If you've watched my show before, you're probably thinking you know how this is going to end. You're thinking he's going to drop the black and white, say some tortured words over an emotional soundtrack, and try to make us cry because of love, because Mikey's a total hippie. And that's all pretty accurate, actually, but I think if we take this journey together, I might be able to surprise you along the way.
I mean, I don't aim to change your understanding of the film. I aim to shatter it. Oh, shit!
Interstellar is a 2014 film from Christopher Nolan and can I just say f***ing finally right? I've put up Nolan movies for vote like six times and I'm really only doing this one because I cheated and picked two winners last time moving on nevermind. It was written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan brothers writing together and I'm trying to imagine what would happen if my sister and I wrote a movie together.
Actually, I know exactly what would happen. It would be called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie, the fan fiction, the game, the novel, the game.
Again, Hollywood, we are available. If you haven't seen any of Nolan's films, they're all about familial bonds, a juxtaposition beset by a white man's struggle against seemingly impossible odds where the inexplicable enters the equation in some visually engaging ways. I mean, Christopher Nolan made that movie like eight times, but it worked eight- times and I'm going to go as far as to say that Interstellar is Christopher Nolan's best film yet yes feed me the suffering of you oh wow that got really weird but I really do believe that this is a film that exists on a monumental number of levels weaving a superb story of science fiction that happens to put a focus on love in a way that made a lot of people very very upset I am NOT talking about any half the way yet this film opens with the film logos in sepia tone preparing us for a different Earth than the one we are expecting to see.
Like the logos, everything is dust now. Dust even falls over the title reveal in the film. And this is where you notice that the visuals will be what speaks to the depth of the film. Nolan loves to show us the climax of the film, generally as an innocuous visual that won't make sense until much later. In this case, it's a 50s cartoon spaceship facing off against the ingenuity of NASA and the United States, all being rained on by dust.
Then there's an interview about... this era of human existence, then Coop has a bad dream, and then he's talking about ghosts with his daughter, and his daughter says, I thought you were the ghost, which is true. He is. The entire scope of the film and its resolution plays out in four seconds, and now the rest of the movie will simply extrapolate that. Nolan uses these interviews of older people explaining what it was like living in all this dust to set a scene for us.
For starters, these people on screen are us. The audience just aged up to the dust age or whatever they call it. This is such a beautiful way to establish this future as plausible to an audience.
It uses a documentary film technique to establish its own credibility. And it's super beautiful when you realize that the person we saw at the beginning was Murph, and that is a video that actually plays in-universe on the Damon...tube? Do we call it a Damon tube or I-And as we move into the Coop household, meeting the kids and Coop's dad, we find a mix of ideologies, and this is an area where Nolan excels as a filmmaker. While we believe what we're seeing is a gentle discussion about whether ghosts exist or not, scientifically speaking, what we're actually seeing is how at least two opposing viewpoints, Coop's and Murph's, end up both being true in the end.
Murph believes that there could be a scientific explanation for what appear as ghosts, and Coop is countering that there could be no scientific evidence for things that are actually Class V free-roaming vapors. Which is all 100% true. Coop does become a technical apparition that does not exist on our corporeal plane of existence for a period of time. But I'm not talking about that scene yet. Hey, the truck scene is dramatic visual representation of their family dynamic.
Tom's on the wrong side of the road. And I bet he will ultimately doom his family because of his lethargic insistence that things stay the same as the way they are on that side of the road. Tom is always standing on that side of the road. Like, we get it, buddy.
It's getting a bit literal. And I love the explanation of Murphy's Law here and why Coop named her After it Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen What it means is that whatever can happen will happen and that sounded just fine with us And I super love the setup for a reluctant hero We are living in a quasi literal hell that science needs to resolve the thing about this movie Is that not a whole lot of people are around there's practically no animals at all and they have seemingly run out of food So what do you think all the dust is made of it's the people the dogs the cats every insect dander fur hair You name it, they are being coated in the eroded remains of the world they used to know. That is dark.
They don't make any grand proclamation of the mistakes we made in any specific way. There's no preachy global warming scene. There is simply an explanation that the people of our generation lived for excesses. This is a long film, and I know a lot of people didn't want to spend so much time on Earth at the beginning, but I think it was fundamental to the message of this film. Coop, and can we get this out of the way, Matt McConaughey is phenomenal in this film.
We need to understand the pull that Coop has to his children so that when he's faced with saving humanity versus raising his kids and dying on Earth, that's not a simple choice. The gravity of his mission versus the gravity of very possibly never seeing his children alive. Again or to put it differently is giving your children a better life worth never seeing them again He takes Murph with him to investigate the binary code that mysteriously appeared in dust on his floor We'll talk about that in a bit which contains the coordinates of what is left of NASA which is one of a few brilliant reveals about the state of the world in this film I love that.
This is the New York Yankees now. It's such a natural evolution These people fight every day to survive living in dust So who gives a shit about baseball and the answer is a few every once in a while But not like it was. Yo, NASA in this future refused to be a weapon against humanity, so they went underground and became the largest pirate-run organization of all time.
NASA is pirates. That is so baller. And around this time, the film starts bouncing into the metaphysical.
NASA didn't really know they were waiting for Coop, and he didn't know they were waiting for him, but something sent him. But who's they? God, aliens, ghosts, himself.
doesn't matter. If the intent is pure and helpful, doesn't matter what deity level force is on the other side of it. And doesn't matter that this movie never quite tells us. I mean, Coop supposes that it's the future of humanity reaching back in time, but that's never substantiated. It's almost like the question of who's they is the one thing that convinces Coop to go on the mission in the first place.
A true astronaut, curious to the end. An interstellar does involve a lot of cutting edge mathematics and astrophysics, all of which I am perfectly qualified to distill down into palatable chunks for an audience because, well, I know Bob it for dosis, so that makes me like an astronaut by marriage. Yeah, let's go with that.
So Coop has to go. To save us, he has to go and he has to leave Murph, but their story is not over. And the thing is, the way that this setup is done, every mistake they make in this movie means that he'll be older if and when he gets back to her. Which is heartbreakingly genius every time something happens because we know how much that mistake will cost Coop and his kids.
It makes the film have these deeply personal stakes that somehow transcend the universal ones in play. We care less about the survival of humanity than we do about Murph seeing Coop again. That's the heart of the movie. To IMAX!
We bounce into IMAX, changing aspect ratios and feeling the start of our grand adventure. Again, we are met with a lived-in space, what feels like a real reality out in the vacuum. Every camera is mounted to the vehicle, mimicking footage we're used to seeing in things like this.
And can we take a moment for my boy Tars? I think this is the one aspect of the film that people pretty much universally love. But I didn't really understand what was going on here until this watch through. Are you still thinking of Marine, pal?
Marines don't exist anymore. TARS isn't a science robot, he was an old marine robot used for war. But since there aren't any of those anymore, because you need ample food, water, and people to fight one, he is repurposed by NASA to work on this journey. He's a symbol of this ragtag group going on this mission.
These four humans are tasked with saving humanity, and none of them, like TARS, should really be there. They weren't made for this. Coop is a farmer that used to fly jets. Brand was a botanist recruited by NASA to save Earth. While still on Earth, Doyle was a geographer, and Romilly is the physicist who, ironically, is really terrified of what he knows to be scientifically plausible, specifically the fact that only millimeters of metal separate them from the vacuum of space.
But he explodes later, so maybe he is smart, not... to trust it. I need a 4k television. Watching this again, I am now convinced to upgrade. The way it pops to IMAX with these breathtaking images of the glory of the universe around us is enough to make you feel tiny and insignificant while using the full height of the frame.
It's just magical. And I could spend more time recapping aspects and beats from this film, but I'd rather get into my hypothesis about it. There's a lot of talk about gravity in this film.
How it bends time, light, love. In orbit of a planet, an hour is just an hour. But on the surface of that same planet, an hour is seven years.
This is the planet the film uses to illustrate non-binary answers to binary questions. When are you gonna come down? We can't ask what's the right thing to do anymore because the answer contains aspects of hard physical probability, gravity, time, resource management, lives, and every multi-tiered and bad hedging answer to that question can be affected by millions, literally millions of factors. Brand makes one miscalculation in the system and it costs them decades.
And against that emotional trauma in one of the most brilliant scenes of ever, this movie makes one. catastrophic error. It did not take the time to explain five dimensionality to an audience.
In a film that makes a lot of assumptions, they made a really big one about an audience that I think ended up hurting them because not a lot of outlets seem to really get the movie. Coop and Brand discuss dimensionality all the time but they never slow down to explain a few very key things in a way where what the film is putting forth makes sense. Here are some things I wish the film had made very clear. One. We live in a three-dimensional world measured against the fourth dimension.
We measure our three-dimensional lives in time. Even though the film makes a really interesting study about how gravity affects the third and fourth dimensions differently, their time can be warped completely independently of their perception that it is happening because they can only see the third dimension. Number two, this film is arguing that only a fifth-dimensional being would be capable of manipulating both the fourth and third dimensions. Number three, should a fourth-dimensional being exist, they would be a literal third-dimensional being.
time machine because their whole existence would be manipulating the fourth dimension, whereas we as humans whittle away our time manipulating our shitty third dimension. This alone paints something that melts our chimp brains because this movie isn't even about the fourth dimension suckers, this is about the fifth dimensional. They. That they care enough to save us and that is what is really important to the message of this movie.
Why would a fifth dimensional god, alien, they, or ghosts who are so advanced, time travel would- bore them care enough to save our objectively worthless lives to beings of infinite complexity to our own. A third-dimensional human looking to a fifth-dimensional being for help is like an ant asking for assistance from every god, from every religion, multiplied by the number of stars in the universe. They should not care about us.
So when we see Coop dealing with the 23-year mistake, sitting down to a screen to catch up on messages from his children, finding out about the death of colleagues, friends, relatives, and people he loves, loves more than anything else in the world. This happens all at once to him. This is why the scene is in this movie.
Coop realized that he missed everything in his family's life. His dad died, his son met a woman, got married, had a kid, and then she... died because that 23 year mistake means he had already failed as a father because his kids have suffered and he did not save them. And then when his daughter finally does speak to him after refusing for so long, she is now his age. She blasts him.
I mean, we physically watch Coop lose whatever was left of his humanity in this one scene. And yes, I'm about to address the elephant in the room. That this film, as flawed as people perceive it to be, ultimately comes down to the intersection of love and science. And before you roll your eyes and start typing nonsense about Anne Hathaway, hear me out.
Brand is saying that love has meaning. It is something that seems to exist outside of love. us and drive us to do incredible things.
That love might actually be something that can exist outside of the reality that we know. This dimension, the shitty third one, because why else would they help us? And if you believe in God, then you already believe this. You believe that you love a deity and that deity loves you enough that even though the entity exists outside of our dimension, but can manipulate, create, and destroy within both the third and fourth dimension. And she only said, maybe it means something more.
And is that really so hard to believe? When you are faced with the love and care that was taken to show us the brilliance and majesty of our universe, it kind of is enough to make you believe what this movie is selling. That it's science and love that will save us from ourselves.
Science makes us practical, but love makes us selfless. Matt Damon's admittedly stunty casting is the illustration of why we need both love and science. He's alone on a planet he knows is worthless, and the only way to ever see another human again is to lie. He's not a cartoon. He's just desperate.
He explains the morality of this as crystal clear as science could tell it. Why keep building those damn stations? Because he knew how hard it would be.
To get people to work together to save the species instead of themselves or their children. Science. Cold. Calculating science. Morality has no place in a conversation about conserving the human race.
As a father, your love has no place in the conversation about preservation of the race, even if your kids exist within it. But love reaches beyond our grasp. Love can make us fly into the center of a black hole, sacrifice ourself, and record a singularity for science. I tried to do my duty, Coop, but I knew the day that I arrived here... This fish had nothing and I resisted the temptation for years.
But whereas the fear of science is an equally deadly defense mechanism. You have a responsibility. This film is all about the edge of the razor when you are pushed to the edge of your survival to maintain sanity and drive and focus.
Love is there to pick you up. Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men near death who see with blinding sight.
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. That poem's use in this film is no accident.
Science fails so many times in this film because that's the point. When science fails, love will carry us because we need a drive to survive and this is our future and that makes this film hugely important. Human extinction on this planet is an eventuality, not a question.
If technology continues to move forward and our population growth does not slow down, then it is a mathematical certainty that we will not be able to continue living on this planet. This film is just a hypothesis. of what life is like on that edge?
How do you preserve any semblance of humanity we have when faced with one emotionally crippling defeat after another? How else could you teach a robot to dock with a broken interplanetary spacecraft in all of 20 seconds without the madness of the human spirit, without the perfection of an artificial life form? It wouldn't have been possible, but they do it.
And then Coop flies into the black hole to find the only answer that can save his family, not mankind. He thinks his sacrifice is the answer. I find no beauty. to the end of that sentiment.
Science represents the distances to which humanity can travel as a species. Love represents our human spirit and drive to do so. Only through our connections to those around us do we have the drive and sacrifice to accomplish our goals. But what Coop finds in there is not that.
It's fifth dimensional space, or more correctly, a three dimensional presentation of a fifth dimensional space. Basically, it slides the dimensions back by two. That makes the third dimension now the first.
dimension. He can only see a single point of three-dimensional space through all of time. That's why he can only see from behind the bookshelf in that one location from any time he chooses in Murph's room. This is important because the entire film hinges on this moment. Everything is built and everything we've learned is in service of this.
If plan A was a lie that doomed the humans still on earth, and if plan B is already accounted for, what if it was the love that Coop and Murph have for each other? Love that the film not only supposes transcends dimensions, but puts it literally right there on screen. Even if Plan A was a lie, what if they can still make it work? What if it doesn't have to be a lie? That's why he went into the black hole in the first place.
What if he could make it work? In a system of infinite complexity, how do you find a single moment? How do you find a place in space and time where there's an infinity in front of you? What could possibly affect gravity, the one thing that affects all of them in space, in the very fabric of our reality?
What if the one thing... that is so potent you can get a message across dimensions to a single point in time in space. This movie is saying two very simple things.
Love transcends gravity and science will save us, and I think that's just about the most beautiful sentiment that human spirit could imagine. Hey, thanks for checking out a new episode. I didn't want to dissect every little piece of the film because there's so much there to discover just on your own. Just go devour everything you can about this movie from the making of it to the film itself.
I think it's brilliant. I I hope over time we remember this is the classic that it is. Anyway, since I pulled the wool over your eyes last time, that means we need a real vote this time around.
Okay, for the next episode of Movies of Mikey's Draw, your options are a Jones, a Mendez. And a bigelow. Let's be civil in the comments whether voting or explaining to me condescendingly about how I don't understand Star Wars is the prequels and they're secretly great.
Please like this video because that apparently does, uh, something. I mean, I know what it does because it helps these videos gain traction by people interacting with them. Also, subscribe to this channel please because YouTube opens up its treasure chests for creators based on the number of people that click that button and since so very many people post the comment, Hey, how do you guys not have a million subs? That is the simplest answer. Also, stop asking that.
It's kind of weird. If I knew the answer, I guess I'd have a million subs. See you guys next time!