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if you’ve watched my show, you’re thinkingyou know how this is going to end. you’re thinking, he’s going to drop toblack and white, say some tortured words over an emotional soundtrack and try to make uscry because of love. because mikey’s a hippie. that’s all pretty accurate, actually. but, i think if we take this journey together,i might be able to surprise you along the way. i don’t aim to change your understandingof this film. i aim to shatter it.

oh shiiiiiii--credits— interstellar is a 2014 film from christophernolan and can i just say, f***in’ finally, right? i’ve put up nolan movies for vote like 6times, and i’m really only doing this one because i cheated and picked two winners lasttime moving on! it was written by jonathon and christophernolan, brothers writing together. i’m trying to imagine what would happenif my sister and i wrote a movie together. actually, i know exactly what it would be. it would called buffy: the vampire slayer:the movie: the fan fiction: the game: the

novel: the game, again. hollywood, we’re available. if you haven’t seen any of nolan’s movies,they’re all about familial bonds, a juxtaposion beset by a white man’s struggle againstseemingly impossible odds where the inexplicable enters the equation in some visually engagingway. i mean, christopher nolan made that movielike, 8 times. but it’s worked 8 times. and i’m going to go as far as to say thatinterstellar is christopher nolan’s best film.

[audible boos] yes. feed me. i bathe in the suffering of your boos. whoa, that got real weird. but i really do believe that this is a filmthat exists on a monumental number of levels, weaving a superb work of science fiction thathappens to put a focus on love in a way that made a lot of people very … very upset. i’m not talking about anne hathaway yet. this film opens with the film logos are insepia tone, preparing us for a different earth

than the one we were expecting to see. like the logos, everything is dust now. dust even falls over the title reveal in thefilm. and this is where you notice that the visualswill be what speaks to depth in this film. nolan loves to show us the climax of the film,generally an innocuous visual that won’t make sense until much later. in this case, it’s a 50s cartoon spaceshipfacing off against the ingenuity of nasa and the united states, all being rained on bydust. then there’s an interview about this eraof human existence, then cooper has a bad

dream, and then he’s talking about ghostswith his daughter. and his daughter says “i thought you werethe ghost.” which is true, he is. the whole movie just played out in 4 seconds. and now the rest of the movie will simplyextrapolate that. nolan uses these interviews of older people,explaining what it was like living in all this dust to set a scene. for starters, these people on screen are us,the audience, just aged up to the dust age, or whatever they call it.

this is such a beautiful way to establishthis future as plausible to an audience. it uses a documentary film technique to establishcredibility. and it’s super extra-beautiful when yourealize that the person we saw at the beginning was murph and that is a video that actuallyplays in-universe on the dyson tube. and as we move into the cooper household,meeting the kids and cooper’s dad. we find a mix of ideologies. and this is an area where nolan excels asa filmmaker. while we believe what we’re seeing is agentle discussion about whether ghosts exist or not, scientifically-speaking, what we’reactually seeing is how at least 2 opposing

viewpoints, cooper’s and murph’s, endup both being true in the end. murph believes that there could be a scientificexplanation for what appear as ghosts and cooper is countering that there can be noscientific explanation for things that are actually class-five free-roaming vapors. which is all 100% true. cooper does become a technical apparitionthat does not exist on our corporeal plane of existence for a period of time but i’mnot talking about that scene yet. hey, the truck scene is a dramatic visualrepresentation of their family dynamic. tom’s on the wrong side of the road.

i bet he will ultimately doom his family becauseof his lethargic insistence that things stay the way they are on that side of the road… okay, tom, let’s take a break, buddy. it’s getting a bit literal. it was a metaphor road, casey affleck. and i love the explanation of murphy’s lawhere and why cooper named her after it. and i super love that the setup for our reluctanthero. we are living in a quasi-literal hell thatscience needs to resolve. the thing about this movie is that not a wholelot of people are around, there’s practically no animals around at all, they have seeminglyrun out of food, so what do you think all

of this dust is made of? it’s the people, the dogs, the cats, everyinsect, dander, fur, hair, you name it. they are being coated in the eroded remainsof the world they used to know. that is dark. they don’t really make any grand proclamationsof the mistakes we made in any specific way. there’s no preachy global warming scene,there is simply an explanation that the people of our generation lived for excesses. this is a long film and i know a lot of peopledidn’t want to spend quite so much time on earth at the beginning but i think it wasfundamental to the message of the film.

cooper, and can we get this out of the way,matthew mccaughey is phenomenal in this film—we need to understand the pull that cooper hasto his children so that when he’s faced with saving humanity versus raising his kidsand dying on earth. that’s not a simple choice. the gravity of his mission versus the gravityof very possibly never seeing his children again. or to put differently, is giving your childrena better life worth never seeing them again? he takes murph with him to investigate thebinary code that mysteriously appeared in dust on his floor.

which contains the coordinates of what isleft of nasa. which is one of a few brilliant reveals aboutthe state of the world. i love that this is the new york yankees now. it’s such a natural evolution. these people fight every day to survive, livingin dust, so gives a shit about baseball? you know, a few, every once in a while. yo, nasa, in this future, refused to be useda weapon against humanity, so they went underground and became the largest pirate-run organizationof all time. nasa is pirates.

and around this time the film starts bouncinginto the metaphysical. nasa didn’t know they were waiting for cooperand he didn’t know they were waiting for him. but something sent him. “but who’s they?” god. aliens. ghosts. himself?

does it matter? if the intent is pure and helpful, does itmatter what deity-level force is on the other side of it? does it matter that this movie never tellsquite us? i mean, cooper supposes that it’s the futureof humanity, reaching back in time, but that’s never substantiated. it’s almost the question of “who’s they?”is the one thing that convinces cooper to go on the mission in the first place. a true astronaut: curious to the end.

interstellar does involves a lot of cutting-edgemathematics and astrophysics all of which i am perfectly qualified to distill down intopalatable chunks for an audience because … i know bobak ferdowsi, so that makes me likean astronaut mathman, just by marriage. yeah, that adds up. so, cooper has to go. to save us, he has to go, and he has to leavemurph, but their story is not over. and the thing is, the way this set up is done. every mistake they make in this movie, meansthat he’ll be older if and when he gets back, which is heartbreakingly genius everytime something happens because we know how

much that mistake costs cooper. it makes the film have these deeply personalstakes that somehow transcend the universal ones in play. to imax! we bounce into imax, changing aspect ratiosand feeling the start of our grand adventure. again, we are met with a lived-in space, whatfeels like a real reality out in the vacuum. every camera is ‘mounted’ to the vehicle,mimicking footage we’re used to seeing in things like this.

and can we take a moment for tars? i think this is the one aspect of the filmthat people pretty universally loved, but i didn’t really understand what was goingon here until this watch-through. tars was an old marine robot, used for war, but since there aren’t any of those anymore(cuz you need ample food, water, and people to fight one). he is repurposed by nasa to work on this journey. he’s a symbol of this rag-tag group goingon this mission. these four humans are tasked with saving humanityand none of them, like tars, should really

be there. they weren’t made for this. cooper is a farmer that used to fly jets. brand was a botanist recruited by nasa tosave earth while still on earth. doyle was a geographer, and romilly is thephysicist, who ironically is really terrified of what he knows to be scientifically plausible,specifically the fact that only millimeters of metal separate them from the vacuum ofspace. but he explodes later so maybe he was smartnot to trust it. i need a 4k television.

watching this again i am convinced to upgrade. the way it pops to imax with these breathtakingimages of the glory of the universe around us is enough to make you feel tiny and insignificantwhile using the full height of the frame is just, magical. and i could spend more time recapping aspectsand beats from this film, but i’d rather get into my hypothesis about this film. [goodbye yellow brick road]there’s a lot of talk about gravity in the film, how it bends time, light, love. in orbit of a planet an hour is just an hour,but on the surface of a planet, an hour is

seven years. this is the planet the film uses to illustratenon-binary answers to binary questions. we can’t ask “what’s the right thingto do?” anymore because the answer contains aspectsof hard-physical probability, gravity, time, resource management, lives and every multi-tieredand bet-hedging answer to the question can be affected by millions of factors. brand makes one miscalculation and it coststhem decades. and in that emotional trauma, in of the mostbrilliant scenes of all time, this movie makes one catastrophic error.

it did not take the time to explain five-dimensionalityto an audience. in a film that makes a lot of assumptions,they made a really big one about an audience that i think ended up hurting them becausenot a lot of outlets seems to get it. coop and brand discuss dimensionality allthe time but they never slow down to explain a few very key things in a way where whatthis film is putting forth here are some things i wish the film had madevery clear: 1. we live in a three-dimensional world, measuredagainst the fourth-dimension: time. we measure our 3-dimensional lives in time.

even though, the film makes a really interestingstudy about how gravity affects the third and fourth dimensions differently. their time can be warped completely independentlyof their perception that it is happening, because they can only see the 3rd dimension. 2. this film is arguing that only a 5th-dimensionalbeing would be capable of manipulating both the 4th and 3rd dimensions. 3. should a 4th-dimensional being exist, theywould be a literal time machine because their

whole existence would be in manipulating the4th-dimension, whereas we as humans whittle away our time manipulating our shitty 3rddimension. this alone paints something that melts ourchimpbrains because this movie isn’t even about those 4th-dimension suckas. this is about the 5th-dimensional ‘they.’ they that care enough to save us and thatis really important to the message of this movie. why does 5th-dimensional god/alien/they/ghosts,who are so advanced time travel would bore them, care enough to save our objectivelyworthless lives to being of infinite complexity

to our own. a 3rd-dimension human looking to a 5th-dimensionalbeing for help is like an ant asking for assistance from every god from every religion multipliedby the number of stars in the universe. ‘they’ should not care about us. so, when we see coop dealing with a 23-yearmistake, sitting down at a screen to catch up on messages from his children, findingout about the death of colleagues, friends, relatives, and people he loves, loves morethan anything in the world. this happens all at once to him. this is why this scene is in the movie.

we cooper realize that he missed everythingin his family’s life. his dad died, his son met a woman, got married,had a kid, and then she died. because that 23-year mistake means he hasalready failed as a father because his kids have suffered and he did not save them. and then his daughter finally speaks to him,after refusing to for so long, now his age. she blasts him, i mean we physically watchcooper lose whatever was left of his humanity in this scene. and, yes i am now going to address the elephantin the room. that this film as flawed as people perceiveit to be, ultimately comes down the intersection

of love and science and before you roll youreyes and start typing nonsense about anne hathaway, hear me out. brand is saying that love has meaning. it is something that seems to exist outsideof us and drive us to do incredible things. that love might actually be something thatcan exist outside of the reality that we know, this dimension, this shitty 3rd-one. because why else would ‘they’ help us? if you believe in god, then you already believethis. you believe that you love a deity and thatdeity loves you enough, that even though that

entity exists outside of our dimension butcan manipulate, create, and destroy within both the 4th and 5th dimension. she only said “maybe it means somethingmore?” and is that really so hard to believe? and when you see it. when you are faced with the love and carethat was taken to show us the brilliance and majesty of our universe, it kinda is enoughto make you believe what this movie is selling. that it’s science and love that will saveus from ourselves. science makes us practical, but love makesus selfless.

but matt damon’s admittedly-stunty castingis the illustration of why you need both love and science. he is alone on a planet, he knows is worthless,and the only way to even see another human again is to lie. he’s not a cartoon, he’s just desperate. he explains this morality of this as crystal-clearas science could tell it: [damon clip]science, cold, calculating science. morality has no place in a conversation aboutconserving the human race. as a father, your love has no place in theconversation about preservation of the race.

but loves reaches beyond our grasp. love can make us try to fly into the centerof a black hole, sacrifice our self, and record the singularity, for science. [damon clip]whereas a fear of science, is equally deadly. it’s about the edge of the razor. when you are pushed to the edge of survival,to maintain sanity and drive and focus, love is there to pick you updo not go gentle into that good night. grave men, near death, who see with blindingsight blind eyes could blaze like meteors and begay,

rage, rage against the dying of the light. that poem’s use in this film is no accident. science fails so many times in this film becausethat’s the point. when science fails, love will carry us. because we need a drive to survive. and this is our future and that makes thisfilm hugely important. human extinction on this planet is an eventually,not a question. if technology continues to move forward andour population growth does not slow down, then it is a mathematical certainty that wewill not be able to continue living on this

planet. this is just a hypothesis of what life islike on that edge. how do you preserve any semblance of humanitywe have when faced with one emotionally-crippling defeat after another? how else could you teach a robot how to dockwith a broken interplanetary spacecraft in all of 20 seconds? without the madness of the human spirit, withoutthe perfection of an artificial life-form, it wouldn’t have been possible. but they do it.

and then coop flies into the blackhole tofind the only answer that can save his family, not mankind. he thinks his sacrifice is the answer. i find no end to the beauty of that sentiment. science represents the distances to whichhumanity can travel as a species. love represents our human spirit and driveto do so. only through our connections to those aroundus do we have the drive and sacrifice to accomplish our goals. but what coop finds is 5th-dimensional space,or more correctly, a 3-dimensional presentation

of 5th-dimensional space. basically it slides the dimensions back bytwo. that makes the 3rd dimension now the firstdimension. he can only see a single point of 3-dimensionalspace, through all of time. that’s why he can only see from behind thebookshelf in that one location, for any time he chooses. this is important because the entire filmhinges on this moment, everything is built and everything we’ve learned is in serviceof this. if plan a was a lie that doomed the humansstill on earth, and if plan b is accounted

for. what if it was the love that coop and murphhave for each other, love that the film not only supposes transcends dimensions, but putsit literally right there on screen. even if plan a was a lie, what if they canstill make it work? what if it doesn’t have to be a lie? that’s why he went into the blackhole inthe first place, what if they could make it work? in a system of infinite complexity, how doyou find a single moment? how do you find a place in space and timewhen there is an infinity in front of you?

what could possibly affect gravity, the onething that affects all of time and space and the very fabric of our reality? what is the one thing that is so potent, youcan get a message across dimensions to a single point in time and space? this movie is saying two very simple things. love transcends gravity. and science will save us. and i think that’s just about the most beautifulsentiment that human spirit can imagine. hey, thanks for checking out a new episode.

i didn’t want to dissect every little pieceof this film because there’s just so much there to discover on your own. just go devour everything you can about thismovie, from the making of it to the film itself. it think it’s brilliant and now that i’vegone the building of this episode. i think it’s easily one of the top ten filmsever made. i think over time we will remember it as theclassic that it is. anyway! since i pulled the wool over your eyes lasttime, that means we need a real vote this time around.

okay, for the next episode of movies withmikey, your options are: a jonze (adaptation)a mendes (away we go) and a bigelow (hurt locker)let’s be civil in the comments whether voting or explaining to me condescendingly abouthow about i don’t understand star wars or the prequels and they’re secretly great. please like this video because that apparentlydoes something, i mean i know it does because it helps these videos gain traction by peopleinteracting with it. also, subscribe to this channel because youtubeopens up its treasure chest for creators based on the number of people that click that buttonand since so very many people post the comment,

“how do you guys not have a million subs”,that is the simplest answer. also, stop asking that. it’s kinda weird. if i knew the answer, i guess i’d have amillion subs. see you guys next time.