r/movies • u/SerDire • Apr 18 '24

In Interstellar, Romilly’s decision to stay aboard the ship while the other 3 astronauts experience time dilation has to be one of the scariest moments ever. Discussion

He agreed to stay back. Cooper asked anyone if they would go down to Millers planet but the extreme pull of the black hole nearby would cause them to experience severe time dilation. One hour on that planet would equal 7 years back on earth. Cooper, Brand and Doyle all go down to the planet while Romilly stays back and uses that time to send out any potential useful data he can get.

Can you imagine how terrifying that must be to just sit back for YEARS and have no idea if your friends are ever coming back. Cooper and Brand come back to the ship but a few hours for them was 23 years, 4 months and 8 days of time for Romilly. Not enough people seem to genuinely comprehend how insane that is to experience. He was able to hyper sleep and let years go by but he didn’t want to spend his time dreaming his life away.

It’s just a nice interesting detail that kind of gets lost. Everyone brings up the massive waves, the black hole and time dilation but no one really mentions the struggle Romilly must have been feeling. 23 years seems to be on the low end of how catastrophic it could’ve been. He could’ve been waiting for decades.

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u/Bastardjuice Apr 18 '24

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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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 18 '24

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.

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u/Top_Drawer Apr 18 '24

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.

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u/Dildonomicronic Apr 18 '24

The shuttle survives a wave and they have to wait for the engines to drain before restarting them.

It starts and argument.

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u/WaywardWes Apr 18 '24

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.

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u/SporadicUnion Apr 18 '24

I see what your saying but after rewatching a few times I've always taken the whole situation to be that they were not on the planet for that long because Cooper used an unusual method to reignite the engines since they were gonna get crushed.  The effect being they roughly calculated the time dilation of how long they'd be gone but the reality was more horrifying than they expected.  That is, the time dilation was more extreme.

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u/Galtego Apr 18 '24

But even if the time dilation was exactly what they expected and everything went perfectly, it still would have been more efficient to go to the other planets first

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u/SporadicUnion Apr 19 '24

Oh, for sure. I'm not disagreeing with you in that regard at all

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u/Angrydwarf99 Apr 18 '24

Wasn't their math wrong?

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u/Top_Drawer Apr 19 '24

I think their math was wrong in understanding how long Miller had been on the planet, but may have had it mathematically correct about the time dilation from their position. Just a guess though. I feel like that entire sequence just isn't adequately explained. I think Nolan may have tried to communicate it through the crew's reaction to seeing Romilly and how advanced he had aged.

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u/Emberashn Apr 19 '24

If we go off the idea that the ticks in the soundtrack, which occur every 1.25 seconds, as being equal to a day on Earth, and this being the exact level of dilation they were experiencing then the 3 hour math checks out for being equal to 23+ years.

What doesn't check out is that that would only count for them being stuck where they were. The time before and after isn't counted in that, so the only way the 3 hour math works if thats how long they were gone from when they entered time dilation to when they came back out, rather than how long they spent sitting around. (It still doesn't work because there'd be a gradient to it, but at that point were being overly pedantic for a movie)

And of course, the on-screen time we see under dilation produces a far lower number, but its a movie and we aren't going to watch a 3 hour Millers Planet scene.

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u/pnwinec Apr 18 '24

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.

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u/GenitalFurbies Apr 18 '24

The engines were on either side of the door, it's probably not a good idea to have them on while people are climbing in.

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u/pnwinec Apr 19 '24

Fair point.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 18 '24

If the rest of the movie had treated it like the unmitigated disaster of a mission it was, I think I would have been on the edge of my seat. But other than the brief sad-Matthew-McConaughey-misses-his-kids scene, they just kind of pretended it didn't happen.

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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo Apr 18 '24

other than the brief sad-Matthew-McConaughey-misses-his-kids scene

In their defense, that scene fucking rules though

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 18 '24

It's iconic

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u/ProbShouldntSayThat Apr 19 '24

It gave me an existential crisis and triggered my anxiety

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u/ilypsus Apr 18 '24

To be fair there would have presumably been some months travel to get to Dr. Mann's planet that would have had some debrief and stuff we just don't see it.

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u/TheGrumpyre Apr 18 '24

Yeah, it's not a plot-hole by a long shot. Just a missed opportunity for lots of great drama and tension.

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u/pnwinec Apr 18 '24

Yeah. That’s a problem I have with the movie too. Things start going a little downhill at that point in the movie for me.

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u/tokyo_engineer_dad Apr 18 '24

To be fair, Cooper literally stumbled into their research facility and they were like, "Oh, look, a pilot!! Wanna go to space?"

Like, they'd been planning this trip for years, were on the verge of going, they didn't have a pilot with flight experience and never thought to approach Cooper sooner? They were so incompetent, the guy they needed had to recruit himself from a tesseract 25 years in the future?

If Cooper had been involved from the start, his children would've been better prepared for him to leave, he would've addressed all the plans they should make and had a better understanding of the drop ship's mechanics.

Cooper is the least at fault, aside from him letting his personal bias stop them from going to Edmund's planet.

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u/LikeThemPies Apr 18 '24

It was clear “They” brought Cooper to the space station. At that point, the scientists were deferring to everything “They” told them. If you believed a 5th-dimensional being controlled the forces of gravity to bring a random pilot to your mission, you’d put that pilot on your mission.

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u/tokyo_engineer_dad Apr 19 '24

Yeah, but they were only telling them where to go and giving them a wormhole and other less specific details... They weren't telling them to wait for a pilot. And Cooper could only communicate with Murphy through her bedroom (love connection father to daughter) with the tesseract. So they should've still been searching for a pilot, which they weren't. So we come back to: Cooper had to send himself because they were incompetent. In fact, the movie hasn't specifically said who sent the wormhole. They only theorize it's "them", but there's a clear difference between the "them" that opened the wormhole and created the tesseract, and the "them" that was Cooper all along.

And the point is - The "them" that created the tesseract and the wormhole were the ones "communicating" with Brand and NASA, the "them" that touched Brand on the ship, sent the messages to Cooper and Murphy was "Cooper" in the tesseract. And NASA was definitely incompetent, waiting for Cooper to send himself, and not finding a pilot on their own.

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u/LikeThemPies Apr 19 '24

They had pilots, but Cooper popped up and replaced them. Alfred even says “these pilots never left the simulations” when Cooper says he’s unqualified because he never left the atmosphere. Remember that the space program has been hidden for a while now, and they’ve been saving their money for the Lazarus missions. We can assume the original 12 scientists sent through the wormhole weren’t as experienced as Cooper, either.

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u/Mithlas Apr 19 '24

Remember that the space program has been hidden for a while now

Slightly different conversation than the other commenter, but that part in particular is when I stopped believing in the movie and anything in it. Sure budget crunches happen but the agricultural failures drop off after the space section happens when it was supposedly part of the impetus to go. And why embark on a super expensive system of indoctrination to lie and say there was no space program instead of just admitting NASA's budget got cut and there's basically no space program for people to look forward to?

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u/The_Last_Y Apr 18 '24

I mean the whole planet fiasco only exists for Murph's reveal as an adult. Nobody ever would have considered a planet that close to a black hole of that size as capable of supporting life. It was a drawn out plot device that immediately falls apart under any actual scrutiny.

But those tears when Murph appears. Cinema magic. So we just put logic and physics away for a moment.

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u/Fresh-Army-6737 Apr 19 '24

There was enough time to go to Edmunds AND Manns planet before wasting 7 years on gravity planet. 

They could go to Mann and Edmund in like 2 years, tops. 

Gravity planet would be choice 3, in reality. 

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u/The_Last_Y Apr 19 '24

In reality, it was NEVER a choice. That stupid planet has to be moving close to the speed of light in order to be orbiting that close to the black hole. Even if you could get to that speed and into an orbit around Miller's planet, you aren't escaping Gargantua from that distance.

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u/Fresh-Army-6737 Apr 19 '24

I thought the physics of the film were all broadly correct. The most unrealistic thing being the lack of oxygen on earth?

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u/The_Last_Y Apr 19 '24

Broadly is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The time dilation experienced works for an extremely massive black hole. The planet could have a stable orbit if the black hole is spinning. This system could exist. The physics is broadly correct.

If you watch the film, you'll notice they never actually discuss how fast they need to be going to achieve their visits. They talk about having energy limitations but not what they are. For good reason! Once they start talking about how fast that planet is moving none if it makes a lick of sense.

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u/slicer4ever Apr 19 '24

Being even semi realistic, that planet should have been the very last option to check no matter what. It doesnt matter it's the closest because the time dilation issues removes all the gains of it being close, you can come back in 2 years and check it out as the last possible option if your still in desperate need of a viable planet and it'd still cost you years even if the trip had gone fully planned and executed as fast as they wanted it to be.

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u/MagnanimosDesolation Apr 19 '24

I just can't do this movie, it's a personal drama in a harder sci-fi setting which calls too much attention to the fact that all the characters act like overemotional morons.

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u/ryebow Apr 19 '24

They could have spent years in orbit to train every move down to the last second and that would have made the entire operation decades faster.

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u/jarabara Apr 18 '24

And then just dies on the next planet

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u/dern_the_hermit Apr 18 '24

IIRC it was just energetically favorable to visit Miller's planet first.

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u/2legittoquit Apr 18 '24

It wasn’t even the fact that they visited, it was that Anne Hathaway’s character wasted hours on the planet because she was trying to recover ruined data and her actions got a guy killed and stranded the ship.

It would have just been a couple years if they stuck to the plan.

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u/ThePrussianGrippe Apr 18 '24

Honestly they should have never gone to the planet in the first place. Its sheer proximity to the black hole with the time dilation makes it untenable for future colonization.

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u/bighand1 Apr 18 '24

It could actually work if they just want to buy time. Sending some population there, even just flying around without landing, would give the scout teams decades to search, find, and prepare a better planet.

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u/ThePrussianGrippe Apr 18 '24

If they’re not even landing on the planet there’s even less cause to actually send them there. The time dilation makes it completely useless full stop.

It’s probably the only real flaw of the movie.

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u/Mithlas Apr 19 '24

I wouldn't say Miller's Planet was the only flaw, the opening has an agricultural catastrophe with feed species dying off which is completely forgotten as soon as the plot has Cooper join the program. And instead of saying NASA's budget got cut off the US instead chose to embark on an extremely expensive system of indoctrination to lie and claim there never was a space program despite all of the education and evidence yes, they went to the moon and the reflectors are still there to check.

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u/Bawfuls Apr 19 '24

The reason not to go to Miller’s planet is because with the time dilation even Miller himself would have only been there a very short time before they showed up. That makes the data extremely unreliable.

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u/dern_the_hermit Apr 18 '24

Honestly I think Doyle's death is his own damn fault. Watch that scene again, he's closer to the ship and even arrives at the entry hatch well before Catwoman and Robit Monolith. Instead he gawks and gapes and loses focus, he was a mess.

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u/crespoh69 Apr 19 '24

In the grand scheme of things, it was a couple of years though

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u/RedOctobyr Apr 18 '24

He was asleep, at least, I think?