Interstellar

Interstellar (2014)

5 corrected entries

(10 votes)

Corrected entry: SPOILER: When Coop is on Cooper Station at the end, we're told it'll be a couple of weeks until his daughter arrives. We skip over that time period fairly quickly, and he eventually sees Murph, who tells him to go to Brand, who's all alone on Edmonson's planet, through the wormhole. Why does it take him so long to think that might be a good idea?! As soon as he's aware what's happened, why doesn't he tell everyone what's happened and where she is, so a rescue party can be sent? Instead he sits around on his recreated front porch, wondering what to do with himself, before finally seemingly going after Brand alone.

Correction: Cooper does not know that Brand made it to Edmondson's planet for sure. The plot is consistent with the assumption that Cooper has told NASA what happened from his perspective. Why would NASA take the huge risk of mounting a hurried mission to rescue one person? How quick and easy would it be to find a pilot with Cooper's skills, willing to risk his life and abandon his family? NASA's purpose is to find a new world to inhabit, and a follow-up exploration mission to Edmonson's planet may indeed be in preparation. Meanwhile, Cooper has to wait to see his daughter, and it's an essential plot point that his first commitment is not to leave her again - until she gives him permission to do so, because now she has family of her own to care for, and to be cared for. He goes on his own because he's driven by his emotional attachment to Brand, which trumps NASA's more logical, calculated approach to exploration.

Corrected entry: The crew are sent spaceward to rendezvous with spaceship Endurance atop a very large rocket booster, very much like a gigantic Saturn 5. Once they traverse the wormhole and commence exploration, they ferry themselves from orbit to each planet's surface and back again aboard rather small single-stage vehicles. If each ferry vehicle is that capable, then why did they need the huge Saturn-type rocket just to get them to Endurance?

Correction: It could simply be to conserve fuel. They didn't have enough fuel to visit every potentially habitable planet so they would take whatever measures they could to ensure that the smaller vehicles had as much fuel as possible.

Phaneron

Corrected entry: When Cooper is in the 5th dimension, he only "sees" Murph's room so he uses the books and the watch to communicate with her, but she takes the watch off the house and takes it to the lab in NASA and the watch is still "shaking" in Morse outside the room and the house, where Cooper can't manipulate gravity.

Correction: Cooper is not *only* manipulating gravity, he's effectively reprogramming the laws of physics. He permanently affected the watch so that the second hand only ever ticked out his coded message, no matter where it is taken.

Phixius

Corrected entry: In the docking scene where Coop is trying to dock the service module to the partly damaged Endurance, the Endurance is spinning around its center axis. As the ship was damaged around the perimeter it would spin around its new center of mass, that would be off axis. The docking bay itself would revolve around this new axis, making alignment much harder.

Milan Korenica

Correction: It's not explained in the movie itself, but any kind of craft that has to take distribution of weight into account (e.g. Larger ships, airplanes), has some form of (semi-) automatic mechanism to rebalance itself, for example by pumping fuel into another section. A spacecraft that is designed to revolve around itself and features detachable cargo modules etc., sure as hell will have some form of automatic weight redistribution as well, so as not to off-center the whole craft when someone goes to the toilet 90° away.

t-6

Corrected entry: The crew land on Miller, the ocean planet, in water a foot deep, and an unbroken wave - a tsunami - of at least 100 feet high reaches them. However an unbroken wave is only possible if the average water depth is - as a rule of thumb - not less than the wave height, anything much less must cause the wave to break. There could be deep water further out through which the unbroken wave can move, but it will break before it reaches the very shallow water in which the astronauts are standing. Recall the footage of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Japanese tsunamis - the waves were broken where they moved over very shallow water. A consideration of the actual movement of water particles as a wave passes reveals that it is physically impossible for a hundred-foot high wave to move unbroken in water only a foot or two deep.

Correction: The planet was orbiting a black hole. The waves were likely caused by the gravitational pull of the black hole. The rule-of-thumb from the original post is not likely to be relevant in that situation.

Consider a cross-section of the wave and movement of the water molecules. There are 2 possibilities: either the water molecules travel in the wave, in which case it is turbulent, i.e it is a broken wave, or the water molecules move laterally and up and down, i.e in a circle, in which case you get a classic unbroken wave shape, the waves in the movie are like that. But you can't get thousand-foot-high unbroken waves going that speed in water only a foot deep: where is the piled up water from?

Audio problem: Murph's dialogue doesn't sync with her mouth at the lines "you hate farming, Dad." (00:17:43)

More mistakes in Interstellar

Cooper: Humour 75%.
TARS: 75%. Self destruct sequence in T minus 10, 9, 8...
Cooper: Let's make it 65%.
TARS: Knock, knock.

More quotes from Interstellar

Trivia: Christopher Nolan planted 500 acres of corn for the film because he did not want to CGI the farm in. After filming, he sold the corn and made back a profit towards the film's budget.

Jennyred

More trivia for Interstellar

Question: Why type of propulsion system does the Endurance use? It took 2 years for them to reach Saturn from Earth. Once they're in the other galaxy, the ship appears to travel between planets in mere hours/days. Also, it appears that the smaller shuttle craft was launched from Earth on a Saturn V type rocket, but later when leaving the surface of other planets, they have no such system.

Answer: I am not exactly sure what kind of propulsion system is used, however; you must consider that although in our galaxy even the closest planets to Earth take years to travel to, in this alternate universe, the planets may be arranged in a closer formation.

More questions & answers from Interstellar

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.