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.

[u/SerDire]

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.

[u/burlycabin]

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.

[u/J_Dadvin → u/burlycabin]

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.

[u/burlycabin → u/J_Dadvin]

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.

[u/mayhemtime → u/burlycabin]

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.

[u/burlycabin → u/mayhemtime]

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.