You only just watched it now??
Yes buddy, yes.
Late to the game, welp I never watch popular things when they are hot.
By the end of it I was just thinking, just how much pain are they gonna drag us through. Pessimistic I know. I mean poor Brands is still out there? In a strange galaxy? By herself?? Shit man. And Edmund is dead. What even.
So synopsis (spoiler alert haha, does anyone actually need a spoiler alert in 2022?).
Cooper's earth is ending, people ain't gonna survive there because crops ain't growing no more. NASA sends Cooper and co. into space with two plans in mind: A) try to find three people on three different planets who went there 10 years ago to see which planet can they bring the remaining human race to, or B) start a new population of people on that planet and forget about the remaining humans. They set off, go through a wormhole, reach another galaxy. They land on Miller's planet, nothing doing, Mann's planet, nothing doing, and they run out of fuel. Cooper and robot TARS shoot off the back of Endurance, to propel Endurance which contains Cooper, off to the last planet with hope - Edmund's planet. They did this because there was not enough fuel left for two people. Where did Cooper and TARS shoot off to you may ask? The Black Hole buddy, the Black Hole aka Gargantua. Apparently, the key to bringing the remaining human race to a new planet is understanding gravity. And gravity can only be understood if they can see Singularity and the data generated from it. Singularity lies on the other side of the Gargantua, which means people can't see it when they peer into it using space cameras. They need to go into it, cross over the horizon to the other side and fly into nothingness. Which is where Cooper and TARS are hurtling towards. They fall into some interstellar (hmm hm) interdimensional space. Cooper sees that he is in a space where he is surrounded by replicas of his daughter Murphy's room, with a second by second frame. Basically you walk down a maze-like aisle where you see Murphy vidoes playing through a loop when she was little and experienced the 'ghost'. He realised he was the ghost knocking over the books in Morse code, telling Murphy the coordinates of the secret NASA base, the word 'STAY' asking himself back in the days not to go on the mission. He encodes the data of the Singularity in the second hand of the watch he gave Murphy, and she gets it when she became much older and was working for NASA. She translates the code out in formulas and calculations, which made it possible for rockets of remaining human race to leave dying Earth and defy gravity. When Murphy 'got it', Cooper eventually falls back to space, near where the new Cooper Station became set up years later and was rescued. Cooper Station is built in the orbit circling Saturn. It is like the land of the topsy turvy. Murphy is now old, and immediately transferred from another station (wow they have two?) which took two years and in cryo-sleep so she would survive (apparently, with two space stations, they still haven't found a way to live forever), and see her father who now looks much younger than her. Brand on the other hand is on Edmund planet in ANOTHER galaxy, and is setting up camp for the future human race. What.
I think a couple of things stood out to me as to what made the story good.
1) The link between the first snippet of the story and the last, the ghost explained.
It was the eureka moment. It was the thread throughout the story. This is a classic even in high school essays, I believe I got an A in Mandarin because my essay featured this 'revisiting' back a topic a couple of times, and a twist at the end (it was God's hand in it for my story). It is like the red scarf in Taylor Swift's song 'All Too Well'. Another minor link was the interviews from the first chapter with relevant snippets shown as it happened and the last chapter, showing the interviews in the museum on Cooper Station.
2) The casual repetition of few major themes throughout the movie such as gravity and love.
Honestly it is a long movie, but time flew because the script keeps bringing us back to a handful of themes amidst the wonderful actions. Simply put, gravity was the problem and love was the solution. Weaving these keywords into the dialogues helps the audience keep track of the plot, which otherwise can be too complicated to follow.
3) The first apocalyptic chapter.
It brings us back to earth (geddit geddit). This is one of my favourite parts. It felt so real, strangely relatable although it is set in an imagined future, we can somehow see humankind ending up like that. The little mystery in Murphy's room was the centrepiece in this chapter, with investigations and clues and tractors attraction making the audiences little Nancy Drews. The thrill of the mystery made me invested. The Dust Bowl, wheat and corn, all familiar but not exactly.
4) A cocktail of classic human behaviours/emotions, portrayed perfectly.
Familial love, sacrifices (compulsory for space movies), many tears (Matthew and Anne's were amazingly real), betrayal (by old Brand and Mann), hope and final salvation.
5) The soundtrack.
Hans Zimmer soundtracks I feel is made to make you feel moved, sad, and be memorable at the same time. I don't think it even played that many times, but repetitive nature of its melancholic melody makes you remember it. It definitely suits space movies. After watching the music still rings in your ears. Whenever you hear it afterwards, it brings back the feels the movie made you feel.
I felt the success of the story is in a well written script with good technical backdrop. Each major episode in the movie was given the time it needed to develop, so they did not feel rushed through, but at the same time they did not zoom in on things that did not matter, it is like you know everything they show is important to the story. Things that did not matter were like how Cooper got scooped up from home, into a spaceship and shot off on a rocket in minutes. Like hello, no training, going through plans etc.? Of course they did, but they were not pivotal to the story so I was glad they cut it short. And finally, they major episodes, they executed them well, the dialogues addressed everything necessary, it is like at any given time in the storyline, there was only one major thing happening and the writer made sure to pare it down to that as much as possible, completed it, before moving on with the next. For example, when they are deciding which planet to go to next, Mann's or Edmund's, they don't talk about Royle's death no more (which in movie time had just happened prior), they focus solely on that and the arguments from both sides. It helps the audience follow. The tying up of loose ends at the end, revealing the Easter eggs, helps the audience with closure too.
The movie makes one feel a variety of emotions, go to multiple places, but there is a constancy in repeated themes and keywords that threads through the storyline that propels (geddit?) one through.
