The impending release of Interstellar on home media has the makers of the film back out promoting their vision and releasing some secrets behind the film. Jonathan Nolan and Kip Thorne spoke to a group at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab to promote the Blu Ray, and it was full of spoiler type revelations about the ending of the film and it’s original, darker conclusion.
Obviously, there’s going to be plenty of SPOILERS from this point on, so don’t go past here unless you’ve seen the film or you could give two sh*ts about spoilers.
As we saw back when the film was rolling through theaters, the original ending features Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper talking to his daughter via the fifth dimension, transmitting information to save humanity, and then waking up in space to wind up on a station to meet his elderly daughter/savior of humanity. I might’ve miffed a bit there, but it has been a while. It also isn’t how it was originally supposed to end. From Nerdist:
At the end of the film [SPOILERS], we see Matthew McConaughey’s character jettison himself into the singularity of the black hole Gargantua. He makes the deadly journey in the hopes of characterizing gravity acting at the smallest scales inside, and to send that data back to Earth. He survives the descent, but then finds himself inside a 5th-dimensional “tesseract,” which he uses to peruse the timeline of his life and contact his daughter’s younger self.
Jonathan Nolan’s much more straight-forward ending “had the Einstien-Rosen bridge [colloquially, a wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.”
So no tesseract (that was Christopher’s idea), no time manipulation, and no return home. Nolan didn’t elaborate on this point, but we might speculate that the original end to the movie was as dark and unforgiving as space.
So that means Cooper isn’t going to make it out of the black hole, Anne Hathaway is all alone in the wormhole galaxy, and I guess no messages make their way back to the human race. I’m not so sure about the last part, but the first two are pretty clear, and pretty bleak.
Other changes include the gravitational anomaly experienced by McConaughey and his daughter in the film, and some other hard science bits that Christopher Nolan reportedly felt “was too much science for the public to digest at once.” Almost as depressing as being stuck in a black hole. Almost.
I’m all for being stranded on an alien planet with a droid, some embryos, and a corpse. Just let me have some of my stuff before we go and a hot bitch poster or two. And Molly Hatchet records.
