Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (2019)

place in a traditional but fairly dense four-part structure. In the Setup we learn of the vast droughts and blights that are threatening to destroy human life within a generation. Cooper’s ten-year-old daugher Murphy has noticed a “ghost” that seems to be sending messages by bumping books off her shelves and sifting trails of dust on the floor. Cooper deciphers the trails as coordinates, and the eads him to a NASA facility that is planning for interplanetary evacuation and colonization. clue The fact that Cooper found the compound suggests to Dr. Brand that alien intelligence picked i for a eep working on equations about gravitational force him, a former astronaut, to pilot the search new home. On the ground, Brand vows to hat will allow the explorers to return. But as a backup plan the mission will carry eggs that can seed a friendly planet they may find. Out of duty and a commitment to space resetlement, Cooper accepts. This tears him from his farm, his son Tom, and Murphy, who is angry and fearful, jects him even though he assures her: “I hinking he’s abandoning them. She reove you forever. I’m coming back.” This is a complex Setup hat needs its forty minutes. The length matches he two parts that follow, so that this nearly three hour film retains “classical” balance. The Complicating Action takes Cooper into outer space. His crew consists of Amelia Brand, daughter of the professor who recruited Cooper, as well as the scientists Doyle and Romilly and a pair of friendly robots. The Endurance is headed for a wormhole mysteriously placed to provide hem a shortcut to another galaxy. Earlier missions commanded by doctors Miller, Mann, and Edmunds have found three planets there that might be hospitable. These provide destinations for the bulk of the plot. The most convenient planet poses a risk: an hour spent there equals seven years on Earth. ittle time. The hat’s one huge Cooper decides to chance losing a planet proves unfit, with a surface sea. As the team tries to leave, a massive wave drowns Doyle. Swamped, the landing craft mus dry out for a period that will cost the crew abou wenty years back home. In anguish Cooper views all the years of video messages from Earth tha have poured in during the delay. The most devasating message is the final one from a grown-up urph. She’s now the scientist her father trained her to be, but she can’t forgive him for leaving. The Complicating Action hasn’t given us direc access to what’s happening on Earth, but here, a he midpoint of the film’s running time, Nolan’s s in. The Development crosscuts the Endurance’s further ex ypical alternating construction kic urph’s effort to solve Dr. Brand’s equation. She discovers that Brand has lied; the mission’s purpose was simply to capture data from a black hole. Cooper was never supposed to plorations with return, and Murph suspects Amelia and Cooper new that. But in seeing desperate crowds fleeing he town, Murph is seized by “a feeling” that impels her to return to the farm—not just to evacuate Tom’s family but also to investigate her bedroom. Meanwhile, the Endurance lands on the second planet and the crew meets Dr. Mann, the only sur vivor of that mission. The Mann section is a good example of how Development portions tend to deay the conclusion by introducing new obstacles. ann has lied about the prospects for life on the ice-encased planet, in hope that he’d be rescued. ann kills Romilly and tries to kill Cooper, who is saved by Amelia. Meanwhile, Murph returns to he family farm, feeling that the answer to Brand’s equation is in her old bedroom. Mann’s escape at empt fails, and he blunders into death. The Climax starts when Amelia and Cooper must decide how to try their last chance. Earlier it was revealed that Amelia is in love with Dr. Ed munds, whose signals seemed reliable, but Cooper picked Mann’s planet instead. With the Endurance ow on fuel, he arranges Amelia to be catapulted to Edmunds’ planet while he plunges into the black hole. (This whole maneuver will cost us fifty-one years.”) After hurtling through darkness, Cooper finds himself floating in a vast AV demo: the tesseract. Here the fourth dimension, time, is repre sented in an endless lattice of cubes showing one ocation, the bedroom of the ten-year-old Murph, at different moments. Cooper can’t cross over to her, and he must watch helplessly as scenes of the past, including his tearful departure, are replayed in one room after another. But Cooper finds a way to communicate. He bumps books off Murph’s shelf and etches the NASA facility’s coordinates into the dust seeping onto the floor. Intercut with his efforts are shots of he grown-up Murph in the room coming to realize her ghost was her father communicating with her. He sends further data through Morse code Pathos and the Puzzle Box Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages * 42