point in time, "they" have evolved to be
able to exist in the fifth dimension. In the paradox-inducing explanation,
this future generation creates the tesseract that allows Cooper to navigate five dimensions,
thus saving themselves from the past and ensuring their own existence.
The monologue Brand gives near the end of the movie is a controversial subject,
to say the least. It gets a lot of hate, but defenders will rally in droves to tell you
it's one of the most important parts of the movie. And they are right. You need to take it seriously.
In the infamous speech, Brand explains that love is the only thing that transcends all
five dimensions. She argues that love is something that exists and is quantifiable, which ultimately
ends up being what Cooper needs to save Earth. The only way he is able to contact Murph through
the bookshelf in Gargantua is through their familial love connection. Coop even exclaims,
"It's just like Brand said. My connection with Murph. It is quantifiable! It's the key!"
In an added layer of meaning, it is also humanity's love for each
other that inspires them to build the tesseract and save the past generation.
"Interstellar" has what many would consider a happy ending.
Coop makes it back to Earth in time to see his daughter one last time.
She can die having gotten the final bit of closure she needs, and he can be free to live his life
unburdened. The secret tragedy is that Coop makes it home too late to spend any significant
amount of time with his daughter. Or perhaps we have just stumbled upon a plot contrivance.
By the end, Murph is an elderly woman who has stayed alive long enough to finally see her
father again, who looks the same as when he left decades ago. The whole movie is built on this
relationship, so people are rightfully confused as to why they only spend a few minutes together.
Murph now realizes this reunion is the last thing that is driving her to live,
and she can finally let go. She even says to Coop that she doesn't have much time left and
that a father shouldn't watch their child die. Even given this, you would think Coop
and Murph would each want some more than just five minutes. It is a stunningly brief final encounter,
considering how much energy he spends trying to return to her in the first place.
Understanding the emotional core at the center of "Interstellar" requires
understanding how time dilation works. Once the crew of the Endurance reaches
Miller's Planet full of treacherous waves, it is assumed the audience understands this
concept. But how exactly does the time dilation make sense in "Interstellar"?
The explanation the movie gives is that a difference in gravitational force causes
time to move at different speeds on different planets. This dilation effect is accelerated when,
in the case of Miller's, the planet is orbiting a black hole. As the force of gravity increases,
time moves at an accelerated pace. While Coop and his crew only spent
a few hours crash-landed on Miller's Planet, 23 years have passed on Earth.
According to scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
this detail of "Interstellar" is a scientific phenomenon that exists for real.
This can be proven by Einstein's equation of general relativity.
"Well that’s relativity folks."
One of the first unanswered questions you might have when you watch "Interstellar" is,
"When exactly does the movie take place?" It's a good question that
isn't ever explicitly stated in Christopher Nolan's movie. However, you can piece a
relatively precise estimate together based on a conversation from early on in the film.
In one of the first scenes, we see Coop attending a baseball game with his family.
In an off-hand comment to his family, Coop's father-in-law says,
"In my day, we had real ball players. Who are these bums?"
And in the scene where Donald and Cooper talk on the porch, the elder says,
"When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some gadget or idea."
This sounds a lot like what growing up in the past 10 to 15 years has been like. We
can safely assume that between growing up with professional baseball and technology,
Donald is a millennial. Using this knowledge,
we can place the events of "Interstellar" about 50 to 60 years after present-day 2014,
when the movie came out. This means the film probably takes place late in the 21st century.
While even Donald's demise gets a passing reference
"Dad didn't raise me, Grandpa did. And he's buried out back"
Murph's brother Tom is the only character in "Interstellar" whose fate is a complete mystery.
So, what exactly has happened to Coop's son by the time he returns home from the tesseract?
Well, logically, the easiest answer is to assume Tom died. For one, he was older than Murph,
who is already extremely old by the end, so his time was naturally up. Additionally,
in the final scenes of "Interstellar", we see that the only thing allowing Murph to
hold onto her life is belief that her dad will return. Tom as a character was defined
by his lack of faith and belief in Coop. His absence at the end of the movie speaks
to the power of Murph's love and hope and how they were the only things keeping her alive.
You can also argue that his single purpose in the story is served in his final scene. Tom's function
in the plot is ultimately to push Murph to solve the bookshelf puzzle. His purpose is fulfilled
when she finally does, and afterward, there really isn't any narrative reason for Tom to reappear.
One of the more confusing world-building elements is the current state of NASA in
the film. It's never explained quite why NASA folded, though it seems that the
general populace in "Interstellar" lost faith in the organization years before
the events of the film. Basically, what we are given in the final film is that
NASA is no longer seen as necessary when people all around the world are starving.
This aspect of the movie is explained more thoroughly in the 2008 original
script that Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan worked on for Steven Spielberg.
In that early draft, the film begins with NASA engineers and a young John Brand investigating
a wormhole. Fifty years later, the NASA probe they had sent out crash-lands on Earth. This
is eventually what leads Coop to NASA, instead of the "ghost" angle taken in the final film.
In the early version of the story, it is explained that 30 years before the film's events,
NASA folded as a result of the blight that nearly destroyed all of humanity.