Literary Master: Starting with Refusing to Be a Child Star

Chapter 164 Released

Lin Mo arrived at the cinema forty minutes early.

He stood in the hall and looked at the bookshelves. He had seen photos of them online, but the actual bookshelves looked older than he had imagined. The wood grain on the sides of the bookshelves showed obvious signs of wear. The small lamp was on, and light shone through the gaps in the spines of the books.

I stood there for about ten seconds without taking a picture, then turned around and went to the ticket gate.

His IMAX seat was in the middle, slightly towards the back, a seat he had secured a week in advance. After sitting down, he looked around; the occupancy rate was higher than he had expected. About ten minutes before the movie started, the theater was almost full. Some people were talking quietly, some were taking pictures of their ticket stubs with their phones, and some were flipping through the brochures playing before the film. He noticed a girl, about ten years old, sitting in the row in front of him, holding a notebook with a dark blue cover and a line of small print that he couldn't make out.

As the lights dimmed, the last whispers in the theater faded away. In that instant, he realized how long he had waited—ever since he saw the first concept poster last year, following the trailers, behind-the-scenes features, the bookshelf model, and the live replay of the science sharing event. Now, sitting in this theater, the end of his wait was behind the screen. The feeling reminded him of his first time watching a dome movie at the planetarium as a child; the moment before the lights went out and the starry sky above lit up, a similar rhythm stirred in his chest, like a confirmation of something.

The opening sequence was quieter than expected. There were no booming sounds of studio animation, no rapidly skipping sequences of images, only a blurry, grainy background slowly shifting, like the first frame captured from some distant signal. The film then opens with a documentary-style interview, where elderly people recall past scenes, speaking calmly about a world that no longer exists. Lin Mo leaned back in his chair, sensing from the very first shot that the film's pacing was different from other science fiction films. It wasn't the type to rush to pull the audience into the situation; it preferred to lay the foundation first, then let them walk on it.

When the sandstorm scene appeared on the screen, his seat began to shake slightly. He heard someone in the row behind him gasp. The sheer volume of dust was overwhelming, filling his entire field of vision on the IMAX screen. The farmhouse swayed in the sandstorm, dust seeping in through the cracks in the doors and window frames. He noticed that the texture of the dust wasn't the grainy effect created by special effects, but rather finer, more like real dust. He held his breath twice during that moment: once when Cooper was chasing the drone, and once when he walked into Murphy's room and saw books fall from the shelf to the floor.

Then came that farewell.

Cooper said goodbye to Murphy at the door of the cabin. He said, "I will always love you," and then turned and walked towards the jeep, its headlights shining through the dust as it drove away.

There was only the sound of the engine and sand hitting the car body, followed by the increasingly distant halo of headlights. He sat motionless in his seat, feeling that the shot was the first real weight that the film delivered, not through visual shock, but through silence.

Then came space. The spaceship docked as it rotated, and Earth receded further and further into the distance, becoming a blue-white sphere. The sound of the pipe organ truly entered its low-pitched range here, vibrating continuously, like some enormous structure being pushed. As that sound spread throughout the IMAX theater, Lin Mo felt his seat vibrate along with the sound for the first time. He realized this wasn't ordinary sound effects; it was the entire sound field working in sync with the visuals to create a unified spatial experience.

Miller Planet was an experience he hadn't anticipated. The moment the massive wall of water appeared on the horizon, he felt a brief shift in his breathing rhythm. The wall occupied several square meters of the canvas; its height and dynamic, real-time scale gave him a sense of synchronization with the character—his reaction time overlapped with the character's at that moment. When Cooper...

When he shouted, "TARS, turn the speed up to the maximum," Lin Mo's fingers tightened on the armrest. He barely blinked during that moment.

The bass notes of the organ lasted for a long time, and it wasn't until they returned to the spaceship and discovered that nearly twenty years had passed that the bass notes paused for the first time.

The scene shifts to Cooper looking at the images on the screen from Earth—his son Tom has grown up, married, and has children; his daughter Murphy has finally started leaving him messages, but her voice is no longer that of a little girl. Lin Mo sat there, feeling the weight of that time difference pressing down on him directly through the screen.

After Cooper enters the black hole, the film enters a sequence of images that he cannot immediately describe in words. The rhythmic movement and changing light of those luminous grids create something he has never seen before in other science fiction films on the IMAX screen—not a visual spectacle, but a temporal structure being reorganized.

The sequence lasted for about five minutes, during which he didn't perceive the passage of time. It wasn't until Cooper reached out from behind the bookshelf and used gravitational waves to send a message to his past self that he suddenly realized: that unexplained sequence was the point the film had been waiting for.

In their final reunion, Cooper stood by Murphy's bedside. She was an old woman, her hair white, lying in a hospital bed; he looked exactly as he had when he left. She said, "I knew you would come back." She reached out and touched his face. When he saw the clear lines and prominent knuckles on her hand, his gaze shifted noticeably. In that moment, Lin Mo understood one thing—this film wasn't about how to travel through time, but about how to accept a distance you can never fully reach. That distance wasn't physical; it was the interval that time created between two people. Cooper had traversed black holes, traversed galaxies, but what he couldn't traverse were the years that had already happened, years that could never be undone.

When the end credits started rolling, no one in the theater stood up for a while.

Lin Mo remained seated, watching the white words slowly rise against the dark background, not trying to memorize anything. He felt a tightness in his chest, not sadness, but something that had been filled but not fully digested, something that needed time to settle naturally. The couple next to him didn't stand up either, and the little girl in front of him was writing something in her notebook.

As he walked out of the theater, the lights in the corridor seemed brighter than when he came in, as if he had just emerged from darkness into a tunnel, his vision readjusting to the light. He stood in the lobby and saw that the bookshelves were still there, the lights were still on, and a few people were taking pictures in front of them. He stood there for a while, then took out his ticket stub from his pocket, looked at the words on the back: "Gravity, the only signal that can travel through time." Then he put the ticket stub back in his pocket, pushed open the theater door, and stepped into the midday light outside.

On the first weekend after the release of *Interstellar*, discussions about the film on social media surged. Discussions peaked on Saturday night, with several film-related topics trending simultaneously, including the title, the gravitational time dilation effect, and the organ soundtrack. The comments section was largely polarized: one group discussed the scientific premise and physics, while the other focused on the father-daughter relationship and emotional threads between Cooper and Murphy. These two threads unfolded simultaneously across multiple platforms, intersecting at certain times—viewers with physics backgrounds posted content expressing their approval of the film's time dilation concept and offering their interpretations; while ordinary viewers asked for more detailed scientific explanations in the comments section of one post, and added their intuitive understanding in another.

Chen Yuanfan's name began to appear in more public discussions during that period.

Some media outlets contacted him for interviews, and he accepted some of them. During the interviews, he maintained a relatively restrained tone, avoiding excessive praise of the film's artistic treatment, but repeatedly mentioned that "the film maintains..."

"Verifiable accuracy."

His statement was reprinted by multiple media outlets, serving as a form of endorsement from a professional background and significantly increasing the film's acceptability among non-science fiction enthusiasts.

At the critics' level, most reviews focused on the film's narrative structure and emotional core. One review stated, "The film's technical rigor has been discussed extensively, but its true achievement lies in building a story that lingers in the audience's memory based on its technical setting. The scientific setting provides the foundation for credibility, while the emotional narrative ensures that this credibility is accepted by the audience." Another review offered a slightly different perspective: "The film's black hole visual effects are impressive, but the emotional core of the entire story was actually determined as early as the moment Cooper left his daughter; the ending of the film was already written." Some reviews also mentioned the film's exemplary effect on the direction of domestic science fiction film creation, believing that it provides a reference path for similar projects in both technical and narrative aspects.

Within the audience, some specific feedback is generating a broader social impact. Science museums and planetariums across the country received more reservations and inquiries than usual in the week following the film's release. Some educational institutions stated on social media that they are considering incorporating the film's scientific settings into discussions during science outreach activities. A high school physics teacher shared online his experience of organizing a group screening for his students, saying, "The students grasped the concepts of black holes and time dilation much faster than I expected."

In the second week after the film's release, a popular science video explaining the scientific principles of black holes garnered significant attention. The approximately eight-minute video compared frame-by-frame with scenes from the film, explaining the correspondences and differences between scientific evidence, artistic interpretations, and real-world physics. Following its release, the video was reposted by several official media outlets and science popularization accounts, sparking numerous discussions in the comments section about the relationship between science fiction and reality. This phenomenon began to attract the attention of relevant departments, and some media organizations started exploring how to more effectively combine popular science content with film and television works to enhance public awareness and interest in science.

Regarding early spring culture, the film's post-release data feedback has been generally stable. Lin Yiming compiled a report on changes in word-of-mouth across various platforms, pointing out that the number of reviews continues to grow, and the proportion of high-scoring reviews and positive discussions is higher than the average for similar science fiction films. In terms of box office, *Interstellar*'s total box office by the end of its third week had surpassed its opening week's level, and continued to climb slightly in the fourth week. The discrepancy between actual box office data and market predictions is gradually narrowing, indicating that the film's continued appeal to viewers exceeded expectations.

Luo Jinnian saw the discussions but didn't participate. He noticed that in a popular post on a certain forum, the poster mentioned the involvement of science popularization organizations and the education system.