Inception vs. Interstellar | Movie Death Match

26:53So I just think there isn't very much to go with there. While we can do that slight exploration down through his mind into, you know, needing to find some way to reconcile the events of his life and come to some sort of acceptance, I don't think that it's quite so fair to say that there isn't an exploration of psychology within what is happening in Interstellar. Because that by the very nature of the exploration of the time dilation and the concerns for humanity or the destruction of humanity, you're left with a character who has to make a choice. And the choice is, does he leave for the sake of hoping or having some chance of ensuring that his children have a future?

27:35Or does he stay so that he can enjoy the life that he has left with his children? And it's very clear throughout the story that Cooper desperately wants to be with his children and is making that conscious decision or has to make that decision to take the journey that he takes. And the journey that we go on with him, we get a lot of emotion and a lot of complexity that we travel with him. Most of Cobb's journey has already happened. It's being given to us as a slow reveal. So we don't get to connect with him in the same way as we can connect with Cooper, as you actually follow the choices that he has to make or the mistakes that happen that at every point cost him time and you feel every moment that costs him and every loss that he has and every sacrifice that he has that culminates in that i know it's a meme scene but a very iconic emotional scene that we have from that movie of him watching his children's lives pass him by yeah we've got years of messages stored Come on.

28:39Hey, Dad. Checking in. Say hi. Um, finished second in school. Hey, Dad. Look at this. You're a grandpa. His name's Jesse. I ain't married. You son of a bitch. I never made one of these when you were still responding because I was so mad at you for leaving.

29:10And then when you went quiet, it seemed like I should live with that decision, and I have. And so I think that it is unquestionable that from the first moment of his relationship with Murph to the final scene that we get of him walking in the door and finally seeing her as an old woman is an emotional journey that we all go on with him that we can all connect with in a way that we just cannot do with the guy doing a brain heist. Pretty compelling stuff from Abby. What do you got, Belga? I actually want to see this on some level because of this. I've been on record about this. I think Matthew McConaughey's performance in Interstellar is the best performance he's ever given and probably the best performance he'll ever give.

29:57And this is an actor I like, to be clear. He's fantastic in the movie and in fact i want to add something else to the appreciation of his performance which is one of the things i find so charming about him in interstellar is that as much as he doesn't want to leave he kind of wants to leave right i mean it's established through the various conversations that he was he's not really cut out to be a parent he's definitely not cut out to be a single parent he's not cut out for farming he doesn't want to be there and every time he talks about how they've asked him to that he's like they chose me murph and it's not like i'm sorry i have to leave they chose me i'm forced they chose me you know like i get to go up in the rocket ship and i get to go into space and live out my dreams he doesn't say it in those words obviously but there is this slight hint of a grin on his face every time especially in the first part of the film where you know this mission is suggested or he has to talk about this mission is that like he really wants to leave.

30:58And even though he's obviously he loves his kids and he's very upset as he drives off, but he really wants to leave. And he really wants to go off in his rocket ship and explore the cosmos and be the astronaut he always wanted to be. This is his lifelong dream. And that's what's actually so powerful about the film because the whole film is about bringing him back to, and yes, all of Nolan's films are about human psychology, of course, but by the end, what really has to happen is not that he has to come back, right? I mean, when he goes into the Tesseract and he sees his daughter begging him not to leave and he kind of sends the message, stay, that doesn't actually change anything, right?

31:41He does not stay. He leaves. He continues to leave. He'll never change that moment. But what he can change is his own psychology. He can want to stay. He can change the fact that if he were to do it all over again, he would stay and he would willingly, lovingly stay. And that's, of course, what allows him to move forward because it's after that that they get the data from the black hole, which allows humanity to proceed. So it's actually it's really like that that character trajectory is really important. And McConaughey absolutely nails it. Yeah. But here's what I want to add. he has to nail it because he has to hold that fucking movie together because i mean it's a great film it's a great film don't get me wrong but it is very much about him and we need him to give the greatest performance of his career in order to hold this like incredibly big complex journey together yeah and here's where i would compare the two interstellar is mcconaughey's greatest performance.

32:46I think DiCaprio is a better actor. And I think in Inception, DiCaprio doesn't have to carry the whole thing. What DiCaprio has to do is he has to do a million different things. I mean, he has to like provide all sorts of exposition. He has to be the guy who's kind of at the center of the movie who is moving things forward, but also things are being enacted on him and this idea throughout that he's the leader of this thing, but he's also the guy kind of undermining the whole damn thing because his twisted psychology is messing up their dreams. Right. And so he has to do something subtler in that sense.

33:19I mean, he has to do a million different things, but he also has to kind of keep us interested in this character, which I think he does very well. If you jump, you're not going to wake up, remember? You're going to die. Now just step back inside. Come on, step back inside so we can talk about this. It's not his greatest performance. I mean, he has performance like Wolf of Wall Street is a better performance. Django Unchained is a better performance, but I think his performance in Inception is great. But I will absolutely cede this category. I mean, like, McConaughey's performance in Interstellar is totally next level.

33:50You know, every time I revisit that film, the part where I lose it is not the much memed but magnificent scene that Abby already referred to, where Coop is catching up on the 23 years of video messages that he has missed while he was down on Miller's planet. It's before launch when he's driving off in his pickup truck and he picks up his jacket just to see if, you know, in the hope that Murph is hiding as she has once before and stowed away and is going to come on the mission. And of course, she's not there. And I mean, that's the scene that always gets me. Can I say one thing as well, just because I think it's an interesting point that you bring up about the, you know, the slight smirk and the slight kind of he wants to leave and, you know, he's never really suited.

34:28I think that that is a very fair portrayal of parenthood for some people. It's a very fair portrayal of saying that, you know, there's this expectation that when When you become a parent, your life is now sacrificed. You don't get to live your dreams anymore. You don't get to have those experiences or move forward or have big moments because it's supposed to be about your children now. And in that moment, I think it's finding a way for him to be able to do something that is at its core about his children. But it's still also a moment for him to finally get a bit of freedom and a bit of a moment to live that dream.

35:03Unfortunately, it becomes a major sacrifice. But, you know. Absolutely. Yeah, I wish I could come to the school play, but I'm being called away. They're going to show me the new Captain America. I'm so sorry. Yeah. I mean, this is something Nolan has talked about a lot. He's like, look, I have a job that I absolutely love. And, you know, it requires me to spend a lot of time away from my kids. I mean, I think his kids are getting to be grown now. But, you know, for much of his career, this has been the tension. All right. Well, the other movies in their time category I have is visual effects. The one category in which both Inception and Interstellar won the Academy Award was for best visual effects.

35:42Inception is set primarily in a place every person who has ever lived has been, which is the realm of dreams. Interstellar is set largely in places no one has been, beyond our solar system, on exoplanets. Finally, in a five-dimensional tesseract. The Inception team spent nine months designing the look of Limbo, which is the glacier-like answer to Manhattan, where Cobb and his spouse, Marion Cotillard's Mall, who we've talked about a little bit already, they spent 50 years relatively together at the deepest level of their shared subconscious before, upon returning to the waking world, Mal takes her own life.

36:19Meanwhile, Interstellar puts Kip Thorne together with the visual effects artists at the firm Double Negative to give us the most scientifically authentic depiction of a black hole ever seen on film. Nolan told Thorne when they started that if the results were insufficiently spectacular, he would have to, quote, jazz it up. But Thorne's projections resulted in something Nolan found thrilling. The way that bending light creates an accretion disc around Gargantua, which is the wormhole that provides an expressway to humanity's potential new homes. Another striking visual element in Interstellar, which was not present in the Jonathan Nolan drafts, was the Tesseract.

36:54It's the five-dimensional structure at the movie's climax, of which the robot TARS remarks, humans couldn't build this, but they did. As with so much of the striking imagery in Nolan films, the Tesseract was a practical set enhanced by CGI rather than a wholly digital creation. So I'll throw to Bilga to start this category. Which film is the more imaginative visual achievement? Well, they're both hugely imaginative visual achievements, and both are spectacular. One of the things that Interstellar does, which I find actually very impressive, is the black holes and kind of the galactic visions of the film are truly spectacular.

37:33The planets they wind up on are... Iceland. Yeah, well, that's the thing I was going to say. They're not spectacular in the way that a generation raised on Star Wars or, for that matter, Star Trek might find spectacular initially, right? Because they're kind of based on, well, what would a desolate planet on the outer regions of another galaxy look like? And it's like, maybe it's really flat. You know, maybe there isn't that much there. But how do you make that visually impressive? That's actually quite a bit of a challenge. And I think, you know, Interstellar deserves a lot of credit for that.

38:07What I find spectacular in Inception is every scenario in the film is designed in a way that seems completely absurd. I mean, one of the things that I love doing sometimes is watching the trailer for Inception or watching one of the trailers for Inception and trying to reimagine how it felt, not having seen the film, thinking, how the hell are all these different scenarios and all these different settings and all these crazy things going to ultimately wind up fitting into one movie? like it's hard to imagine all these things being a part of one movie and yet they are and that's obviously the dream framework the dream narrative framework kind of helps that but i just find that in the sense that it's taking the real world quote unquote like a world that we are ostensibly familiar with and in each case twisting it into something that feels dreamlike and unreal and also acts in crazy ways depending on the nature of the dream i find that to be incredibly imaginative.

39:12And I am actually, Inception is one of those films that every time I go back to it, I am astounded at the way it looks. So I give this one to Inception, but that's also because I'm here defending Inception. All right. Abby, shock us with your preference for which Inception or Interstellar is the more striking visual masterpiece. Right. I do want to say first a note on Inception because it's not a movie that I've watched multiple times and there was definitely thoughts that I had about the scenery and how it played out and I had these memories of well because it's a dream world and there's an architect and they get to do all of this crazy stuff and I will say that when I re-watched it I was surprised by how little of that there was.

39:59I thought that there was a lot more than I remembered and I very strongly remember that first moment where the I can't remember the name of the character but where she flips the city up and then just lays it on top of... Oh, Ariadne. Yeah, this is the Elliot Page character, the architect. Yeah. So when they flip the whole city up and then lay it on top... I guess I thought that the dream space would be all about the visual, but it's more about the feel of it. My question is, what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?

40:38and I remember I have a memory of watching that for the first time and thinking that was so cool and I do think that in that time period it was very cool since then we have seen many other movies do very similar things but do it much better and I think if you have the capacity or if you have the opportunity to say we're going into this dream sequence world where you can change and switch and flip anything around, that we don't get more of that is surprising to me. Now, I understand that, of course, the point is that you're not supposed to change anything because it becomes too noticeable. Right.

41:16Then, yes, the person you're invading realizes that you're messing with their mind. Yeah. But at least once you get down to the limbo state where they're building, it's, you know, why have they not built this absolute madness of a space for them? I just think it was a little bit looking back on it I felt like oh you know it was it was interesting but I felt they could have done more coming to interstellar then now I want to approach it because we're talking about like visually imaginative but the key point with interstellar's visuals is that it's the most scientifically accurate but then that kind of implies that a scientifically accurate simulation or visual isn't imaginative.

41:58But the whole point is that connection between science and art. And one of the things that we have to do in science all the time is try to find ways to take what we have as these models and these theories and to show them to people. So I think that one of the most limiting things that we have in science is resolution. It's incredibly difficult to create an accurate physical model of something and be able to actually show it and go, that's as close as possible as we can get to reality. Because the power that you need and the resolution that you need to be able to do that. This is why the black hole in Interstellar was so revolutionary.

42:36Because all of the equations and the descriptions of the specific type of a black hole that Kip Thorne wrote for the movie, he can run those simulations on his computer at Caltech. It's not going to give you very much to look at. But once you combine that with the VFX studio and the axis that they had. It didn't just create something that was visually interesting. It created something that we had never seen before. Approaching the event horizon. Fort side, dipping down beneath it. To go through it. Heading towards blackness.

43:15It's all black. Taurus, you read me? It's all blackness. Tars, can you read me? Over. It created a visual representation of a black hole that the scientific community had never seen. And not only that, but when we finally got the first image of a black hole in 2019, it confirmed that visual from Interstellar. We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable. we have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is. We saw the accretion disc, but it's not just the black hole. We focus on the black hole, we focus on Gargantua. There is so much more to the way that this movie is constructed.

44:08I mean, when you even just look at the ships, when you look at the endurance, when you look at the centrifuge, the rotation that they create in order for that, when you look at the stylization of TARS and case, when you look at the motion through space, when you get the visual when they're getting up close to Saturn. But the big thing, something that they did in the movie that had never been done before as well, was showing the wormhole representation and having Romilly stick that pen through the paper, as we've all seen done a million and one times ever since Event Horizon. And then, so, no, but that's two dimensions.

44:44It's three dimensions. And they gave us that three-dimensional visualization of a wormhole that no one had ever really processed in our minds when we look at science fiction to think of what a wormhole would actually look like. And the ship coming up on that spherical object, that warping of space-time. Everybody ready to say goodbye to our solar system? To our galaxy? Here we go.

45:15And then as they move through the wormhole and then they're moving through an actual real physical concept of bulk space, which is bulk brain cosmology, which is what Kip Thorne is interested in, which is the higher dimensional space. They're literally moving through that higher dimensional space to get to this galaxy. And then when he goes through the black hole, which, again, was all scientifically written. So and it's explained in the movie as well, you know, that the specifics about the black hole means that there is a very slim chance, but theoretically possible that he could cross over and not be spaghettified.

45:50But you get his that's in another completely new and completely interesting visual of what would somebody see as they moved into a black hole? What would light start to look like? What would these sparks of information that you are now losing as you get into this depth of this blackness before then finally being in this absolutely incredible three dimensional representation of a tesseract, which, again, was so beautifully done because our mental ability to try to see or understand the concept of what a four dimensional object would look like is impossible for us. We can only ever unfold it out and know what it would look like in three dimensions.

46:28And that's what the Tesseract is. It's that it's the three dimensional representation of a four dimensional object laid out in this beautiful span that with, you know, these gorgeous looking like little fibers of fabric of time that he can play with or plucking gravity as he moves through it. So it's not just about Gargantua. It's not just about the accuracy of the simulations. It's about this entire exploration through this bending of space and time in a completely new and revolutionary way. But, Abby, I don't think you're considering what our brilliant Internet complainers pointed out, that the books on Murph's bookshelf would be facing the wrong direction as Coop is trying to communicate with her via the bulk.

47:12He knows which books are on her bookshelf. Come on. Do you think I don't know what books are on my bookshelf from behind right now? You think I don't know what's in what order? Absolute faith. I mean, your book spines are clearly color-coordinated. They're author-coordinated. Magnificent. All right. Well, as we come to the end of round one here, guys, I have to put Abby in the lead for now. I mean, one, Bilga, you did cede to her on the point of the McConaughey performance being more monumental. And Abby's explication about how the Interstellar team predicted black hole imaging correctly, It reminds me of the way that when we got to the moon 15 months after the result of 2001 A Space Odyssey, and it's like, oh, that's got it pretty much right.

47:59So I do have Abby in the lead going into round one. Yes. Allow me to note that the system is rigged because you have asked about the lead performances, but you have not asked about the supporting performances in the film, of which I would note that Inception has quite a few remarkable ones. Am I being too passionate? am I talking too much about my love for it no no you're giving physicists a bad name by being so accessible and persuasive let's tone it down a little bit some monotone please

48:38alright well we've teased this concept a little bit but as we move into round 2 the movies in our time considering what these films have come to represent since they were new. One of the most unique aspects of Nolan's filmography, but especially these two films, is the way he calls our attention to the concept of time dilation, wherein different characters in the same story experience the passage of time at varying rates. Why don't you give us another five minutes? Five minutes? What? We were talking for like at least an hour. Most movies, we never even think about the passage of time. It is just, you know, invisible component of film grammar.

49:14As we've discussed a little bit already Inception investigates the way the mind works more efficiently in the dream state. We're told explicitly that in the dream, your mind functions more quickly. Therefore, time seems to feel more slow. Five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream. And that ratio compounds each time we go one layer deep into the dreaming. Again, Abby, we've talked about this already. You made a whole video about it. Maybe Interstellar's most famous sequence where the main characters were Coop and Dr. Brand. This is the Anne Hathaway character. They return to the Endurance after a mission to the planet's surface.

49:52To them, it's lasted only hours, but they find that for their crewmate, Dr. Romilly, played by David Gyasi, and for everyone back on Earth, including Coop's now adult children, 23 years and change have passed. This is where we get the scene we've talked about already where Coop is watching 23 years of video messages. He He realizes his daughter Murph is now the same age that he was when he left Earth and he collapses into tears. Magnificent scene. All right. So which film is showing us the concept of time dilation most dramatically? I will start with Bilga for this one. Well, obviously, the scene in Interstellar that you're talking about is enormously powerful and very sad because, you know, He's watching not just his kids grow up, but he's watching his son become an embittered old man because his son dies.

50:44And look, as a parent watching Interstellar over the years, I mean, it absolutely wrecks me. But Inception, in terms of how it uses time dilation narratively, is on another completely extraordinary level. because, I mean, I've often done this in a couple of my pieces, and I just wanted to read this because it sort of gets at one of the things that I find so impressive about Inception. Imagine if a director made a movie about a group of people who infiltrate other people's dreams and steal their secrets and who, in order to do so, have to go two levels of dreams deep, which means that within each dream they have to go to sleep and dream again, but then somebody hires them not to steal but to actually implant a secret this time, So now they have to go three dream levels down, and each dream has to be dreamt by a different member of the team who has to stay behind in his dream and fight off any gun-wielding dream security goons.

51:38Parentheses, there are gun-wielding dream security goons. And also each level they go down, time slows exponentially so that a few minutes on one level winds up being the equivalent of hours on the next level. And if they go down too far, they'll be lost in the dream forever. But then everything is nearly ruined because the guy who is the leader of the group turns out to have traumatic memories that intrude on their dreams. So whenever things get hairy in the dream, his dead wife shows up and starts killing people. Or maybe a freight train suddenly bursts down a busy city avenue. Parentheses, long story.

52:06So not only do they now have to implant this one idea in this one guy's head, they also have to deal with their leader's dead wife, not to mention more gun-wielding dream security goons. And the leader guy finally has to confront his demons so he can finally get back home to his children. He has children, by the way, who are in another country he can't return to. And the only way they can get out of the dream is to fall while listening to 80th Piaf's Non, je ne regrette rien. No, really. And then at the end, the leader guy finally makes it back to his children. But you have no idea if he actually made it back or if he's still dreaming, lost in his own broken mind for eternity.

52:38Now imagine that this was one of the biggest moneymakers of 2010. The fact that Christopher Nolan could come up with a story like that, intercut it with all these different differing, you know, quite aside from just the actual story, the different time dilations we're talking about. And somehow millions and millions and millions of people around the world watched that movie and understood everything he was trying to convey. I think that's I think that's incredible. And I just it's one of those things where I'm like, look, I'm never the person to make the argument from like box office success, because a lot of films I love are box office flops and a lot of films I hate make a lot of money.

53:21But this is one of those films where I'm like, I can't believe he pulled that off. I literally cannot. I still can't believe he pulled that off. I mean, that's and that's the right metaphor to talk about a what I will reductively and inadequately call a a heist film. I just wanted to add one more thing because, you know, and in doing this, Nolan also uses stylistic things that he never really has used in the past. One thing he almost never does, he never uses slow motion. You will not find slow motion in his other movies. I think there's maybe a little bit of it in Memento in kind of the sort of the memories, but he does not use slow motion.

53:58And we're living through a period, especially during the 2010s, this is a period when people are going to town on slow motion. He never uses slow motion, but he uses it in Inception and he only uses it to illustrate time dilation. Pretty persuasive. Abby, are you still persuaded that interstellar is the superior expression of time dilation as a narrative concept? Go on. Come on. Do continue. I just want to say, I just want to say, I also can't believe that he pulled it off. Because honestly, any concept when you have to like go into the mind, when you're trying to say it's like anything like that is an exploration.

54:38If it's not being John Malkovich, it's going to be a bit hacky. And then it being a heist movie, but in the brain, in someone's dream sequence, can come across as a bit. But I do want to say within Inception, that entire sequence is fantastic. Like the moment the van comes off the bridge and just every little shot back we get to just show us like how much further that's progressed. And then what's going on with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character in the next level down who I look, I will also always I just want to say it out loud. like anything that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in or does I will stand for it's fine no matter what but like the whole layering down of the trickle down of it and then them needing that that shock wave back up the ripple effect back up is done beautifully like absolutely and it's a clever idea in order to give you different scenes different locations all happening at the same time but giving you more time in each location in order to explore and tell the story and it does and I think as you said like the last hour happening within just the time it takes for that to happen is fantastic however whether it is a better representation of time dilation when we're talking about a movie that is specifically using the very very real physics of time dilation I know you said, though, that is it more dramatic?

56:07So I'm not arguing on the point of the time dilation in Interstellar being accurate, even though I will say it is. What I would like to argue the point on is it's not just about Miller's planet. It's not just about that one moment that we see and they go down to the planet and time is different. It's about the actual perception that we have in general of time, about how we connect as humans to time and how it is relative. Quite literally within the theory, it is relative. And interstellar is an exploration of the effects of special relativity and general relativity, because a lot of people don't understand that gravitational acceleration is also what dilates time.

56:53Because when we talk about this curvature or this bending and this warping in space-time, it's the warping of space and time. Because we exist in a four-dimensional space, space-time, three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. But that is the reality of our existence is that time is linear. Now, in Inception, Cobb gains time. Cobb extends and expands time. He gets to live out this shared reality with his wife. They get to live into their old age before they finally leave this shared subconsciousness that they have. Whereas the reality of us existing within this linear time is we can never get time back.

57:34We can never move backwards in time, but we can move forwards. And that's what's happening with Cooper in Interstellar. every moment, every moment on Miller's planet or every other interaction that they have as they're traveling through this space, he is losing time. His time is stretching and expanding. And then we get that beautiful moment in the Tesseract where we realize that when you go to that higher dimensional space, time is no longer linear. You can now look at time. He can see all aspects of it. But he also still has to come to that realization that he still exists within our world and our time, and he still cannot change it.

58:15As you said earlier, he can't go backwards. He can't force himself to stay. He can look at it, but he can't experience it. He cannot make decisions or change patterns or gain back any time to resolve what's happened already. he has to come to that resolution and that understanding and that moment of acceptance that all he can do is continue to move forward in the future. And that's all any of us can ever do. And that's why it's a better depiction of time. I'm trying to end everything with, and that's why. Outstanding. Right. This is all making me think that maybe Tenet is the Nolan film that's more due for reclamation and defense than Interstellar.

59:00There's actually a line in that film that like, I will say that when you sent me the thing saying it was Inception versus, and just out of my brain immediately was like, why is it not Inception versus Tenet? Because nobody understands Tenet. I understand it less every time I watch it. And I like the idea of Tenet. That's the beauty of Tenet. I understand the physics of what it's about. It's about retrocausality. I understand that. And it's another Kip Thorne science-written concept. But I still, I watched that movie and I finished it and just went, what? My limited understanding of all of this, all I took away from reading up on the ongoing Nolan Thorne collaboration was it sounded like on Interstellar, Nolan took his notes.

59:40But in the case of Tenet, he showed his script to Kip, got Kip's notes and was like, OK, thanks. That's about enough out of you. Out the window. Yeah. You got to do it for the plot sometimes. I'm not a perfectionist when it comes to science. You got to do it for the plot. So moving on to cinematography. Wally Pfister won an Oscar for his cinematography on Inception. He retires from DP work after shooting The Dark Knight Rises, his seventh Nolan film. Interstellar is where Nolan brings in Hoyt van Hoytema. Hoyt will get an Oscar nomination for Dunkirk. He will win shooting Oppenheimer for Nolan.

1:00:16The Odyssey is his fifth movie for Christopher Nolan. once again inception set in a place where every human being ever has gone dream space interstellar a place where none of us have been abby which one of these films and and i think i know what you're gonna tell me The greater photographic achievement, both celebrated for their cinematography, you know, but let's judge a book by its cover as it were. Which one? I mean, Interstellar. Hot take. Surprise. I know, yeah, I'm shocked. But look, I rewatched both of them in the same day. So I watched Inception and I watched Interstellar, one after the other.

1:00:54And I was looking at how does it make me feel? How does it make me feel watching? Forget the story for a moment. Let's look through each sequence. Let's watch each part of the story and how it's being visually told. And I realized that the one thing that I believe that Nolan was going for, and I'm pretty sure this has been said out there already. And if I'm wrong about this, then I'm wrong. But I believe that he was going for his version of 2001 A Space Odyssey. And I believe that he achieved it. Because the pairing of the musical sequences with each shot, each visual, each setup, each framing of everything brings you across that.

1:01:35Like there's moments in it where you don't need the dialogue. You don't need action. You don't need anything to be happening because the moment itself is conveying it to you in just how it has been set up and framed. That it gives you the entire story in a picture. And I just feel like the Interstellar just achieved that hands down. Okay. But you're going to argue for Pfister over Van Hoedema? Are you, Bilge? In the case of this movie, yes. I mean, I think Inception looks fantastic. And, you know, you mentioned he won an Oscar for it. He did win an Oscar for this one, right? Yes. Pursuant to our previous conversation, can you believe Inception was not nominated for Best Editing?

1:02:16I find that a crime. No, I mean, my theoretical physics term for that is horseshit. Yes. That's what I'm going to call it. But I do think it looks spectacular. I mean, the two films are doing two different things. And I find, you know, Interstellar is a more emotional landscape that's being explored along with being kind of obviously there's the physics and, you know, all that stuff involved the science. But really, it's a very emotional landscape. I mean, every image in that movie is meant to evoke an emotional response as well. Inception is in many ways, I mean, it is trying to do all that, but it's also trying to tell a very complicated story.

1:02:57And that is an underrated skill when it comes to cinematography in terms of, you know, not just in terms of, I mean, there's lighting, obviously, but there's also just how to frame a shot. How to frame a shot because it's going to be cut within all these other things and you still have to convey like really important information. Otherwise, the audience is going to be lost. So there's a practical quality to the cinematography and inception that I find electrifying because it's achieving so much. And also this kind of the thing I talked about earlier in terms of just how I think kind of spectacular and strange each environment is.

1:03:32but while also trying to create a certain kind of unity because one of the things that that final sequence in inception and you know i call it a sequence although it's actually multiple sequences that are being intercut you know people always would say to me well you know like the ice fight in inception isn't all that visually interesting or it's not all that exciting because you kind of you know it's just a bunch of things happening but the thing i would always say to them is but But that's not what the scene is, right? Because it's not an ice fight. It's not a snow fight. It's being intercut with all these other things that's happening.

1:04:07The whole action scene is actually happening on multiple layers. The action scene isn't what's happening with the guys in the snowsuits and the rifles. What's happening with the snow guys while what's happening with Joseph Gordon-Levitt bouncing around an elevator shaft. The hotel hallway fight. Yeah, and trying to line these people up and all this stuff. And also, you know, you mentioned how well done the whole bit with the van flying off the bridges. What I always forget is they mess up, right? When the van sort of goes off the bridge, they mess up. They're unable to match the kicks and they realize it, right?

1:04:49In one of the layers of the dream, they're like, oh, shit, we missed the kick. And they're like, we are going to have to use another kick. We're going to have to use the impact of the van in the water to sort of actually bring about a new kick. So they have to improvise. I mean, it's like so it's like a high story that goes wrong on multiple levels. I just wanted to add that to the context of the earlier thing we were talking about. You know, we think of cinematography and the visuals of the film. We think of either innovation or beauty. And those are absolutely important things. But there is also this practical element that's that's being done here, that's being accomplished here.

1:05:23That is, again, on a completely other level with this film. And in fact, on a higher level than I would say the various Batman movies, which are visually spectacular in their own right, but are often kind of confusing. I mean, one of the things that I love about Nolan's work, I mean, you know, I love revisiting his films and I love almost all of them. But I love also how he develops as a filmmaker over the course of these films. You know, the Dark Knight is a great movie. I love the Dark Knight. But like the Dark Knight, they're like action scenes of the Dark Knight that are like kind of confusing because he's still learning.

1:05:57And part of it is he doesn't use second unit directors. He doesn't like peace out and bring in like the second crew and all the stunt people to like, you know, do the kind of standard effect stunt sequence. He directs everything. And as the films have progressed, he's become a better and better filmmaker to the point where Dark Knight Rises maybe isn't the best of the Batman movies. But it actually has the most sort of effectively conceived action sequences. And of course, Interstellar comes after Inception. So within this framework, Interstellar would be the more accomplished movie. And in some cases it is.

1:06:29But I find Inception is one of those films where I look at it and I say, this film kind of represents the apogee of him as an action filmmaker. And it's almost like I referenced North by Northwest earlier. You know, is Vertigo the better movie? Sometimes. is Psycho the better movie sometimes certainly maybe the more influential is The Wrong Man the better movie because it's the kind of darker serious more you know gravity laced film but then every time I watch North by Northwest I'm like no come on this is the one you know I mean it's the only one that has James Mason you know so I know but the other ones have all these other people you know but yes I mean so it is it's one of those things where like it's doing these things so well.

1:07:15And some of these things are things we take for granted. And as a result, I have to make a case for Inception is that there's, you know, technically this thing is an incredible achievement. And yeah, visually, I think it's wonderful in that sense. All right. Well, coming into the conclusion of round two and, you know, in honor of the fact that, you know, Nolan has sometimes had to tell his buddy Kip Thorne, thanks for the science, but I'm going to go my own way for no other reason than to preserve some suspense and to make our third round decisive. I have to give round two to Bilka. Also, his arguments are eloquent and persuasive.

1:08:04Round three, the movies for all time. This is where we consider how these movies will, will echo through eternity. I want to say here briefly, as though we say anything briefly, I didn't want to do another music category in this episode because in our previous deathmatch, Close Encounters versus E.T., we talked so much about the John Williams and Steven Spielberg collaboration. And then I learned how pivotal Hans Zimmer was to both Inception and Interstellar, how deep and unconventional his participation in both of these movies was. I was very tempted. So all of that is just to say, when you both return for the film spotting spinoff spinoff movie rematch, we're going to talk Zimmer.

1:08:40So I just want to plant that flag. I'm not incepting it. I'm suggesting it. So listen to some scores tonight. Finally, the deciding category here is going to be the question of stakes. Now, in Interstellar, the issue, again, is finding a way for the human race to survive beyond Earth's ability to sustain us. In Inception, it's that Kobol Engineering wants to remain competitive against Fisher Moro, although Saito, played by the great Ken Watanabe, justifies his industrial espionage by saying that Fisher Moro will control the world's energy supply if he can't achieve his ends by dishonorable means.

1:09:20I also need to point out here, and this is not something I've seen discussed very much, Cobb's profession, stealing secrets via dreams, that seems like the most profound violation imaginable, far beyond any physical attack. So I think I'm backing you into the corner of the ring here, Bilgo, but how can Inception possibly stand up to Interstellar on the matter of what's at stake? What can you tell me? Well, I mean, in terms of how we traditionally think of stakes, obviously the survival of the human race is maybe a little more important than the stakes in Inception, at least as stated. I mean, if you're a Fisher Morrow shareholder, you might feel different.

1:09:59Listen, listen, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. And if the planet is destroyed, but I've achieved an 11.8 annualized rate of return, you figure somebody's going to benefit. Yeah, well, what did Pam Bondi say? The Dow is over 500. 50 ,000. Yeah, sorry. I'm a theoretical economist. If it was at 500, we would actually be in the opening scenes of Interstellar, forced to eat corn. But at the same time, I will simply I will I will come full circle. I will go back to sort of what I said earlier, which is obviously, you know, there's the civilizational scale to interstellar. But in Inception, what's really happening is this, you know, incredibly important individual human level progression that has to happen.

1:10:43So the stakes are smaller, but the stakes are also hugely important in that film. I mean, why is humanity worth preserving if the human mind is not worth preserving? Right. I mean, it's the thing I say about the AI revolution, takeover, whatever you want to call it. I'm like, one of the reasons it's happening is because we have made ourselves like AI. Like we have become more computerized and robotic so that it doesn't, it's not going to take that much for our interactions to be taken over by computers. Because we're already interacting via computers, right? People are like, I have an AI boyfriend.

1:11:16I have an AI girlfriend. I mean, I find that absurd. But I'm like, so many people have relationships that are entirely tech space. And I'm like, well, yeah. What if the other person on the other end of the line is not an actual person? So I actually think, I mean, that's a roundabout way of saying like in order to preserve civilization, there has to be civilization to preserve. There has to be humanity to preserve. There has to be psychology to preserve. And I think that on that level, I think Inception is just as important in terms of the stakes because it's all about the human mind and about what makes us human and the things that constitute our regret and the things that constitute the fraught stew of emotions that make us who we are and about getting through some of these things.

1:12:00So on that level, I find Inception very moving. And, you know, the fact that Interstellar is also incredibly moving and, you know, that it's about sort of human survival as reflected in the way a parent revisits his interactions with his kids. I find that very moving as well. But I think the films, like I said, in many ways, they're mirror images of each other. One is kind of the galactic level of what's happening on a more intimate level than the other film. Well, this podcast stands for nothing if not the fact, the belief that art can be quantified and... And gamified. And binary. Yeah, yeah.

1:12:37Yes. All right. So an eloquent response to a admittedly totally unfair question. Abby, what's so great about humanity? Why should we survive beyond another century or so? I'm actually going to take this in a slightly different direction at first, and I'm going to give a helping hand. because I do think that the actual stakes in both movies, while you do have the global scale stakes of things, of course, and you have the fight for humanity, they're actually quite similar. When you look at the perceptions of your world around you and when you look at the connections that you have with people and the biggest thing that is at stake within Inception is the fragility of your concept of reality.

1:13:22It's not just the kind of this exploration through your mind or the loss of your autonomous control because somebody else could infiltrate your mind and plant an idea or take an idea. That's what limbo is, right? It's breaking reality. It's breaking your perceptions. That's what happened to Mal. She came out and still couldn't conceptualize what couldn't understand or connect with reality anymore. And I think that's a lot of our biggest fears as we grow and we age and the things that can happen to your mind and what might the future might be if you become a prisoner in your own mind. And how can you trust anything around you?

1:14:01And that's the world, as you say, about AI. That's where we're in right now. We look at things on a screen and we don't know if we can trust it anymore. Is that a real person that I'm talking to? Is anything real anymore? And you mentioned Blade Runner earlier. And this is like this is a topic that I genuinely love because it's one of Phil K. Dick is one of my favorite science fiction authors of all time. And his entire archive is about perceptions of reality and how we connect and what breaks it and like what breaks us as being human. so in that I completely agree with you in thinking about it from that perspective that there are very high stakes when it comes to it and when it comes to a person who is trying to fight against that and fight against the guilt in order to come back to reality and and actually be present and be exist within the world and keep that connection an interstellar as you said it's like you're looking at something a bit more global so it's a bit harder to connect with the global stakes of the population.

1:14:59However, we are consistently brought back down to the local connection and to the, you know, it's not just Cooper and his children. It's Brand and her father. It's, you know, the moment when she comes up from Miller's planet and she's like, is he still alive? Because she knows that every moment she's also losing. And one of the most misunderstood quotes in Interstellar is Brand's discussion about love transcending. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.

1:15:42Maybe we should trust that even if we can't understand it yet. Because people think that this is a scientific statement of trying to make this big grand claim that love is more powerful. But it's not. It's about connection. And the point that she's making in that moment is to just say that gravity can cross dimensions and draw and pull and curve and twist and separate you or pull you together. And does love not do the same thing? And in her moment, she's thinking about the survival of humanity, but she's also thinking about her own personal loss and connection and the stakes that she has. She's lost her father and her other stake is the only person that she loves, which is this man on this other planet that she doesn't even know if she's alive, but she's willing to risk it all just to find out, just to see his face once more.

1:16:29So I think the stakes on a personal level are quite similar in both movies. But Interstellar also has to deal with the fate of the entire of civilization. The Michael Caine character, Dr. Brand's father, is not the person she hopes to be reunited with who has gone off to explore one of these planets. But yeah, it was it was a real shame that I there was no time for me to ask you to each find your inner Rob Brydon and or Steve Coogan and tell me which Michael Caine performance you prefer in these movies. But I wanted to say thank you, Abby, thank you for that, because it does relate to something else that I find very moving about Inception, which is and both of these films are in their own way quite prophetic.

1:17:09Right. You know, and Interstellar is a little later. So we'll see how prophetic they are over the ensuing decades and whatnot. But one of the things I find very fascinating about Inception, and also every time I see it, I realize it's doing this, is this idea of people who begin to doubt their reality. And arguably, we are living now in a world populated by people who doubt their reality. And on that level, that was not a thing. I mean, that was kind of a thing. Obviously, it's always been a thing with technology. But that was not part of the discourse when Inception first came about, right? Early years of social media.

1:17:47But now when watching it again, I'm like, this whole film feels almost like a metaphor for the fact that everybody lives in their own reality now. And not just that everybody lives in their own reality, but that we actually have to acknowledge that everybody lives in their own reality. Right. I mean, it's not like it used to be we all kind of accepted that there was something called reality and something called the truth. And we all lived in it. And maybe people had different ideas. But this idea that someone can say, this is the reality I live in, and I have to sort of respect that, you know, I mean, whether it's politics or whatever, that's a fascinating development in human civilization that we still haven't entirely reckoned with.

1:18:28And I think Inception kind of shows that sort of in embryonic fashion. Yeah. And then essentially one of the things that I've sometimes thought of as being one of the hazier table setting elements of Interstellar is when we learned that at least in whatever community Coop lives in, you know, the school teachers say, oh, these are the corrected textbooks that show that the Apollo program was all a psyop to bankrupt the Soviet Union and we never actually went to the moon. And, you know, every time I watched, I'm like, oh, yeah, I sort of forgot about this. And we don't really. And I feel like we're like maybe two weeks away from that being an actual article someone writes.

1:19:06That's the thing, right? It's like you look at that maybe at the time and you go like, that's such a ridiculous idea, like as if that would happen. But when you think about when technology starts to erode, because that's what's happening in Interstellar, they have some advanced technology for the crops and for the farming. But technology is at a standstill for everything else. You know, it's like nothing else is progressing. Nothing else is moving forward. It's not about agriculture. It doesn't matter. And so you can see how those things would start to get lost quite easily, but also how people would start to convince themselves and change their own reality because they want to make that argument because they don't want people to start questioning.

1:19:43They want people to conform to this new world where it's all about the crops. And so it's like they've got to shut it down quickly and stuff. But you're right. I feel like we are. Trust me. I run a science channel. We're very close. Yeah, I mean, I think both of these films on that level, I mean, this is actually an element of Nolan as a filmmaker that is underrated because people think of him as very much a kind of guy who makes movies that are successful and maybe tap into something in the zeitgeist. They don't think of him necessarily as a filmmaker who's thinking 10 years ahead, 20 years ahead.

1:20:17But all of his films are really about these moral, psychological, communitarian issues that absolutely are portrayed in a way that then, you know, 10 years later, 20 years later, you revisit a movie and you're like, holy shit, this film has so much to say about what's happening now even. I think that the reason Interstellar holds up and the reason Interstellar will continue to hold up is because there is not a future where we are going to be able to look back and nitpick at what they got right and what they get wrong. Because there are realities about the concept of the bending of space time, about perceptions of wormholes and ideas of black holes, that we will never have the information.

1:21:00We will never have the technology to do it. Now, people will get angry about that. I know this very well from my own channel that people get upset. They're like, yo, you can never say never. But as soon as you move beyond the concepts of what we know and understand of current science and current technology and the laws of physics, and once you move into the realm of speculation, which is essentially where Interstellar lives, when we talk about this idea of, well, could you pass over this event horizon into the black hole? And could you reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics if we got data from inside a black hole?

1:21:35And is there a higher dimensional space that a wormhole would travel through? And if there is, then is that why gravity is so weak? And then if we knew why gravity was so weak, then could we manipulate it? And then could we actually lift populations off of the planet? These are big, big questions. They're not small little explorations of something that is very near future that might happen or that we could, you know discuss at some point these are really really massive physics questions that will remain in theory and will remain in speculation for many many many years to come and that's why i think that the biggest thing about interstellar is that it is timeless you cannot date parts of it you can't look back at it and say that's not that it's not that it's not that everything about it It is timeless in the way that it is laid out, and it will remain for generations to come in the way that 2001 has, but without as much nitpicking corrections as 2001 will have been subject to.

1:22:47The time has come inevitably for judgment. And with respect and gratitude to both advocates and the substance and passion of their scholarship, the court does find that on the evidence presented here today, pop culture scientist and also science scientist, Abby James is the victor. Interstellar is the Nolan film that shall live on in our post-Earth five-dimensional future. Congratulations, Abby. I want my belt. No, you're out of order. You're out of order. This whole courtroom is out of order. Listeners, now it's your turn. Go to moviedeathmatch.com and vote for which of these two Christopher Nolan masterpieces you believe to be the more masterful piece.

1:23:31Whether you've been persuaded by one of our expert combatants today or whether you had a clear favorite from the jump, let us know. Vote now at moviedeathmatch.com. Abby, Bilga, thank you both for being here. Let's take a moment to mourn the erasure, or at least the exile to Limbo, of Inception, a Nolan monument honorably slain in single combat. But since you're being so gracious in defeat, Bilga, I'll ask you first, aside from the many pieces on Inception that we'll be linking to and again, your really, really fantastic current Spielberg oral history for Vulture. Is there anything else you'd like to plug?

1:24:10Well, you know, I have many pieces on Interstellar, which, you know, people are welcome to read. I wrote about it on its anniversary a couple of years ago, and then I wrote a very big piece about it at the time that it came out, back when people thought I was crazy for defending it. And here I am arguing against it. But yeah, no, you know, everything's good. By the time this comes out, it's entirely possible that I will have some pieces on the Odyssey up. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how we can do the Odyssey in a single film when Wicked took two. But, you know, I guess that's it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

1:24:46Can we just clarify? Was that a slight at Wicked? Can we just, I just want to clarify this. As somebody who worked in theater for many years and is a big musical theater fan and has seen that stage production five times. I was so hoping we were going to be friends. I enjoyed the Wicked films. I loved Wicked on stage. And I've, I actually, I had a slight preference for part two with the movies. I don't know. We're just going to have to litigate this over several pints, Abby. Yeah. Okay. Boy, I was hoping I'd retain credibility in your eyes at least for a couple of hours here. Shot, completely shot.

1:25:18I blew it. Abby, any specific pop culture scientist videos or anything else you'd like to promote? I guess, yeah. I like to talk about the science of science fiction, but I try to not be a nitpicker about it. I also like to interview people about science and science fiction and design and and how we use science or to visualize it as well on screen as well as in storytelling and everything like that so crackpots like neil degrasse tyson i think yeah sometimes seen on your channel i mean yeah i mean banging on about alien abduction so you know i want to ask you both another unfair question although this one's probably unfair to abby any special viewing plans for the Odyssey, Nolan's latest, grandest, Greekest epic.

1:26:06What format will you see it in? How far will you travel to see it in your preferred format? I would like to see it on a large screen and I will go to the cinema that is a five minute walk around the corner from my house, which is just a regular old cinema screen. Oh, wow. Like you don't have to like step through a wormhole or anything to get to. OK, no, I could go into town and find an IMAX, but, you know, so far. Ah, can't be bothered. Is that bad? Have I lost my film cred? I mean, you're not watching it on your phone, probably. Not at all. Yeah, as long as you're seeing it. I think at this point, I'm allowed to say I've already seen The Odyssey.

1:26:41Oh. That's very pre-screening. Wait, wait, but has he gotten an advanced copy from the publisher, The Odyssey and Galleys? I've read The Odyssey, too. Wow. Access. So I've seen it in IMAX already, and I don't live near any real IMAX screens, unfortunately, anymore. I live in the New Haven area and we have two multiplexes and one of them has an IMAX, but it's a LIMAX. So when the movie actually opens, I will most likely just be going to my regular movie theater to watch it again and just to see. I like, you know, even when I've seen the film ahead of time, I like to go opening weekend to Christopher Nolan films just to see how the audience is responding because I'm always fascinated by that.

1:27:22You know, because I've spent so many years watching his films that I'm like, I'm fascinated by his ability to kind of manipulate an audience. So, yeah, I'll be seeing it just at the regular movie theater. But by that point, I'll probably have seen it at least one more time. Okay. Well, I'll be very mad if I can understand all of the dialogue clearly and intelligibly. You will be able to understand. This is one movie where there are no issues with the dialogue. That's not what I want from a Nolan movie. Abby, a stage manager turned physicist and pop culture advocate slash explainer. What a delight to talk to you.

1:28:00I hope we will speak again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and insight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for letting me win. Bilga Ibiri, a delight to talk to you once more after our historic summit following the Liam Neeson, Naked Gun, last summer. Another film that just seems destined for the movie Deathmatch treatment. I know, right? I was going to say, Naked Gun versus Naked Gun would be one that could be a fascinating... Or, you know, Naked Gun versus Naked Lunch, Naked Gun versus Mike Lee's Naked. I see a lot of possibilities here.

1:28:37This is true, yeah. Great to talk to you, pal. Great seeing you again. Great talking to you again. Thank you so much, guys. All right. Well, in addition to the various Blu-ray extras for Inception and Interstellar, I want to cite Tom Schoen's 2020 book, The Nolan Variations, The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan as a key resource in the preparation of this episode. It's not just a biography or a making of, but a series of conversations between the author and his subject that is smart and expansive without being dry or academic. So until Bilga or Abby right there, this is the Nolan book I will recommend.

1:29:13Current only up to Tenet, which came out the year the book was published. So once again, that is The Nolan Variations by Tom Schoen. Great book. Listeners, we want to hear from you. If you have feedback or if you have a movie death matchup you'd like to propose, moviedeathmatch at filmspotting.net is where to send it. That address again, moviedeathmatch at filmspotting.net. Sound off. And join us for our next movie deathmatch when we plan, in observance of Spider-Man's brand new day, to pit two previous iterations of old webhead against one another, Peter Parker versus Miles Morales, live action, mostly, versus animation.

1:29:50Sam Raimi versus Lord and Miller. It is Spider-Man 2 versus Into the Spider-Verse on the next movie, Deathmatch.