INTERSTELLAR: Is It Deep or Dumb? - Wisecrack Edition

this video is brought to you by paradox interactive what's up guys jared again there are few filmmakers who inspire as much adoration as christopher nolan from mind-bending thrillers to superhero adventures to world war ii epics nolan has made solid films in many genres but there's one nolan movie that's divided the wisecrack crew some proclaim it a masterpiece while others just roll their eyes i'm talking about his big space opus interstellar there was so much hype surrounding interstellar's release nolan had already been called the new stanley kubrick and this film was supposed to cement this comparison

with nolan's very own 2001 a space odyssey yet reactions were mixed people praised the ambition and the visuals of the film while taking issues with some of the more emotional moments while the dark knight inception and the prestige have been discussed studied and deemed irrefutably smart it seems the jury's still out on interstellar but don't worry we're here to finally put that question to rest so welcome to this wisecrack edition on interstellar deep or dumb and yeah obviously spoilers ahead but before we get into that i want to give a shout out to this video's

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too distant future a global blight has rendered most of earth's land useless humanity's only hope is ex-pilot cooper and his ten-year-old daughter murph who mysteriously received coordinates from a ghostly presence that leads them to a secret nasa headquarters led by coop's former mentor dr john brand recently an alien entity opened up a wormhole that may lead to a new habitable planet dr brand is developing a gravitational equation to save humanity by relocating everyone to another planet but if that doesn't work plan b is to leave humanity behind and populate a new planet with frozen embryos

with the embryos in tow coop reluctantly sets out to the wormhole leaving his daughter and son behind coop and the crew including dr brand's daughter amelia reach one of the potential planets but an error in their plan costs them 23 years due to relativity murph now grown up discovers that dr brand was lying his equation that would save the people of earth was a sham the only hope for humanity lies in the embryos on board coop's ship yet murph refuses to give up and continues to search for an answer coop eventually sacrifices himself so that

amelia can go on with the human embryos and falls into the black hole but he's saved by the quote aliens who have made him a cozy little tesseract which he can use to communicate with murph turns out these aliens aren't aliens they're future humans murph realizes the ghostly presence from her childhood was actually her father all along and she decodes a new message from him to complete bran's equation and save humanity off the dying earth coop wakes up on a space station populated with earth's inhabitants where he finally reunites with his daughter now well over

90. she tells coop that his mission isn't over he needs to go find amelia and a new planet for humanity the end now before we can determine if interstellar is deep or dumb we first have to understand what nolan was trying to achieve everyone always makes the 2001 comparisons and at first glance this may seem apt both films have an alien artifact space exploration a robot a second act dominated by a crew member going loco and a phantasmagoric third act but these are only aesthetic similarities underneath it all the films are quite different whereas kubrick's

film is meant to give us deliberately opaque answers to the unknown interstellar does the opposite it seeks to embolden us to inspire us to make the unknown knowable and transparent now i know what you're thinking what does making the unknown knowable even mean well let's look at three ways he tries to communicate this message part one interstellar setting and structure interstellar is set on an earth on the brink of collapse the amount of arable land dwindles by the day all science points to humanity dying out in one generation tops even worse everyone has given up

on any long-term solution resigned to just maintain life for as long as possible before their inevitable doom cooper a former nasa pilot does exactly this he foregoes his dreams of arrow exploration to tend to his farm and family in this new world hope is suppressed space travel was treated not just as a wasteful impracticality but an outright lie in order to stifle any ambitions outside the immediate issues facing humanity textbooks have been rewritten to suggest that the lunar landing was a hoax nasa too has been dismantled and disgraced and if we don't want a repeat

of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th century then we need to teach our kids about this planet not tales of leaving it but interstellar argues against this to not get bogged down in the existential dread but to fight against the dying of the light dr brand constantly repeats dylan thomas's poem do not go gentle into that good night do not go gentle into that good night old age should burn and rave a close of day rage rage against the dying of the light and it reflects the film's primary ethos the pioneer spirit american rhetoric

often assumes this quintessential belief that growth and survival comes through exploration this ethos led to the country's expansion into the west and its exploration into space brand uses thomas's poem to incentivize cooper and his nasa engineers to leave their families and look to the stars for a solution to humanity's crisis dr bran uses the lie of his gravitational equation to give humanity hope for a better world if he told the truth coop wouldn't leave his family and pilot the spaceship the human race would inevitably die out it's only through the lie that bran keeps the

pioneer spirit intact cooper too constantly extols the pioneer ethos it's like we forgotten who we are huh explorers pioneers not caretakers well we used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt look no further than how he defines murphy's law typically murphy's law is stated as the adage anything that can go wrong will go wrong a fairly pessimistic and resigned outlook this falls in line with most of humanity's thinking in the film that the planet is doomed

and we should just use what little time is left to feed our own before oblivion comes but coop favors a less traditional definition per coop murphy's law instead means what happened what it means is that whatever can happen will happen this recontextualization favors the pioneer ethos to explore outwards discover things and expand the definition of what can happen we're explorers wrong this is our boat yet the plot of interstellar sometimes undercuts this ethos cooper's journey into the unknown has already been pre-planned he's just a pawn in future humanity's grand circular scheme if these fifth dimensional

aliens i.e future us are guiding cooper the entire time it makes the whole human ingenuity thing a whole lot less convincing i mean is cooper really saving mankind through the pioneer ethos or has he been given all the answers by a metaphysical helping hand nolan also highlights the importance of the pioneer ethos through the film's structure interstellar in some ways resembles joseph conrad's seminal novella heart of darkness which is all about journeying into the unknown in heart of darkness marlow a sea captain sails down the congo river yearning to fill in the blank spaces on

his map similarly in interstellar cooper leads an expedition into the blank reaches of space driven by a need to explore the unknown doyle even refers to the black hole cooper and his team are traveling to as a literal heart of darkness as marlow delves deeper into the heart of darkness he comes face to face with the dark side of man this is personified by colonel kurtz who preceded marlowe into the jungle hoping to civilize the indigenous populations in regular society kurtz is praised as a remarkable man with a generous mind whose goodness shown in every

act yet by the time marlow reaches kurtz the jungle has corrupted him whole kurtz no longer has any interest in civilizing the people he just wants to exterminate all the brutes in interstellar dr man 2 is described as the best of us as a remarkable man anyone said the doctor man was the best of us he's remarkable just like kurt's man preceded cooper into space and by the time cooper reaches him man has been corrupted by his time alone on the newfound planet both curts and man are consumed by their own selfish desires kurtz forces

the natives to worship him proclaiming everything in the jungle his own you should have heard him say my ivory my intended my ivory my station my river my everything belonged to him and man selfishly lies about the habitable prospects of his planet just so others will come to save him even egotistically refers to the planet as his own the truth is i never really considered the possibility that my planet wasn't the one just as heart of darkness comments on the innate selfishness of mankind nolan uses man to cynically do the same i mean the character's

name is man also one could draw a parallel between dr brand's necessary lie about the gravity equation with marlo's lie to curses intended at the novella's end falsely telling her that kurtz's last words were her name but using heart of darkness to celebrate humanity's pioneer ethos is a little awkward conrad presented a much more nuanced look at exploration the idea to explore may be pure but often went hand in hand with european imperialism the conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses

than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much what redeems it is the idea only yet for nolan exploration specifically the space variety is an unabashedly pure and worthwhile pursuit now while we wouldn't go as far as to say the movie is dumb for alluding to conrad it's just not the most precise reference to make same with the whole predestination thing not the most graceful way to celebrate humanity's will to go beyond but regardless for setting in structure we're gonna go with a soft deep part two interstellar's religious imagery it

may sound odd for a film that purports to a noble man's search for certainty deals in religious imagery yet interstellar is loaded with religious symbolism which to be fair many have commented on in the past there's an omniscient god-like being who creates a wormhole and guides everything originally 12 astronauts are sent to explore this wormhole just as jesus sent out 12 disciples in his name and cooper becomes to represent the holy trinity first as the son when cooper like jesus sacrifices himself to save humanity and like jesus cooper's miraculously resurrected and comes back to civilization

only to immediately leave once again he even spends time wandering in the wilderness albeit on an uninhabitable planet instead of the desert when cooper enters the godlike being's tesseract he becomes the holy spirit i.e the ghost guiding murphy and himself in the past later cooper becomes the father reaching out and touching amelia when they first enter the wormhole allah michelangelo's the creation of adam there are even two noah's arks one the spaceship holding the embryos that cooper pilots for a majority of the runtime and the other in the film's coda the spaceship transporting earth survivors

through the cosmos these religious images aren't about crafting anything mystical though in fact the opposite is true interstellar incorporates these religious elements into an explainable framework the god-like omniscient beings guiding everything is just humanity in the future the ghost that gives them coordinates it's just coop in the tesseract cooper seemingly never aging and rising from the dead einstein's relativity in practice miracles can happen but not through prayer instead miracles like saving humanity from extinction come through science the pioneer spirit and belief in the imagination hanzimer's score which utilizes religious church organs highlights this point per

nolan i wanted zimmer to use the church organ i also made the case very strongly for some feeling of religiosity to it even though the film isn't religious but that the organ the architecture cathedrals and all the rest they represent mankind's attempt to portray the mystical or the metaphysical what's beyond us beyond the realm of the everyday yet again nolan speaks to the importance of journeying into the unknown because what might seem beyond us even the metaphysical can possibly be understood and help us in the face of insurmountable odds so for this novel treatment of

religious imagery we're also going to say deep part 3 interstellar science of love nolan consulted for years with american theoretical physicist and nobel laureate kim thorne there's even an entire book that explains the scientific concepts behind the film's cosmological ideas science is a huge part of interstellar the b plot centers around murf attempting to solve a seemingly impossible gravitational equation but in order to figure it out she can't just blindly accept what dr brand thinks that the equation is impossible yet again no one stresses the importance of pursuing the unknown not just in the cosmos

but in science itself instead of dismissing what might seem unknowable as nonsense humanity must confront these problems with due diligence and try to incorporate these ideas into the scientific method or if you want to talk science don't just tell me that you're afraid of some ghosts no you got to go further you gotta record the facts analyze get to the how and the y then present your conclusions this necessity of incorporating uncertainty into frameworks that seek to solidify certainty is developed in a really clever subplot involving tars in which it's revealed that tarza's optimal honesty

setting is only at ninety percent hey tarz what's your honesty parameter ninety percent ninety percent absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic nor the safest form of communication with emotional beings while we might think of emotion as being counter to rational thinking tarza's 10 dishonesty calculus suggests that emotion can be incorporated into a model seeking absolute certainty and since we're on the topic of emotion let's talk about love yes this is where things get a little dicey and where most claims of dumbness have been leveled at the film interstellar takes a big emotional swing for

the fences arguing that just like traditional science emotions a la love can also be quantified and known you all know the scene love isn't something we invented it's observable powerful it has to mean something love has meaning yes social utility social bonding child rearing we love people who have died where's the social utility in that none maybe it means something more something we can't yet understand maybe it's some evidence some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive i'm drawn across the universe to someone i haven't seen in a decade who i know

is probably dead love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space maybe we should trust that even if we can't understand it yet and the film backs up this monologue in the end amelia's right about which planet is habitable later in the tesseract cooper's able to figure out how to communicate with murph through his love for her no one seems to be arguing the same as before just because love seems undefinable doesn't mean we should dismiss it as such instead we should you know the drill attempt to understand

this unknown and use it for our betterment and yet the film's actual definition of love feels vague at best unlike the scientific and religious connotations which are given specific answers interstellar's manifestation of love boils down ultimately to some sort of gut instinct coop claims that it's through love that future humanity guided him to just the right time and place in the tesseract so that he could communicate with murph though even that is a bit vague but to be fair how can you define emotions in anything but the vagus of terms it's a problem that interstellar

can't quite master so yeah in a movie all about journeying into the unknown and using science and reason to solve humanity's crises it does feel a little odd to fall back on a vague appeal to love as the grand solution but perhaps interstellar is trying to suggest that love like gravity is an observable force of attraction just as two masses attract each other through gravity two people are attracted to each other through love and if that is observable maybe it's not all mystical mumbo-jumbo but even if you buy that the film only seems to uphold

certain kinds of love favoring coop's love for his daughter while ignoring his son the film celebrates love for someone who's a pioneer like murphy but then dismisses the love for someone of the land like tom in interstellar's world view tom represents everything wrong with the feet in the sand earth philosophy so he gets left behind in the literal dust i mean when cooper wakes up in the future he doesn't even ask about what happened to his son or if he's even alive that's cold and maybe even a little dumb so what to make of interstellar

is it deep is it dumb yes there are some awkward contradictions and haziness around the whole love thing but perhaps that's inevitable when you're making a film that affirms and celebrates our most essential human characteristics after all nolan isn't a scientist his job isn't to write a proof on how to quantify love his job is to dramatize it to make us feel and just as cooper's message of love transcends time and space to murph the image of a 2013 matthew mcconaughey crying on a sound stage in burbank transcends time and space and makes 2019 me

all misty-eyed in my crappy apartment so if the film inspires you if it makes you excited about the cosmos about humanity's ability to use its grit and creativity to thrust ourselves into the future then the movie is deep because that's the message of the film and if this whole soap boxy speech came off as cheesy and you didn't care well then the movie is dumb anything that can happen will happen after all but what do you guys think did nolan trip over his own ambition or is interstellar another masterpiece thanks to all our patrons who

support the channel and our podcast be sure to hit that subscribe button and as always thanks for watching guys but before you go i want to give another shout out to surviving mars new expansion green planet i recently played the game and had a lot of fun building my colony and terraforming mars from setting up your supply chains to hand picking your colonists there are so many things you can do to make your colony thrive making the wrong move can be costly but that's the thrilling thing that sets this strategy game apart surviving mars is

available on pc xbox one and ps4 and right now the base game is available to play for free on steam so get started building your own colony today by clicking the link in the description thanks for watching guys peace [Music] you