Dr Mann says that Cooper will see his kids in a dream right before death.That's what actually happens.Cooper dies in the black hole and the ending with him meeting his daughter is just a dream.Remember Inception-time changes in a dream-hours became weeks or more.
So are we to assume mankind perished altogether or that Cooper as the "ghost" did the thing with the watch and all that other business in the tesseract and Murph did save humanity? Dang, what a downer if it was what you thought! Aw heck, the movie was sad, anyway even with him reuniting with his daughter!
I think that Cooper survived in the black hole long enough to send the data to his daughter.After he send the data Cooper died and we see his body floating in space.Cooper sacrificed himself for humanity.Cooper is a Christ figure.The 12 men send in space are the 12 Apostles and Dr Mann is Judas who betrayed Christ.
i don't wish to accept your interpretation of the ending but it makes perfect sense. Much the same as in Captain Fantastic, whereby the eponymous central character loses everything and then 10 minutes later everything fixes itself and all live happily ever after when more likely all is fantasy.
The reasons I think it was more than likely a dream were the scientific fact (supposedly) that a black hole WILL suck you in and kill you, Mann's speech, and most of all, the indifference and casual treatment Cooper received at Cooper Station. He wasn't interested in meeting his descendants and they paid almost no mind to him when he sat with Murph at the hospital. And a baseball field right outside a hospital room window and the overall layout of Cooper Station was weird. Does everyone travel by foot there?
I think part of it was that no one knew what was on the other side of the horizon...it may have been "them" all along. so not dying, being able to get out might be a possibility because of the unknown. "They" might have had the power to shove him out into space at the correct time. A lot of the movie has to do with the bending of time. Not sure about the indifference of the doc and nurse. Maybe by that time getting out of a black hole was possible...gravity was able to be controlled so to speak so it was no biggie. Not sure about meeting his descendants. Sort of "for what" to me. They were no one he was remotely familiar with so sort of a why bother. Though I bet the kids would have liked his stories.
Nope, I don't agree at all with this theory, I'm pretty sure that he is alive, because visually there is nothing that shows us he is dead, all the explanation while he is inside the black hole and the chat with the robot, all the dialogue with his daughter who said that he should go and find Anne Hathaway, that she knew that he would come back because he promised her, the fixing of the TARS, when he wakes up and he is in the ship, all that elaborated "dream" ....all that would be completely ridiculous and pointless if he is dead..
Or maybe he was traveling to the afterlife with the robot at the end?...come on...this movie would not waste all the scientific explanations to end like that....
They put a lot of effort on the film to explain the aging difference the relativity, specially showed at the end of the film when his daughter is an elderly woman.....
Sorry but this is not that kind of film, for me the ending was very straightforward and in some way similar to The Martian, he survived, was recognized by everyone as a "legendary" person and that's it.
Or maybe in The Martian Matt Damon died in the storm and everything else was a fantasy, an afterlife experience? please, enough with that theory, lately every movie has it.....
It's funny how you said that the speech of Mann is the key to understand the film, how can be a single speech more important that all the other things they talk the rest of the movie?
It was stated from the beginning by Cooper that there were no ghosts. Just science.
A different thing would be him reunited with his TWO KIDS at the end of the film , and there was no need to show his daughter as an old person.
Totally agree with you, tobisama, for all you have stated.
This is not the Inception-time changes in a dream kind of movie, nor the character didn´t realize he was dead in the end.
I don´t think Nolan left the end of this movie open to interpretation.
/They put a lot of effort on the film to explain the aging difference the relativity, specially showed at the end of the film when his daughter is an elderly woman...../
this exactly, it was all explained and it would be a very weird 'twist' for him to have died in the black hole
That part of the movie confused me so much... Then again, I only saw it once, so I didn't really analyze it that much. Time traveling almost always ends up doing weird things with the plot.