Page - 62 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

planet. By the time they get back to the Endurance they discover that 23 years have passed since they left the ship on their reconnaissance mission to Miller (01:17:40). The ship’s fuel is running out and they must now decide which of the two planets they should continue on to, based on the data sent back by the “spies”. Amelia suggests traveling to Edmunds’ planet, where the data seems more promising, whereas Cooper and Romilly prefer Manns’ planet because it is still transmitting, unlike Edmunds, whose signal fell silent years earlier (01:25:50). The crew chooses to go to Mann. The Endurance goes into orbit around the planet and the crew takes a lander pod down to the planet, where they expect to find Doctor Mann, one of the original “spies”, in suspended animation (01:35:30) (see fig. 3). Upon entering the planet’s atmosphere, they discover a world of ice covered in ammonia gas that does not seem fit for human inhabitance. They find and wake up Doctor Mann, who confirms that the planet’s surface, under the ice, is suitable for human settlement (01:39:29). However, he also reveals to the crew that there was never a Plan A to save humanity to begin with – Brand made it all up as a cover story in order to motivate Cooper to undertake the mission (01:42:06). Meanwhile, the film also follows Murphy, now an adult and a NASA scientist back on Earth, who is trying to solve a physics problem that has plagued Professor Brand for years: how the giant space station built by NASA could lift off into space without launchers, since the enormous size of the station would not allow for them. On his deathbed, Brand reveals to Murphy that he had almost solved the problem years ago, and that the final feat is not possible without additional information that can only come from the singularity of the black hole – information that cannot be ob- tained (01:32:30). Having concluded that humanity would not be able to escape the dying Earth, Brand put his faith in Plan B, a fact he did not share with Cooper when he asked him to join the mission as a pilot of the Endurance. Fig. 3: Doctor Mann in his cryo-chamber, Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, US 2014), 01:36:24. Biblical Narratives in Interstellar | 61www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 53–69