Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Christopher Nolan fan. I remember in early middle school, Memento blew me away; a year or two later I made my mom take me to see Insomnia and she probably thought I was nuts… And again I was blown away by tour-de-force acting and a great character study.
Then of course came all the Batmans which were great, even though the third one had, well, a few issues that the Honest Trailer people figured out. And I even really liked Inception even though it also had some problems.
And then we get Interstellar. Nolan doing sci-fi. Check. About space. Check. About the future. Check. And man was I mad! It’s like no one read the script except Nolan, who is apparently going nuts! Really the only thing about the movie that isn’t flawed is the amazing score by Hans Zimmer, who is the man. It’s also shot really well…
So I decided to go back and watch Interstellar and find 50 plot holes (sure, some may be more “issues” than “plot holes”) and connect them using metaphors – like how the movie uses the metaphor for human love to explain everything – to fantasy basketball. The plot holes that really grinded my gears are in italics.
FULL DISCLOSURE! I’m not going to watch the Honest Trailer for Interstellar until I’m done!
If this isn’t your viewing companion next time you watch Interstellar, then I don’t know what is… Here we go:
(note – if I really need to say “spoiler alert” for a post like this if you haven’t seen it, then that might be your issue…)
1. Why would McConaughey tell his daughter “get your butt back in bed” when he gets up and it’s morning outside?
Reminds me of Rasual Butler. “Get your butt back to irrelevance, it’s 2015 out here!”
2. So everyone is whining of all this dust (one old lady in the interviews said people had to tape their nose shut), yet McConaughey wakes up and has an open glass full of water next to him while he sleeps. Wouldn’t people start using sippy cups or some crap to keep dust out of their water?
It’s like when Kyle Lowry was obviously still having issues with his hand, and shot only 37.3% in the second half. Get a filter on all those labradoodles and kick it to someone else!
3. With all this dust, the McConaughey family doesn’t seem to care too much about leaving their front door open… (happens several times)
Kinda reminds me of when I look at my roster and feel like everyone is too good to cut. Even with all the dust out there, I should be sure to leave my door open for streaming!
4. The world is running out of food, yet McConaughey is fine bulldozing a ton of it through a corn field to chase a stupid drone.
Feels like me in the REL league and my FAAB budget. Tony Snell is my hero! Worth the $37 I think I spent, haha.
5. Apparently an effed-up truck with a flat tire can keep up with a drone from the future. [sure the drone was “busted” for some reason, but it would go faster than like 40 MPH or else it wouldn’t maintain air speed velocity!]
Ummmm, what? I guess a nice way to illustrate this would be watching Kyrie Irving labor through the first game of the finals against the future drone that is Stephen Curry.
6. I’m sorry, but even in the most starkest of world catastrophes, the world is just too informed right now to suddenly have everyone thinking the moon landings were faked. Sure, if this movie was made in 1975, maybe. But it’s just not possible, especially since people still have computers like McConaughey’s thingy.
When we laugh at Vince Carter and Shawn Marion this year, it’s easy to remember the ridiculous seasons they had! I mean, ummm, they didn’t exist – they were brilliant pieces of propaganda to remind us that old NBA vets used to be good when they never were!
7. McConaughey and Lithgow sip beers on their porch. All the wheat has died off, so it must be corn beer, which is a thing. But it still seems like a frivolous waste of the food that’s being squandered.
Perfect comp here – Kenneth Faried. Just wasting him on the bench! If only McConaughey was the Nuggets coach…
8. So when they get to the army base installation, there’s a sign that says NORAD which confirms they’re in like, western Kansas or something to be able to get there in a day of driving. I get that they’re trying to bring back baseball, but why the hell would they call the crap team “the home of the New York Yankees” in western Kansas?! Why not the Royals – whose fans are so adamant they’re breaking the All-Star Game? Or the Rockies who are apparently close? I guess it’s sorta post-apocalypse – so there would be no New York – but there’s no way people would call a team that.
Remember when New Orleans used to call themselves the Hornets, and are now the Pelicans? Any time to show off this mascot fail!
9. President Heller from 24 asks McConaughey how he found the place and it’s the best kept secret in the world. It’s in friggin’ NORAD, how would that be the best kept secret in the world?! I can Google NORAD and find it!
Reminds me of Draymond Green. Dude was an absolute beast in the second half of 13-14! Yet only Razzball loved us some #OccupyDraymondGreen. Side note – the other two in the green were both guests on the Podcast!
10. So NASA, in all of their glory, “didn’t even know I [McConaughey] was alive”. Humanity’s last hope to pilot a mission, with all those people at the facility planning for it and building it, and they didn’t even think to look for him… His kids are at public school that feeds into “university”, he couldn’t have been hard to find!
Sigh. This is about as frustrating as when I don’t scour the waiver wire hard enough, and I see an opposing team picking up someone I would’ve liked to have add myself. I didn’t even know they were alive!
11. “Someone” places a wormhole to “save us” as the incredibly hot Anne Hathaway tells everyone. Well “someone” is some sort of dick for putting it by Saturn instead of right by the moon or something…
Sure it needs to be far enough out not to swallow the Earth, but it seemed like it wasn’t doing much hovering way out there. Reminds me of when coaches bench their guys out of nowhere, screwing you out of a roster position after tip. Stop benching, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kidd! Are you Kidd-ing me?!
12. So this place in NORAD is the best kept secret in the world, yet the Lazarus project sent the former astronauts to space while it was a secret, hidden from the public because starving people don’t like space exploration. No one saw these other rockets take off? No one saw McConaughey’s rocket take off?!
Finding the under the radar guys that no one is seeing taking off is the best advice we can give post-draft! It was #OccupyDraymondGreen in 13-14, then last year I think my steadfast hold of Elfrid Payton and even Andrew Wiggins was pretty helpful. Hard to believe that they were cut candidates!
13. I’m watching these shots in space when they dock with the extra part of their ship, and there isn’t a single star out there in space. Then in some shots around 50:00 there’s some stars, and then they’re gone again… Even for a lot more of the shots, even when Earth is getting further away. Then again there’s no stars at times around Saturn. So much for the movie being shot really well…
I get that they’re going for some stylistic points – I guess – but geez, this reminds me of my RCL team in my league vs. Slim that was atrocious and I went too boring with safe picks and didn’t get enough stars. Well I did get one – damn you, Kevin Durant! A star was there, but only sometimes and usually not!
14. When the Dr. Rom guy explains how wormholes work, it was 100% a rip off from Event Horizon, which may or may not have been the first movie to use the pen through paper thing, but either way Nolan should’ve been more creative. (ed. note – Honest Trailer saw this too! Watched it after the fact.) Also, Dr. Rom really belittles McConaughey by assuming he doesn’t know how wormholes work…
I know this may sound really noob-ish, but sometimes I have to really play with my line-up – especially in the REL where we play 2 PG/SG/SF/PF/C/UTIL to properly fill out my lineup. Play around with it, be creative (that’s what she said)!
15. OK, so mayyyyyyybe if future humans or whatever put a wormhole near Saturn just for us to survive it would be somehow usable, but there’s no way the technology where human kind is at in the movie would be able to build a spaceship able to withstand a wormhole. Although the special effects were pretty cool.
Kind of like how the past few 76ers coaches have never had a line-up able to withstand NBA competition because of the path Sam Hinkie had laid forth for them. And some of the random effects of these raw talent guys have had some pretty cool stuff happen! Jerami Grant with that 8 block game I think it was, MCW with a debut quad-dub flirt, etc…
16. At 1:06:22, it shows a planet with terrain, or at least something other than what we experience on the surface. Oops.
Well, I know ahead of time this is going to lead into my #1 issue. Kinda like when you look at projected stats, and know something is going to go wrong. I’m thinking if I saw any Kobe Bryant projections with him playing 75+ games…
17. How would McConaughey know when he landed the lander that the water was so shallow it could land OK? Before you say censors could tell him, it leads into #18.
How did Pau Gasol drafters know he would be such a monster? Some sort of blind faith I didn’t experience in! Ugh.
18. Bar none, my NUMBER ONE issue with the movie when I saw it in theaters. So with all of their technology, all of their censors, and even landing on the planet and seeing it from afar – they couldn’t figure out the water planet had huge MOTHER F WAVES?! How did they not see this coming?! Sure they had to rush in to avoid wasting time, but the scientists couldn’t predict this either?! Ahhhhhh!
Easily can be equated with my Michael Carter-Williams love heading into last year. I didn’t see his catastrophic TO a problem?! His inconsistency?! The bad roster?! Ahhhhh!
19. OK, so now we know that massive tidal waves eff everyone’s shizz up, how was the wreckage of the first astronaut’s stuff not dispersed all around the planet with waves like that?! Then they try to explain it – the astronaut just landed hours ago. OK… So she landed, said things were cool, then what… Everything just fell apart in calm water?! At least one wave must’ve torn them apart, or else the beacon would be fine, they wouldn’t have set up a beacon saying things were all good AFTER somehow surviving one wave. All that wreckage would still be littered miles apart!
Hah, a great example of this is Phil Jackson. He got to the foreign planet that was the Knicks, it gave fans a beacon that everything was OK, then boom!
20. Murph, now a woman of science, decides to shit on McConaughey in her message yelling at him for not coming back, with now the full knowledge he went to try to save the world?
Totally used for dramatic effect. Poor, poor screenwriting. Almost as bad as Hinkie and anyone else trying to defend the 76ers tanking by saying anything other than they’re in full tank mode.
21. On Michael Caine’s deathbed, he mutters his way through some dialog that he lied about conviction that things would work, and seemingly everyone on Earth is going to die. While it makes sense on your deathbed it would be hard to annunciate, but IN A MOVIE, you can’t have a major plot point revealed when you need to turn the subtitles on!
I guess that’s not really a “plot hole” but more a “get your ish together, Chris!” I guess using this kind of movie making magic, I should just mumble my way through all the big calls for 15-16 on the Podcast, that way I can claim I said anything!
22. Full disclosure again – I had to look it up after the fact, but I had my reservations the first time I saw the movie – clouds can’t freeze in a planet that humans could withstand.
Obviously it wasn’t pure air, but it didn’t kill you right away if your visor broke. Just like The Poppycockers, you couldn’t have a majestic fantasy entity on a team so unbearable for humans. What a dumpster fire! Or should I say, dumpster cooler…
23. Again, so before landing on the ice planet, the spaceship censors couldn’t tell them that life was not gonna work there?! Dr. Mann talks about his findings, but they couldn’t figure this out before landing?
Mayyyyyybe this is defensible, but the lack or censor technology in this movie was just too frustrating. It’s like they had these fancy spaceships with the censor tech of the Apollo mission. Just as frustrating as some big men that lack censor technology to let them know how far 15 feet is. Seriously, the sub-50% FT shooting is an abomination, it needs to stop!
24. “If there’s an answer here on Earth, it’s back there in my room where a ghost knocked over a few books” or more or less is the logic McConaughey’s grown up daughter uses…
I get the “human feeling”/”human love” whatever the hell cop out you wanna use, but just think about that… I guess human love means having no grip on reality. It’s just like my KCP addiction! Once you go Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, you never go back! I need rehab…
25. Well I think I’m going to struggle to get to 50, so I’m re-using one. At 1:48:57 the door is wide open to the farm house with dust friggin’ everywhere! And it’s a screen door too, the main door is wide open indicating it’s been open all day with the dust everywhere!
Reduce, reuse, recycle my plot holes! Actually, that kinda works as a fantasy hoops strategy in a shallow(er) league. Reduce your team to as many studs as possible, reuse guys on the wire, then recycle the hurt ones to the wire. But do it in a smarter way than our ancestors, who ate all the food and then told people landing on the moon was fake!
26. Why wouldn’t McConaughey and Anne Hathaway question why Matt Damon didn’t set up base camp “near the surface” where all the oxygen was? It was a sham, but couldn’t Damon move his shizz over to a base camp where there’s oxygen?
Sure he’s in a drop ship or whatever so maybe it wouldn’t work, but Damon needs to move that thing to the goods! Kinda like Andre Drummond and his FG% – what’s he doing taking baby hooks and mid-range shots?! Dunk it every time! Luckily it worked out, and no Greg Monroe means let the Drummo flow!
27. When McConaughey and Matt Damon fight after Damon reveals he faked everything, they’re in totally a different place than falling off the side of a steep dropoff – they’re in the middle of an open area!
Continuity is everything! Consistency is king! Like how it’s so hard to own the up and down guys like Robert Covington after he was benched to further help the Sixers tank. Free Covington!
28. Casey Affleck absolutely wrecks Topher Grace in the face, and Topher doesn’t have a mark to show for it.
Remember when Russell Westbrook had the face dent?! I remember seeing it live and noticing it before the ESPN broadcast. Face surgery and he only missed one game?! Westbrook is made of adamantium!
29. So in defiance to her brother – knowing the world is having a catastrophic food shortage – she burns all of Casey Affleck’s crops.
It’s a distraction to save his family, but just such a waste after she gets emotional seeing people leave and talking about people starving. As wasteful as Rudy Gobert in the first half, while the Jazz were starving for defense. How about bodying someone up, Enes Kanter?!
30. Damon and McConaughey walk to find Damon’s supposed surface or whatever, but apparently it’s a ridiculous distance away as it takes the spaceship minutes to get to them going at a really high speed. Why wouldn’t they have taken the ship in the first place?
Well, the ship looked cool and fast, but as we’ve learned to this point, spaceship designers were inept in putting any good tech in them, so who knows. It was kinda like watching Jusuf Nurkic down the stretch struggle to get down the floor after a series of injuries, with guys like DeAndre Jordan motoring past him.
31. Why would a deprogrammed/torn apart robotic unit have a giant explosive payload in it?!
So mayyyyyyybe a bomb or something was hidden in the wreckage of the robot, but I would think a scientist, or his military technology robot poking around the dead robot, would have noticed it. Then again, no one on the Cleveland bench noticed the bomb LeBron James fired on the bench a few years ago, until it was too late! LeBron had that dutch ovened in his warmups…
32. Dr. Mann, a “Mann” of science, tries to go into an airlock that he knows has an imperfect connection… Even though he’s desperate – and nuts – it makes no sense… Even if it leads to a cool docking sequence for McConaughey. (ed. note – another one the Honest Trailer hit on!)
Emphasis on that final sentence. While Mann is desperate, he gives a 10 minute speech on human survival, risks his entire integrity to lie to be saved, only to have the dumbest death in modern cinema (overstatement?). Kinda like Rajon Rondo whining about the Mavs. Figure out a way! Instead he moped around to being unownable.
33. Couldn’t they turn off gravity during the docking sequence to make it less stressful?
Talking about Cooper’s little dropship thing, the only way you get G forces is if there’s gravity… He says something like “I hope I don’t pass out” I think, but I’ve burned the movie by now. Trying to think of last year’s best hang time dunk – turning off gravity. I like the #9 “best dunk” from former mancrush Archie Goodwin, but the criteria for those dunks wasn’t great, Wiggins at #1 there?! His earlier one was better!
34. WHAT?! A spaceship has an eject button like a modern fighter plane?!
Sure, because the designers figured an eject button would be critical to send a pilot into a black hole. I know they use these some on the surface, so I guess that’s defensible, but again – no censors or the ability to see anything, yet the tech for an eject seat!?
35. So the things disintegrating the spaceship don’t f up his space suit?
Nit-picking, but his ship shatters around him, and McConaughey is fine. Kinda like the continual dumpster fire that is the Magic, yet Nikola Vucevic always seems to be fine. Well, sometimes the debris does give him some minor injuries…
36. Why would McConaughey’s purgatory be behind a bookshelf? It just makes no sense…
All this because all-powerful beings like to hide people they snatch up in black holes in an inane spot within a memory. Sigh. Going back to VC here, most of the time he’s just sitting on the bench but gave us a glimpse into the memories with an outburst here and there!
37. McConaughey’s daughter re-reads “stay” and just assumes McConaughey was her “ghost”????
I’m getting grumpy at this point in the movie haha. I guess this is a tiny one, but it’s almost the end and I’m reaching! The end of the first round on Thursday should be interesting with some reaching, really hope to see Christian Wood get into the first.
38. TARS, the robotic nincompoop, has to explain to McConaughey what is going on as the “5th dimension beings” constructed the “3 dimension space”. If a robot has to explain the metaphsyical stuff going on, your screenplay is rubbish as the Brits would say.
The big conceit of the movie in the “climax” is entirely a conversation between McConaughey and a robot. Since it looked cool and sounded cool, people PROBABLY overlooked that… Kinda like overlooking what Zach LaVine did late in the year. Wolves are going to be a nightmare to rank at guard…
39. After banging repeatedly on books behind the bookshelf, now McConaughey knows how to bang out proper, succinct Morse Code all the sudden?! Why not knock everything over or some crap?!
More “unexplainable” human condition stuff, that McConaughey had to tell the audience in expository dialog with a robot. I woulda just thrashed around like a shark and knock everything over, full Poltergeist style. But I guess he had the precision of Kyle Korver from deep – 49.2% on 3s last year?! Shoulda taken 12 a game, not 6! Speedy recovery Kyle!
40. How would TARS know McConaughey is talking to his daughter through the bookshelf?
Again, my copy is long gone back to Netflix and I’m not re-watching this shizz, but I think this is what happened (6-7 beers deep now). After all the explaining, I don’t think McConaughey says he’s talking to his daughter, yet the robot knows it. Nit-pick! Like finding a stat to have me hate a guy, like Derrick Favors‘ 5% FG drop post-Kanter. Gobert clogging the middle!
41. So the gravitational anomaly guides McConaughey to NORAD to set forth the narrative. The whole movie is a casual loop. McConaughey says “we brought ourselves” and tells TARS to give him the coordinates of NASA is binary. Why not explain more in the dust?! Why not send binary code explaining everything at that moment? Why can’t the future humans or whatever harness gravity in a smarter way? McConaughey says “we are the bridge”, and the bridge is flittering morse code on a watch!?
Aight, we get it, JB didn’t like the structure. Kinda like how I won’t like the structure of the league by 16-17 as free agency is going to really shuffle things up with the bigger TV deal and expanded caps. Be sure to consider that in keepers!
42. Earlier in the movie, the scientist who gets blown up by hidden-bomb-robot says they’ve been detecting gravitational issues for 50 years. I don’t even pretend to know the science behind it, but from my understanding, McConaughey types in the code on the watch like 30 years in the future. How would gravity be reaching the Earth from this event 50 years prior?
Maybe the aliens can shoot gravity through their black hole, if you know what I mean! I wish coaches were a little better about explaining their decisions – hey Brett Brown. just tell everyone which PG is going to get more minutes beforehand, not like you’re winning!
43. “They have access to infinite time and space, but are not BOUND by anything. They can’t find a specific place in time, to communicate.” “How” asks TARS. “Love” says McConaughey. ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME?! So an infinitely sentient species couldn’t have access to doing something akin to #44?!
Ranting back on the “climax” of the movie having to be explained with dialog that everything is unexplainable… Now I have a headache. Like the headache of owning any of the old vet injury guys like Kobe and Dwyane Wade. Will never do it!
44. I’m running out of steam! This is pretty much #39, but how in the hell could he know he could manipulate the watch handle perfectly like that while hitting a bookshelf as hard as he could only knocked out one book?!?!??!?!?!
Just the fact he knew it would work immediately… Sigh… It’s almost like he could see the future! Like how we all knew Kevin Durant would barely play this past year… Everyone except me! Ugh.
45. So in the future giant spaceship that holds humanity, kids are allowed to play baseball and hit flying objects that can slam into the other side and destroy their precious only ship?!
I don’t even know if logistically a ball would knock out a window hanging upside down on the other side, but I’m no scientist! Regardless if that’s how it would work, seems overly dangerous and just an excuse for a cool shot. We have a term for this – labradoodles! Shots that make no sense to be taken, which is why I never own Nick Young.
46. Why would Murph give these grandiose interviews on farm living throughout the movie?
Grasping again! But I feel like there would be better things to do with her time. Which is kinda like my feeling at almost 4500 words ranting about one movie! Didn’t think this article would be so long!
47. So after all this, Murph and McConaughey meet up for 2 minutes in an extraordinarily low emotional-impacting scene.
I heard this complaint walking out of the theater – not a plot hole just bad scripting. I guess that’s closer to how I feel on Durant – it wasn’t a complete plot hole for me to keep him high, just was bad scripting that knocked him out again!
48. Why would Murph as an old lady assume McConaughey would care at all about Brandt? I guess someone informed her Brandt was alive in the first place… Just because she saw them together as a kid as incredibly hot people, she assumes they secretly wanna bone?! What if McConaughey is just done with space travel and wants to be with his daughter on her death bed instead?! But nooooo, he leaves her there right after getting there!
Makes me more mad when I think about #47. I feel like I have this wire decision in FAAB leagues all the time. Super sexy upside guy on the wire, with my boring/old/dying vet the only one to ax… Screw it Spencer Hawes – you gots to go!
49. Why would McConaughey need to sneak away to do whatever the hell he wanted?
Isn’t he like, “a hero” for saving humanity at this point? But no, he has to abscond a ship in the middle of the night to fly to Anne Hathaway. Not to belittle his urgency though, I’d try to get to Anne Hathaway as fast as I could too!
50. So in this fictitious, no logic world, why would anyone just “assume” Brandt is alive? Why wouldn’t other rescue mission be sent earlier, if Murph knew that?
The ending montage was so lame and makes no sense. As soon as they talk to McConaughey, wouldn’t they be like – “yo, what happened to your crew?” But no, it’s not talked about until McConaughey leaves his dying daughter. I’m out of steam to try a basketball metaphor, this post is getting too long to wrap up all the loopholes, so we’ll just have an unexplained montage.
If you read until the end, I give you applause good reader! Something I didn’t give Interstellar, that’s for sure. We’re pumped to cover the NBA Draft on Thursday, and we’ll catch ya then Razzball Nation!
PS – The Interstellar Honest Trailer ended up with some of the same ones! Awesome, I’m glad everyone can share my frustration, although I put the link way down here because it’s basically this monster post in a 5 minute video 🙂 Plot hole!
