Page - 63 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

As it turns out, Mann too had given false information about the planet he had been sent to explore, just like the “spies” in the biblical story: there is no surface under the ice; the planet is uninhabitable. Mann attempts to kill Cooper (01:51:57), but Cooper manages to call for help and is rescued (01:57:35). Mann then tries to take over the ship and burns up with it. He is thus punished and will not get to enter the promised land despite the long and arduous journey he made for humanity: “Yet thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go thither unto the land which I give the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 32:52). The movie ends with a futuristic version of Noah’s ark – the third one – finally sav- ing humanity. Cooper returns from the place where he was trapped (the tesseract – to which we will return) and discovers that he is in an artificial structure in space – a habitat named “Cooper” that is orbiting Saturn. The habitat is actually named after his daughter, Murphy Cooper, who had finally managed to solve the gravitational propulsion problem and save humanity by building it a Noah’s ark. Cooper reunites with Murph, now an elderly woman on her deathbed, surrounded by family (her chil- dren and grandchildren). She encourages her father to go and find Amelia, who has already begun the mission of settling Edmunds’ planet. Murph stayed behind to wait for her father, believing that he would be back. Cooper then goes back to the planet where he had left Amelia with the embryos that will save humanity (02:42:05). The Present and the Ability to Influence the Future With little fuel left after the accident, Cooper and Amelia plan to use the black hole Gargantua as a gravitational slingshot to project them in the direction of planet Ed- munds. Once they have gathered enough speed in orbit around the black hole, Coop- er and TARS manually operate the engines of the two landing pods to push the En- durance out of the black hole’s gravitational pull. Having completed that task, Coop- er and TARS detach themselves from the Endurance (02:17:18) and are sucked into the black hole, where they find themselves in the tesseract structure.21 (See fig. 4). In this structure, time appears as a physical dimension. Cooper is trapped in the four-dimensional cube, but soon enough realizes that the tesseract is in fact constructed of an infinite number of versions of his daughter’s childhood room (02:21:50). Through the bookcase, he can see her at different points in time, at dif- ferent ages – as a child and as an adult – and he tries to communicate with her by pushing books out of the shelves to spell out “Stay” in Morse code (02:23:55). He sees himself in the past telling Murph that he is about to go on the Endurance mis- 21 A tesseract is a hypercube, or a cube in four-dimensional space. 62 | Bina Nir www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 53–69