Director of Photography Department of Huayu

Chapter 703 Only Love Can Transcend Time and Space

"At that time, the vast majority of people were farmers, although he wasn't initially."

An elderly man with white hair and a face etched with the marks of time began to reminisce in front of the camera.

The invited film critics almost instinctively picked up pens and paper.

Their eyes were glued to the screen, but their pens were scribbling away on paper in the darkness.

"Down-to-earth"

"Let's not talk about science fiction at the beginning, let's talk about survival first."

By using the universally relatable identity of a 'farmer,' Wu Chen bridged the gap with the audience and resonated with them from the outset. It seems that from the beginning, Wu Chen never intended to make a film that was too highbrow for the general public.

Matthew McConaughey's slightly hoarse and tired voice resonated clearly throughout the venue via Dolby Atmos surround sound.

There are no grand space fleets, no dazzling interstellar wars.

The film opens with a scene of withered yellow.

The endless cornfields seem to be the last color on Earth.

The sandstorm, like a giant yellow beast, devoured everything on the horizon.

On television, an elderly man with white hair faces the camera, reminiscing about a bygone, prosperous era.

Repressed.

A deep-seated sense of oppression instantly captivated all the viewers.
Is this the future?

"This cornfield has a morbid beauty! Every frame could be a wallpaper!"

Despite being a commercial sci-fi blockbuster, the visual language presented to the audience is that of a top-tier art film.

Those in the know have already seen the potential.

"His visual processing is becoming increasingly sophisticated, a step up from his previous films."

Mu Deyuan looked at the screen with great satisfaction, and he discussed it quietly with Zhang Yimou beside him.

"Yes, and the plot is quite patient, not too rushed." Zhang Yi nodded in agreement.

He understood.

Wu Chen didn't rush to send the audience into space right away; instead, with an almost cruel patience, he first showed everyone...
Why leave?

At the parent-teacher meeting, the teacher explained the Apollo moon landing to Cooper.
The new textbooks have corrected this point and advised Cooper's daughter, Murphy, to stop bringing "nonsense" about space to school.

Upon seeing this, Chen Kaige, who was sitting in the guest seat, subconsciously straightened his posture.

He sensed a hint of "criticism and reflection" in this simple conversation that he was most familiar with.

Moreover, Wu Chen is quite bold; is he denying the authenticity of the moon landing?
"However, North America itself buys into this approach, and they've really mastered it."

Chen Kai pursed his lips, wishing he had done the same thing back then.

But Wu Chenzhi was clearly not there.

When Cooper drove his car, with his two children in tow, frantically chasing an out-of-control drone through an endless cornfield, the passion for exploration and adventure burst forth from the suppressed earth for the first time.

"ghost".

The "ghost" in Murphy's room left behind a series of coordinates through binary gravitational anomalies.

When Cooper, driving his beat-up pickup truck with Murphy in tow, finally finds the coordinates—the air defense headquarters hidden in the wilderness, now a secret space base—the entire story unfolds before our eyes.

Liu Yifei's portrayal of Dr. Brand marks her first appearance on screen.

She was wearing a white lab coat, her eyes cool and resolute.

When she explained the Lazarus project to Cooper, and the wormhole that appeared near Saturn, all the viewers finally understood.

It turns out this wasn't a story about the end of the world.

This should be a story about hope.

The first emotional climax of the film comes during Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murphy.

When will I be able to see you again?

"When we're the same age."

Little Murphy cried, not wanting his father to leave.

Cooper, this resolute man, finally couldn't hold back his tears in the car.

The first soft sobs began to echo in the theater.

Zhang Ziyi and the others all sighed in unison;

It would be wonderful if they were the ones acting in this kind of film. It's only been on air for a short time, and it has already resonated strongly with the audience.
They seemed to see themselves in the roles they had played, those characters facing life and death.

But Wu Chen's approach was more restrained, yet also more ruthless.

"5, 4, 3, 2, 1"

When the countdown ended and the massive rocket engine spewed flames, the audience was momentarily stunned, as if the entire theater was shaking violently!
That wasn't the smooth, stable takeoff you see in traditional science fiction movies.

Instead, it was filled with the creaking of screws, the tearing of metal, and the real feeling of suffocation as astronauts were pinned to their seats in the cockpit, unable to move.

With the added bonus of 3D IMAX, it made people's breath catch in their throats for a moment.

"Damn, this is kind of realistic." Jiang Wen involuntarily gripped the handrail and cursed under his breath, "Damn it, I have to make a 3D movie someday, no matter what, I have to give it a try."

Zhou Yun, standing beside him, instinctively grabbed his shoulder.

As the spacecraft burst out of the atmosphere, all the violent roaring sounds abruptly ceased.

The whole world fell into an absolute, deathly silence.

Only Hans Zimmer's music, reminiscent of a church organ, slowly began to play.

The massive Perseverance ring-shaped spacecraft slowly rotated beneath Saturn's dazzling rings. Not far away, an unassuming sphere, smooth as a glass marble, floated silently in space.

That's a wormhole.

As the spaceship slowly approached the sphere, the whole world seemed to be projected into a funhouse mirror.

The starry sky in front of the spaceship began to twist, fold, and stretch.

With the 3D effect, viewers feel as if the theater they are in is being kneaded by an invisible force.

The spaceship entered the wormhole.

There is no dazzling light tunnel, but a spacetime continuum that is twisted to the extreme.

Countless starlight was stretched into threads, weaving a bizarre and magnificent giant net around the spaceship.

Dr. Brand's hand seemed to break through the screen and touch a space-time as smooth and wrinkled as silk.

"Is this 3D space? The stars seem so close, it's so realistic!"

"My God, this is a wormhole? How did Wu Chen create it?"

Throughout the theater, gasps of amazement rose and fell, and some people were even unconsciously swallowing their saliva.

The way these shots are presented in 3D is truly stunning.

Cameron was also slightly surprised. He knew that this distorted sphere effect must have involved a massive amount of physics calculations; otherwise, such a realistic "gravitational lensing" effect could not have been achieved.

But he still stubbornly believed that it was great, but not amazing.

Because his film Avatar was equally stunning at its premiere.

Nolan's wife, Emma Thomas, sitting next to him, couldn't help but exclaim in surprise.

Nolan lowered his voice and whispered in her ear:

"Wu actually used the dry concept of 'relativity' to create an amazing visual of this giant wave."

Because the spaceship had already entered the first planet—Miller's planet.

It was a boundless, shallow sea, only ankle-deep.

However, in the distance, a white line resembling a mountain range is rapidly approaching.

That's not a mountain.

It's a wave.

A colossal wave, thousands of meters high and capable of swallowing everything.

With the 3D effect, the white wall of water seemed not to be on the screen, but right at the end of the theater, covering the sky and pressing down on all the audience members!

"what!"

A short gasp erupted in the theater.

Countless people instinctively leaned back, as if trying to avoid the towering wave that was about to crash down.

“Every hour here is equivalent to seven years.” When the surviving Cooper and Dr. Brand returned to the main ship in a disheveled state, they were met by their teammates who had been waiting for them on the ship for twenty-three years.

And, a video message from Earth from twenty-three years ago.

This is the first truly emotionally charged moment in the entire film.

Cooper sat in front of the screen, watching the video of his son transform from a naive young man into a slightly weathered middle-aged man.

He had a wife and children, and then his first child died.

"Dad, we named him Jesse. I think you'll like him when you meet him."

Cooper's face was already covered in tears.

When an adult Murphy, played by Jessica Chastain and the same age as him, appeared on the screen, the suppressed sobs in the theater merged into one.

"Today is my birthday. When you left, you said that you would come back when we turned the same age."

"You're a liar."

The adult Murphy broke down in tears in front of the camera.

The emotional moviegoers were already sobbing uncontrollably.

Murphy's words struck like a thunderbolt, shattering everyone's emotional defenses.

Cooper was only gone for three hours, but this is the outcome he got in return.

This sense of powerlessness in the face of the passage of time slowly spread in the hearts of all the viewers.

On screen, Spielberg slowly removed his 3D glasses and wiped his moist eyes with the back of his hand.

He watched the man on the screen break down, and a wave of emotion washed over him.

The initial idea for this film was given to him.

Because Kip Thorne and others believed that he could capture that ultimate humanistic concern in his films.

Just like his films "Saving Private Ryan" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial".

"If this project had been given to me in the first place, I probably wouldn't have thought of interpreting time in this way."

He transformed a cold, hard concept from physics into a burning, piercing knife plunged into the heart of every father. This is a stroke of genius.

Sitting on the other side, Zhang Yimou stared intently at the screen.

He also wanted to make a film that reached the pinnacle of humanistic concern, and this kind of emotion was what moved him the most.

If the tsunami of time is the ultimate expression of emotion.

Therefore, the black hole "Gargantua" is a visual miracle.

When that ominous, slowly rotating, enormous black sphere, and the accretion disk around it, twisted into a halo by gravity, appeared in its entirety on the IMAX screen for the first time;

The entire theater suddenly fell into a deathly silence.

James Cameron finally leaned forward instinctively, gripping the armrests of the seat tightly with both hands.

His blue eyes were filled with disbelief.

"That madman," he spat out through gritted teeth, "isn't he afraid of failing and messing things up in the end?"

As the absolute king of the 3D and special effects field, he recognized it at a glance.

This is not CG.

Or rather, it's not purely CG.

This is a black hole that is infinitely close to the real one. It was created by performing massive data calculations based on Einstein's field equations of general relativity, and then the art team did countless modelings.

Here, computation and art achieve a perfect unity.

However, the risks involved are unimaginable. If it fails, the results will be greatly diminished.

But clearly, Interstellar was a success.

What was presented to everyone was "Gargantua".

At that moment, everyone in the theater felt as if their souls had been sucked into that deep black sphere.

Matthew McConaughey, Liu Yifei, Jessica Chastain, and others sitting in the main creative team seats also subconsciously turned their heads to look at Wu Chen next to them.

Their eyes were also filled with shock.

This was the first time they had seen the final, completed image on an IMAX screen.

Wu Chen simply watched the screen calmly, a slight smile on his lips.

Film critics have gone mad. Their pens are dancing wildly on the paper.

"This isn't science fiction, it's mythology! Wu Chen used his camera to depict a miracle for us!"

"The greatest science fiction film since 2001: A Space Odyssey has been born!"

"A miracle! A pure miracle, belonging to science fiction movies!"

When Cooper, in order to send Dr. Brand to the last planet, resolutely decided to pilot his spaceship into the event horizon of the black hole, everyone held their breath.

However, he was not torn apart.

He entered a space that surpassed all human imagination.

A five-dimensional hypercube composed of countless timelines.

He saw his daughter Murphy, at different points in time, in every single moment.

He was the "ghost" in his daughter's study.

At that moment, almost all the directors and people in the know grabbed the handles instantly.

At that moment, everyone felt an unprecedented sense of dread and resonance.

"A closed loop! A perfect closed loop in terms of narrative!" Nolan thought to himself in shock, but Chen Kaige was the most surprised at the moment.

He seemed struck by lightning, muttering to himself:

"'The ghost' is the protagonist himself! Cause is effect, and effect is cause! A five-dimensional space perfectly stitches together the three core elements of family, gravity, and time."
This is not.

Almost immediately, he thought of his own film, *The Promise*.

Back then, he also wanted to explain cause and effect, and reincarnation.

As a result, he created an overly grand narrative, but in the end, he failed to complete the loop.

However, at this point, several physics questions had already arisen in the minds of many viewers.

What is five-dimensional space?

At the end of the movie, Cooper uses gravity to transmit the data of the black hole's singularity in Morse code to his adult daughter Murphy via his watch.

Humanity is saved.

When Cooper awakens in the massive space station and sees his elderly, dying daughter, the sound of sobbing rises again in the theater.

That reunion between father and daughter, spanning nearly a century, was brief, yet eternal.

"Parents should not watch their children die."

With his hair completely white, Murphy said his final goodbye to his father.

"You should go now."

Cooper took one last look at his daughter, then turned and boarded a spaceship.

His next destination was to find Dr. Brand, who had landed alone on the last planet.

The audience couldn't help but recall her insightful comment.

Only love can transcend time and space.

The screen slowly dimmed.

The end credits roll.