Why Christopher Nolan’s 10-year-old sci-fi film was much easier to understand than his other time travel film

The journey through time from Christopher Nolan’s novel Interstellar was much less confusing compared to a recent film by the director. Nolan has earned a reputation as a director who makes ambitious, often complicated films Interstellar remains one of his boldest cinematic outings. In InterstellarThe Earth is suffering from a plague that will make the planet uninhabitable. So former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper is sent on a mission across the galaxy to find a habitable planet for humanity to move to.

The end of Interstellar introduces an element of time travel. Of course, time travel always makes a story more complicated, but Interstellar explains the concept of time dilation quite well. Six years later Interstellar Release, Nolan’s film 2020 principle also dealt with time travel. Compared to Interstellarlike characters in principle Traveling back in time is much more confusing. This meant that many moviegoers ended up having no idea what actually happened in the film principlewhich makes it a less satisfying high-concept story than Interstellar.

Most of Interstellar’s time travel is relatively factual and based on real science

Interstellar explores the concept of time dilation

In Interstellarthree astronauts were sent to different planets that NASA believed might be capable of supporting human life. The first planet Cooper and his team reach is Miller’s Planet, which is very close to a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. The characters live on this planet Interstellar Experience time dilation. The science of Interstellar is based on the works of Albert Einstein, who believed that time is directly affected by gravity. Therefore, Because Miller’s planet is so close to Gargantua’s strong gravitational field, time passes significantly slower on the planet compared to Earth.

In Interstellar, For every hour Cooper and his crew spend on Miller’s planet, seven years pass on Earth. Cooper and his crew were on Miller’s planet for approximately three hours and 17 minutes, meaning 23 years, four months and eight days passed on Earth. Technically, traveling back in time due to time dilation had a profound effect on Cooper, as his children, whom he left behind to embark on the mission, were already full-grown adults when he left Miller’s planet.

With the ending of Interstellar the film really becomes science fiction (but it still works)

Fifth-dimensional people from the future ensured humanity’s survival in interstellar space

Most Interstellar is a linear story, but due to the time dilation Cooper experienced on Miller’s planet, the ending of the film becomes a bit confusing. In the end InterstellarCooper is drawn into the Tesseract, which was built by people from the future with knowledge of fifth-dimensional physics. The fifth-dimensional humans, who can observe the past, present and future, built the Tesseract so Cooper could communicate with his daughterwho is also trying to find a way to save humanity.

Related

10 things I learned from rewatching Interstellar 10 years after Christopher Nolan’s space film was released

Interstellar just turned 10 years old and here are 10 new things I learned from rewatching Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic in 2024.

While the concept of fifth-dimensional humans is somewhat complicated, the time dilation Cooper experienced on Miller’s planet easily explains how he is able to communicate with his adult daughter. The information Cooper Murphy can provide during the climax of Interstellar dramatically advances humanity’s understanding of space and timeand ultimately saves the species.

Interstellar’s time travel was much easier than Tenet’s

Characters in the tent travel back in time

There are still some very complicated topics being discussed Interstellareffectively conveyed to the audience the risks of spending too much time on Miller’s planet, making for one of the film’s most nerve-wracking sequences. While Cooper technically traveled to the future Interstellar, characters in principle travel into the past. In Principles In the story, a scientist from the future invented a machine called a turnstile that reverses the entropy of anything or anyone inside it.

Characters in principle can move backwards in time instead of forwards using the turnstile. However, while characters in principle moving backwards through the past, everything around them is still moving forwardwhich makes some scenes in the film very confusing and difficult to follow. The time travel presented in principle is based on a hypothesis in theoretical physics by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, but is not nearly as well explained as time dilation in Interstellar. Hence the time travel in Interstellar is much easier to understand than principle.