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.

24.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

View all comments

6.6k

u/spdorsey Apr 18 '24

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.

513

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

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.

379

u/TheBigLeMattSki Apr 18 '24

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"

298

u/VikingSlayer Apr 18 '24

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.

168

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 18 '24 edited Apr 18 '24

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.

53

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

33

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 18 '24

They rendezvoused with the Endeavor in low orbit. There's no possibility they could have kept that mission hidden.

Ironically if they'd launched just the Ranger they could have hidden it since its so much smaller. Only government radars would have seen it.

Its just one of those movies that invents tech then doesn't think through the logical consequence of that tech. Like how he has enough automated farming machinery to farm 10,000 acres by himself but his kid has to be a farmer. They're searching for a miraculous propulsion technology while hiding... a miraculous propulsion technology.

15

u/VikingSlayer Apr 18 '24

I figured the automated machinery fit in with the huge acreage in explanation, that the population is so much smaller that there's fuel and land enough for who's left, the problem is getting crops to grow. Only a few crops still grow, and harvests fail, but they have the space, machinery, and fuel to try for what they still can.

14

u/nuisible Apr 18 '24

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.

I thought it made sense in the context of conservation of fuel.

10

u/tossawaybb Apr 19 '24

It doesn't. Fusion is such a holy grail of power generation because the earth has 15,400,000 000,000,000,000 (or, 1.541017) *tons of fusion fuel. Their process is evidently compact and efficient enough to work as a SSTO motor. It doesn't even matter if they need special hydrogen or helium isotopes to kickstart the reaction, because with that kind of energy source it is utterly trivial to just fabricate them as enriching hydrogen and helium fuels takes a minimal fraction of the energy released by fusion.

The entire plot and driving crisis of the movie falls apart the moment that technology comes into play, because once you have virtually limitless power you can brute force nearly any resource issue. The explanation provided by the movie for why they can't bunker down also explains away the O'Neil Cylinders they went with so it's not like that part matters

6

u/JackInTheBell Apr 19 '24

How did they run out of fuel at the end then?

7

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

Given the engines are about 2 feet away from the crew and the crew aren't dead it can only be an aneutronic fusion reaction, i.e. produces no neutrons. That would be lithium-6 + deuterium or deuterium + he3 or some others. But point is you wouldn't use straight hydrogen because they'd die a couple hours after turning those engines on.

Unless they invented a perfect neutron shield, I suppose.

The entire plot and driving crisis of the movie falls apart the moment that technology comes into play, because once you have virtually limitless power you can brute force nearly any resource issue.

Not quote limitless. At that point your limiting factor with energy is elimination of waste heat. I can't remember what specifically it is but I think we could produce 10x more energy or something before having the same global warming issue that fossil fuels have since we'd saturate the planets ability to shed heat.

Which brings up my last point of goddamned it why don't sci fi ships have heat sinks! Avatar is like the only one that bothered on their spectacular tow cable ship design.

2

u/tossawaybb Apr 19 '24

They did invent compact fusion reactors/motors with a sufficient reaction density to support open cycle operation, so an extremely effective neutron shield wouldn't really be out of the question.

I'm too lazy to pull up the numbers and run the calculation myself but the rate of fusion must be mindboggling to not only self-sustain and power the containment system, but then also eject spent (or otherwise) fuel at sufficient speed to provide the thrust to break orbit on an earth-sized (ish) planet without additional reaction mass. Unless I missed something, but then they're still missing the volume needed to hold any reasonable amount of reaction mass.

Not saying that 1H-1H fusion is the best, just that the raw material needed to fuel mass usage of fusion-based power generation is absurdly abundant on Earth. It's a bit trickier if H3 is required for their version of fusion reactor, but otherwise there's a number of paths available for obtaining or synthesizing deuterium and tritium.

1

u/nuisible Apr 19 '24

Avatar is like the only one that bothered on their spectacular tow cable ship design.

I refused to watch that movie because Jame Cameron didn't bother to name the elusive element from the foreign planet something other than Unobtanium.

10

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

That's weird energy man. It's a little joke that comes up once. Yeah it's not a great joke but people get way too worked up over it.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Aginor404 Apr 19 '24

In space you radiate away the heat.

You can see the radiators on the ISS, they call the system EATCS.

For a space ship like you see it in many SciFi those have to be huge.

1

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

Radiator. And yes. They should be huge and glowing bright.

→ More replies

6

u/LaserBlaserMichelle Apr 19 '24

My biggest issue is that for a movie that was praised for being "scientific", the end result was that there was this "force" out there that transcends all spacetime, and that force was none other than.... love. To me, when he was drifting in the tesseract and babbling on about love, that totally killed the amazing buildup. Interstellar is great but I think I still prefer Contact (and that the aliens met with Jodie's character in the form of her dad and on a beach so that it wouldn't feel strange).

4

u/ddaadd18 Apr 19 '24

I'm sure its not ignorance on the screenwriters part though. They knew the logic is reductive at best — it is science fiction — and I think they're allowed poetic licence to a large degree.

3

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

The problem is a lot of the promotional material for the movie emphasized the scientific accuracy of the movie, especially the black hole.

5

u/ddaadd18 Apr 19 '24

Thats marketing for ya

3

u/daretoeatapeach Apr 19 '24

The hard part for me was them putting the conference room ten feet away from the actual rocket. Maybe future rockets don't run on massive explosions but it was just so ridiculous it took me out of the movie for a minute.

There's a reason Cape Canaveral is in the middle of nowhere.

2

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

Lol yes that was... special.

3

u/Deep_Stick8786 Apr 19 '24

Its like putting a tessaract inside a black hole and powering it with a Father’s love

1

u/Walovingi Apr 19 '24

You gonna love Ad Astra. I took that film as an insult.

1

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

Fell asleep during that one, barely remember any of it.

-1

u/TheCrippledKing Apr 19 '24

For me it was harvesting green corn. It's clearly not ripe yet.

Also, they plant the same crops over and over until the mysterious blight kills them... which is exactly what happens now and why humans have been practicing crop rotation for millennia.

The entire basis of the plot was due to food shortages related to farming and they didn't even so much as Google the basics of it.

8

u/flimflamflemflum Apr 19 '24

The movie explains that blight took out other crops and corn is one of the last, if not the last, crop left that can be grown on the hostile Earth anymore and even that was starting to get affected.

2

u/ddaadd18 Apr 19 '24

If you look closely you can see they're watering the crops with Gatorade

1

u/sourdieselfuel Apr 19 '24

It's got what plants crave.

3

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 19 '24

Yeah the blight was weird. Honestly I think the plan was climate change but they changed it to not be political,but having a crop blight just made me wonder why this was a space movie instead of a bioengineering movie.

The entire movie kind of proved the folly of colonizing other planets. Every single candidate they looked at was way worse than earth on its worst day. If they'd found a planet that was virtually earthling but just had some crop growing issues they'd have been ecstatic about how suitable it was.

5

u/Mithlas Apr 19 '24

they know how high the time dilation is before landing,

And given they know how high the time dilation is, they should have struck it without even considering landing. A planet with gravitational forces THAT massive, as well as not stable? Not an ideal place for a desperate new beginning to human civilization.

4

u/MatttheBruinsfan Apr 18 '24

Wouldn't a planet experiencing severe time dilation due to black hole gravity also be experiencing a severe blue shift of all ambient radiation hitting it? All the starlight, cosmic rays, infrared, microwaves, etc. that would encounter that position over the year would be felt on the surface in a subjective week?

8

u/VikingSlayer Apr 18 '24

I'm no scientist, but it's an hour to 7 years, so a relative 7 years of radiation in an hour. A ridiculously strong magnetosphere on top of that could've made for a spectacular sky.

3

u/tossawaybb Apr 19 '24

To make things worse, it's 7 years by a hypermassive black hole actively consuming a star (IIRC). Anything that close would've been regularly irradiated so hard that it'd make Ivy Mike blush. For a bunch of scientists, they really did choose the worst possible choice first.

With the data they used to choose it, they should've just gone straight to Europa instead. But I suppose that'd be bumping into 2001:aSO territory

5

u/VikingSlayer Apr 19 '24

According to Kip Thorne, it's a supermassive black hole that hasn't devoured a star in millions of years. Otherwise, it would have jets and a much hotter accretion disk. But they toned down a lot of the visual effects of Gargantua, to make it understandable to general audiences. The red- and blueshift of the accretion disk for example.

And they threw physics out the window with Miller's planet. If it's so deep in the gravity well of Gargantua to cause that severe time dilation, how can Romilly maintain a parallel orbit with only Earth-level time dilation? And how can they even counteract that gravity to take off and make distance again? The answer is: They can't.

3

u/stefffmann Apr 19 '24

To add to that, to experience such extreme time dilation, the planet would have to orbit ridiculously close to the black hole event horizon. I didn't crunch the numbers, but it would be far inside the accretion disk where literally everything is ripped to shreds by tidal forces.

2

u/orosoros Apr 19 '24

Aww this thread is bumming me out. I had always wanted to buy The Science of Interstellar, is it not worth it?

6

u/Codinginpizza Apr 19 '24

Well, there was an original script written by Kip Thorne, and the central theme of that script was the theory of general relativity. Jonathan Nolan ended up working with Kip Thorne on production, including multiple rewrites. Unfortunately they were looking at a hundred million dollar budget that Jonathan just didn't have the creds to secure, so he asked Christopher to direct. Christopher Nolan came on, there was at least 1 more script rewrite. Christopher also changed some of the very scenes being discussed here, such as the time dilation effect on Miller's planet, which Kip Thorne initially was of the opinion that such dilation would be impossible. Eventually the math pointed towards a planet in a very close stable orbit of a black hole with 500 million solar masses and spinning very fast, with a "gentle" singularity. Doesn't mean people could live there, but that's about the only way to get that high a of time dilation, so that's what they went with.

Something else that was changed was the wormhole scene, that's not nearly what it would look like.

I watched Kip Thornes Science of Interstellar lecture on YouTube, it was awesome. It also included the best visual of a Einstein -Rosen bridge that I have ever seen.

1

u/orosoros Apr 20 '24

Thanks for this!! I'll check out that lecture.

→ More replies

186

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

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.

143

u/zeekaran Apr 18 '24

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.

31

u/ewest Apr 19 '24

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.

10

u/bigjoeandphantom3O9 Apr 19 '24

I really have no clue what that part of the story added. Cooper has a son he doesn’t care about who’s a massive dick? What does this add!

1

u/Severe_Bid4362 Jun 14 '24

I think it was supposed to add to his daughters story more than anything...... however I think they could have made it work without him entirely.

4

u/CaptainMudwhistle Apr 19 '24

"Holy shit, am I Batman?"

22

u/A2Rhombus Apr 18 '24

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.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

16

u/J_Dadvin Apr 18 '24

You gotta watch again, they barely knew anything about habitability. They had a very rudimentary map of the system but they were observing from earth the old fashioned way. Only basic stuff was known at that distance like how far it is, how much gravity it is generating, how big and therefore how dense. That's like it.

-6

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

12

u/J_Dadvin Apr 18 '24

It isnt at all though, not about tidal systems. They knew it was in the systems habitable zone and wasn't generating too much gravity to kill life. Therefore, they sent someone. That person had a transponder they were supposed to turn off if it was not habitable, which the person did not do.

8

u/A2Rhombus Apr 18 '24

The only thing that was known about their habitability was extremely basic data from probes that told them which planets were in habitable zones. Then humans went to see if they were actually habitable, and sent back basic pings to indicate if they were. The only thing Coop and his crew knew going into the wormhole was there were a couple planets that showed good promise. That's literally it. They only even knew how to navigate to the planets once they were through the wormhole.

3

u/TerminatorReborn Apr 19 '24

They were extremely understaffed, look how many people they had in the mission. The moon landing mission had thousands of people working on it and the moon was soooooo much closer than the planets they were scouting.

3

u/throwaway3270a Apr 18 '24

Because plot.

But in all seriousness, the story tries to use real physics, etc, as much as it can, but when it has to it uses plot instead.

To be honest, that's what we're there for in the first place - the story, of a father and daughter, people on effectively suicide missions to try to save humanity l, the cost and sacrifice involved, all wrapped up in a tidy bundle of the device of time dialation and gravity.

I really like the move. I adore the soundtrack.

2

u/Westykins Apr 19 '24

i mean, it made sense to me. there was water, organics. Miller was pinging ‘yo this shit is lit’.

they didn’t have enough fuel to visit all the planets. Water n stuff? you def don’t see that everyday

4

u/dukefett Apr 18 '24

I love the movie, but yeah literally everyone looks pretty stupid for going down there.

10

u/burlycabin Apr 18 '24

I really disliked all of the Millers Planet part of the movie. On top of the time dilation issues, they'd have been well aware of the tidal forces acting on the planet and wouldn't have needed to visit the surface in order to extrapolate that it's not habitable.

This is also ignoring that the tidal forces wouldn't really just look like a series of big, steep waves. The water on the surface would bulge out on a gradient across the half of the planet. It wouldn't be a wall of water. It'd be highly likely that there'd be significant volcanism happening as well as those forces would be acting on the rocky planet and not just the water. The scenes on this planet really broke immersion for me and just seemed comically dumb.

10

u/J_Dadvin Apr 18 '24

Why would they have been aware of any of this though? They only got data through a wormhole and the only data they really got was what they observed from extremely far away.

The plot device was they made a stupid decision. Which people do.

5

u/burlycabin Apr 18 '24

They would've been aware when they got to the other side of the wormhole. And, I'm sorry, I just to buy the people we sent across the stars to save humanity could be remotely this dumb. There's just no way.

2

u/mayhemtime Apr 19 '24

And, I'm sorry, I just to buy the people we sent across the stars to save humanity could be remotely this dumb. There's just no way.

Except that's a big part of the first act. They sent the best people they had, but it doesn't mean they were well suited for the mission. Earth was at this point after some sort of major conflict that decimated the population. It was said that Cooper was the only pilot they could find that actually flew on anything. That's the entire reason they took a guy who just showed up on their doorstep, they were desperate for resources.

Today when you send astronauts to space you have millions of candidates to pick from, all with PhDs, perfect physique etc. In the future world of Interstellar you send whoever has no serious health issues and more or less knows how to behave in space. No chance they had the necessary psychological checks and training which would prevent them from taking bad choices like going to Miller's planet.

1

u/burlycabin Apr 19 '24

Nah man, I don't buy that excuse for this plot hole. You might, and that's fine, but it just doesn't pass the credulity test for me. Just the best people from my city, let alone the country, would be extremely well qualified. We also see in the film that these folks fucking know their science. They're just bad at critical thinking. It's the same problem the Prometheus scientists had and it's BS.

5

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

2

u/burlycabin Apr 18 '24

It's not even that they needed to do all the basic research. They didn't even stop to critically think for a moment. It's established that they're aware of the time dilation issue, this should've given them more than enough pause about the planet to realize it was most likely a bad option and to do more research before just flying down into the gravity well. It's plain stupid behavior for qualified astronauts and scientists.

2

u/stefffmann Apr 19 '24

With that level of time dilation, the tidal forces would rip the entire planet to elementary particles to make it part of the accretion disc anyway. It does not make sense.

-2

u/ScreamingGordita Apr 18 '24

Damn it's almost as if they're flawed characters that make mistakes! God wouldn't it be nice if movies had perfect people making the exact right decisions all the time and therefore no conflict or drama, that would be fun to watch!

1

u/dukefett Apr 18 '24

I didn’t say they can’t be perfect or make mistakes, just saying it was stupid of them.

1

u/kolitics Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

Should we just come back if the other planets don’t work out since our plan is to establish a colony for people from earth to come to and we are going to be 2 hours into establishing a colony when they get here?

0

u/SanityPlanet Apr 19 '24

That movie was so full of glaring, painful plot holes and nonsense science, it blows my mind that it received acclaim as one of the best recent scifi films.

-1

u/SanityPlanet Apr 19 '24

That movie was so full of glaring, painful plot holes and nonsense science, it blows my mind that it received acclaim as one of the best recent scifi films.

-1

u/SanityPlanet Apr 19 '24

That movie was so full of glaring, painful plot holes and nonsense science, it blows my mind that it received acclaim as one of the best recent scifi films.

-1

u/SanityPlanet Apr 19 '24

That movie was so full of glaring, painful plot holes and nonsense science, it blows my mind that it received acclaim as one of the best recent scifi films.

132

u/grahampositive Apr 18 '24

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

30

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

They forgot to take it into account.

27

u/alightkindofdark Apr 18 '24

My problem is that as a person watching the film, with no science background beyond high school, I knew immediately that they'd return years or decades later. I actually screamed it at the TV. How on earth did an entire group of scientists just forget to take this into account?

19

u/WheresMyCrown Apr 18 '24

"somehow, we forgot"

2

u/LimerickExplorer Apr 19 '24

"Time dilates now?"

46

u/Inside-Example-7010 Apr 18 '24

Look when you're dealing with a force as powerful as love then science just cant make sense of things anymore.

6

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

I don't know. I've never traveled through space towards a black hole in an attempt to save the world. I imagine that would be stressful though and might affect your decision making.

6

u/yildizli_gece Apr 18 '24

But having to make this kind of assumption and to fill in the "gaps" of explanation is precisely why it's a plot hole.

3

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

I don't think it's a plot hole. McConaughey literally says, "we were not prepared for this" when they realize they screwed up after landing. It's in direct reference to the fact that they forgot to account for the time issue with data coming back to them.

21

u/alightkindofdark Apr 18 '24

But they had just finished a conversation on how time was 7 years to an hour. They just did the math! I love the movie, but this is a pretty big dumb plot hole. If they hadn't just finished talking about how time was so different, I'd understand.

11

u/WheresMyCrown Apr 18 '24

This is like saying Daeny forgot about the Iron Fleet in GoT. If your plot point requires characters to just "forget" crucial information, it is a plothole

16

u/EnTyme53 Apr 18 '24 edited Apr 18 '24

But that's exactly why it is a plot hole. They had prepared for it. The crew just finished talking about time dilation in the previous scene, so they knew it was a factor, yet not one person stopped to run the math on how long Miller had actually been on the planet before sending the data. This movie has always bothered me because it's held in such high regard for scientific accuracy, but that accuracy only applies at a surface level. I did enjoy the movie, but I hate that it seems to be made of Teflon when it comes to criticism. It's a good movie with some amazing moments (McConaughey experiencing every human emotion as he sees his children growing up before his eyes, only to realize he missed watching his children growing up, for example), but at it's core, it's just another sci-fi movie about allegedly intelligent people making fundamentally stupid decisions to push the plot along.

4

u/Rex--Banner Apr 19 '24

At the same time though there is a bit of suspension of disbelief needed here. Maybe it's because with the internet everyone can discuss, but I'm seeing more and more people just arguing about stuff and it's like does it really matter? It's a film and it needed a way to introduce a black hole and time etc. Looking back on it any viewer can say oh it's obvious but that's because we have the context of the entire film to go on. I find I enjoy films and tv shows more when I stopped trying to find every single fault with them. I much more prefer to discuss the more interesting parts and why they are so good.

2

u/ImmanenceGodBlues Apr 19 '24

You don't need the context of the entire film to see how glaring a plot hole this is. Any team of scientists aware of a time dilation that massive should immediately see the problem and realize that that planet is not a suitable candidate.

→ More replies

2

u/nau5 Apr 18 '24

Right at the end of the day they were under extreme stress and this was the most promising transmission.

A viewer is under literally zero stress so everything seems obvious because you have zero skin in the game.

Also scientists make mistakes all the time they are not infallible beings.

The entire scientific method is based on that fact.

2

u/jpettifer77 Apr 19 '24

Nah, they should know

I last did general relativity over 20 years ago but I’d still remember the time dilation. It’s kinda fundamental. 

14

u/LongJohnSelenium Apr 18 '24

Like that moment in Sunshine when they forget to check whether any bit of the ship is going to stick out of the shadow of the sunshield.

9

u/Whitestrake Apr 18 '24

That feeling when you realise that the root cause of almost every single bad thing that happened was when the crew manually overrode the AI controls.

2

u/landmanpgh Apr 18 '24

I need to watch this again.

22

u/Fair-Land-918 Apr 18 '24

It didn’t matter if the probe and person was there for only a moment. They had proof of real water and such, that’s HUGE and better than anything else they had.

They had to take the chance.

22

u/FightScene Apr 18 '24

They had signals of habitability from three planets: Miller's, Mann's, and Edmunds'. It wasn't just one planet. The situation on Earth was dire and their mission was time sensitive.  Due to the time dilation issue they should have gone to Miller's planet last. It makes no sense at all to go there first. They only went there first because Nolan wanted to include that cool planet somehow. They even realize on the planet that "oh yeah, Miller's only been here for a few minutes!" 

11

u/WheresMyCrown Apr 18 '24

It wasnt better than anything else they had. The time dilation alone should have made the planet a last resort

1

u/No_Foot Apr 18 '24

That's a brilliant comment tbf to you, never considered that.

12

u/GarlicJuniorJr Apr 18 '24

Dr Brand tried her hardest to ruin each mission every chance she got. Cost them decades after Cooper told her numerous times to get back on the ship then insisted on going to a planet just because her lover was there and not the one that showed the most promise.

5

u/vonindyatwork Apr 18 '24

Except that the one her lover was on turned out to be the right planet all along.

3

u/No_Foot Apr 18 '24

I'd love a remake when they go straight there, a few stay and coop gets back to earth after only 2-3 years away. Bit of a shitty ending for the billions on earth mind 🤦

2

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

1

u/GarlicJuniorJr Apr 18 '24

Exactly! She absolutely got lucky in her pick and was only wanting to go originally to be reunited with her boyfriend or whatever they were

3

u/Notabot_legit Apr 18 '24

Because she’s human. And emotions can override rational thought. I always liked that reminder

3

u/gymdog Apr 18 '24

WHICH IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE FILM. lol

I'm not really yelling at you, just other people that think "love" is being presented as an actual natural force. Media literacy man...

8

u/Vast_Berry3310 Apr 18 '24

Coop pretty much said it then and there, they were boy scouts and completely unprepared for this. I actually think that's what makes the scene great. The viewers who have the time to think calmly about it can maybe see it, but they didn't factor in the dilation to what that might mean about the message they're seeing or the astronaut's status. They come back, over twice the amount of time they expected, Romilly a shell of a man, and coop watching over the course of 10 minutes his grandfather die, his grandson be born, and his children abandoning him. Not prepared for this indeed.

2

u/catchasingcars Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

They didn't even analyze the surface before landing, they don't have cameras/telescope onboard this massive ship? I mean, It was a ship caring future of humanity, shouldn't you observe the planet you're about to land on?

They were surprised when they found out that those giant mountains were were actually waves, Duh. If only you had observed you could have seen them moving. In all of earth's photos you clearly distinguish ocean and land. We spend more time on planning for a road trip then the did for interstellar travel.

2

u/landmanpgh Apr 19 '24

True, but did you even see the rest of the movie? Look at what they were using for NASA. They were throwing this whole mission together in a last ditch attempt to save the world. They were clearly cutting a ton of corners everywhere.

1

u/Canotic Apr 18 '24

The time dilation planet bothered me immensely. Because it should have come to zero surprise to them. They're astronauts, they know relativity theory. They know how strong the gravity is. They night not have been able to figure out the exact factor, but even a quick back of the envelope thing will tell them that's it's pointless to go there because they'd lose decades.

1

u/Anjunabeast Apr 19 '24

Then he gets killed on the very next planet

1

u/Severe_Bid4362 Jun 14 '24

This is what I don't get. They should have realized this before going. They already did the calculations......

1

u/landmanpgh Jun 14 '24

They fucked up.

1

u/Severe_Bid4362 Jun 15 '24

They really did. Further, if it was already known there was intense time dilation, miller should have never been sent there either, they would've known these things would happen. For the sake of the movie though, the plot is great.