vivideagle7 said:If that hack of a director had actually edited it well, I wouldn't have anything to say.
The dialogue is just sappy; everything that female astronaut says feels totally fake.
And that ending? Total melodrama. He meets his daughter, who basically carries the weight of the whole movie, and then she just walks away after three seconds. Everything feels insincere to me. Honestly, the father-daughter scene in *Contact* was handled a hundred times better.
Even the son disappearing at the start... he seems important for a second, but it feels like Christopher Nolan only threw that in so MMC could drop two or three lines about the Moon landing to that professor. It’s a completely pointless subplot, much like the son's role in the entire film.
When it comes to the sincerity of their relationships, isn't it all just a matter of personal perception? To me, the bond between Cooper and his daughter felt genuine, a connection rooted in the fact that beyond being father and child, they share a similar intellect. He didn't have that same intellectual bridge with his son, whose perspective was far more limited—that whole thing regarding the Moon was specifically tied to his daughter.
Furthermore, regarding what you said about the son—it feels to me like those are conclusions drawn from a general negative bias toward the film, where one searches for flaws even where they don't exist, which only serves to reinforce the initial negativity in a circular loop.
If one weren't approaching it with such a skeptical lens, perhaps they would see that the son is significant because his sick child is the reason she keeps returning to the old house, something she wouldn't bother doing if she were just living at the base. Moreover, through those brief glimpses of him and his family, we witness the escalating decay of conditions back on Earth. Ultimately, he does serve a purpose in the narrative, regardless of how minimal it may seem.
As for the reunion with his daughter, what exactly are people expecting? For them to go grab a picnic? She was exhausted, after all... For the sake of the story, it is enough that he returned and fulfilled the promise he made to her. Some might find it sentimental, but I certainly didn't.