interstellar movie summary essay

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Christopher Nolan’s  "Interstellar ," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet "Interstellar" is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batman Begins"; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style. 

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down  their  cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an  un-billed  guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the  dismantling  of NASA) lives on a  corn  farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of  " Interstellar"). Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) 

While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead. 

With the possible exception of the last act of " Memento"  and the pit sequence in "The Dark Knight Rises"—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on  misery and  valorizes  gut feeling (faith)  the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway.  T he  most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters' actions mean to them, and to us. The  best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night": "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (If it wasn't already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in " To Kill a Mockingbird ." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance 's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Interstellar (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

• Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

• Hans Zimmer

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Interstellar Explained — Plot, Meaning & the Ending Explained

T here’s no doubt about it: Interstellar was one of the most mentally-stimulating blockbusters of the 2010s. As such, a lot of people were confused about the Interstellar plot, high-concept science, and bold ending. It’s time for Interstellar explained – a deep-dive in which we answer some of the biggest questions audiences asked about the film. By the end, you’ll know the plot and meaning like the back of your hand; you might even say we’ll have an “interstellar explanation” for the fourth dimension.

Interstellar Ending Explained & Beat Sheet Breakdown

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Interstellar Explanation

Interstellar plot and summary.

Interstellar is a 2014 movie that was directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan . The film received four Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing – and the VFX (Visual Effects) were so well regarded that they won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

Although Interstellar received good-not-great reviews upon release, it’s since garnered more acclaim and it frequently places on lists of the best sci-fi movies ever made .

Interstellar is about Earth’s last chance to find a habitable planet before a lack of resources causes the human race to go extinct. The film’s protagonist is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot who is tasked with leading a mission through a wormhole to find a habitable planet in another galaxy.

Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) explains to Cooper that NASA previously sent another group (Lazarus) to find a habitable planet but they’ve gone silent.

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Dr. Brand Explains the Plan

There are two plans in the  Interstellar plot:

• Plan A involves Cooper transmitting quantum data back to Earth in order to develop a gravitational propulsion theory that will allow spacecrafts to carry people off Earth into the other galaxy.
• Plan B involves Cooper’s crew finding the remaining Lazarus crew and establishing a colony on another world.

Interstellar Summary & Setting

When is interstellar set.

We don’t know for certain when Interstellar is set, but the script implies that it takes place in the not-so-distant future. We imported the Interstellar script into StudioBinder’s screenwriting software to take a closer look at the film’s setting. This scene takes place near the beginning of the story and gives us a good hint at how many years in the future Interstellar is set.

Read the Interstellar Baseball Scene

We can infer by way of deductive reasoning that Interstellar takes place about 40-70 years into the future. How? Well, we know that Major League Baseball was still played when Donald was a kid. And we know that when Cooper was a kid, things were in such a state of disarray that no baseball was played.

So, if we assume that Cooper is about 40, and that things fell apart sometime before he was born, but not so far before that Donald didn’t live through a period of normalcy, then we can deduce that Interstellar is set between the ages of Donald and Cooper — roughly 40-70 years from “modern time” of 2014.

Water Planet - Interstellar Explained

What happens on the water planet.

The Endurance crew decides to scout out Miller’s planet because it was the one that had most recently transmitted data to them. But since the planet is so close to the black hole, time is extremely dilated — every hour on the water planet is equivalent to seven years on Earth.

Cooper, Brand (Anne Hathaway), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) land on the surface and attempt to locate Miller’s transponder. But just as Brand finds the device, a massive wave rolls in, forcing the crew to flee to the courier ship. Doyle dies but Cooper and Brand narrowly escape — and Brand realizes that Miller must’ve died seconds before they arrived because of the severe time dilation.

Cooper’s Family - Interstellar Explained

What happens to cooper’s family.

Cooper leaves his family – daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain), son Tom (Timothee Chalamet/Casey Affleck) and father in-law Donald (John Lithgow) – on Earth in order to lead the NASA mission. In his absence, his family develops a contentious relationship; but we don’t learn about it until Cooper does, 23 years into the future while watching old transmissions.

Interstellar  •  Screenplayed

Murph and Tom become foil characters , aka characters who serve to expose attributes in each other. Murph becomes a NASA researcher who desperately wants to solve the gravitational theory to save the people on Earth while Tom takes over the family farm and largely rejects science and the reality of his situation. Their two opposing worldviews work against each other and expose negative and positive aspects of their character.

Mann’s Planet - Interstellar Explained

Where did matt damon come from.

Matt Damon plays the role of Dr. Mann, the captain of the Lazarus mission. After the failure of the water planet mission, Cooper is left with a difficult choice – go to Dr. Edmunds’ planet or Dr. Mann’s planet.

Let’s go back to the script to read through one of the best scenes – the one in which Cooper has to make the right decision in order to have any hope of executing the mission.

Read the Interstellar Decision Scene

Cooper chooses Mann’s planet, taking the Endurance on a one-way trip to Matt Damon Town. When the crew arrives, they find Mann in cryosleep. It’s pretty much clear from the get-go that something is wrong with Mann – although considering the fact that he’s been in solitude/cryosleep for years, it’s not hard to see why.

But Mann has more than just a case of cabin fever, he’s full-blown bent on finishing the mission, no matter the cost.

Interstellar Summary

Plan a was a sham.

Back on Earth, Dr. Brand reveals to Murph that Plan A was always a sham and there’s no way the people of Earth could ever escape.

Interstellar Meaning  •  Plan A Was a Sham

Murph transmits a message to Cooper accusing him of knowing Plan A wasn’t possible, effectively leaving her to die. Cooper tells Mann, Brand and Romilly that he’s going to return to Earth to be with his children and the rest of them can stay on Mann’s planet to start a colony.

But Mann’s planet isn’t hospitable – and he needs the ship to go to Edmunds’ planet. In this scene, Nolan intercuts between Cooper’s confrontation with Mann and Murph’s confrontation with Tom.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Dual Confrontations

Murph burns all of the crops in order to make Tom understand he needs to leave the farm. Romilly is killed by a trap mine. Brand and Cooper barely escape back to the Endurance.

What happens in the docking scene?

Interstellar Movie Meaning  •  Docking Scene

I love Interstellar but, boy oh boy, we’ve got a cringe-worthy exchange of dialogue here:

TARS: Cooper, it’s not possible.

COOPER: No, it’s necessary.

Not great – but it’s hard to pick holes in a script as sharp as Interstellar . After some impressive piloting, Cooper successfully docks his courier ship in the Endurance.

What is the Interstellar black hole?

The Interstellar black hole is called “Gargantua” due to its gargantuan size. For more on how Nolan and the team made Gargantua with CGI (computer generated imagery), check out this awesome video.

Interstellar Theory  •  Building a Black Hole

When Interstellar was released in 2014, there were no recorded images of a black hole. But in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope took the first images of a black hole. This is what the central black hole of Messier 87 (a galaxy in the Virgo cluster) looks like.

Messier 87 Black Hole via NASA

As it turns out, the scientists and visual artists who worked on Interstellar were pretty close with the design of the black hole. But what is a black hole? To answer that question, we have to first answer the question: what is a wormhole? And to answer that, let’s watch a great analogical scene from the film.

Interstellar Movie Plot Explained  •  Wormholes

A common misconception is that black holes and wormholes are the same thing. But as Romilly (David Gyasi) explains, wormholes are like funnels that connect two distant points in spacetime. Hypothetically, objects could safely travel through a wormhole – but consequently, black holes are areas of spacetime that have such strong gravity that nothing can escape.

Note: I am not a PhD physicist and most of the astronomical science in Interstellar is theoretical.

Breaking Down the Interstellar Black Hole

Interstellar black hole explained.

I think the Interstellar black hole scene is where a lot of people got lost. Up until that point, everything made a good amount of sense:

• Wormholes allow people to travel long distances through spacetime
• Differences in gravity and relative velocity cause time dilation
• Planets need key life-sustaining elements to be hospitable

But the Interstellar black hole scene is where Nolan dove deep into theory – and there’s no way to tell whether he was “right” or “wrong” because we have no idea what exists beyond the event horizon.

The event horizon, as it relates to Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the point in a black hole where nothing can escape nor be observed. 

So, for Interstellar, Nolan said, “Let’s send Cooper beyond the event horizon and see what happens.” Let’s look to the film to see what happened — it's abstract and minimalist but a truly thrilling sequence.

Interstellar Gargantua Explained

Many theoretical physicists believe that the event horizon serves as a barrier to the unknown physics of a black hole’s singularity. It could be compressed spacetime, antimatter, etc. In the case of Interstellar, the singularity is a portal to the fourth dimension. But what is the fourth dimension? Let’s listen to Carl Sagan explain.

Carl Sagan Explains the 4th Dimension

So if we’re really trapped inside of a fourth dimension, how can we escape? Well, perhaps the answer exists beyond the event horizon.

Interstellar Movie Explained

Interstellar ending explained.

How does Interstellar end? In order to save Brand, Cooper slingshots around Gargantua to generate enough energy to send the Endurance to Edmunds’ planet. As a result, he slips into the black hole and beyond the event horizon. There, he finds himself trapped in the fourth dimension – a tesseract styled as a never-ending bookshelf.

Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

But Cooper realizes that he’s able to interact with Murph through spacetime. He asks TARS to relay the quantum data to him, which he communicates through morse code. Murph picks up on the morse code because she was fascinated by the gravitational anomalies in their house ever since she was a kid.

Turns out, those anomalies were caused by Cooper interacting through another dimension – sending himself on a mission to get the quantum data. Don’t just take my word for it – for more on the Interstellar ending explained, let’s listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

deGrasse Tyson Interstellar Last Scene Explained

The questions raised in this scene aren’t just plot-filler, they’re some of the most profound questions in the universe – epistemological themes, or stances taken on how we understand the world are hallmarks of Christopher Nolan’s directing style .

Interstellar Movie Explained (Continued)

Interstellar ending explained: part ii.

After Cooper successfully communicates the quantum data to Murph, he’s kicked out of the tesseract. Some time later, he wakes up on “Cooper Station” – a space station that’s orbiting Saturn. There he finds Murph on her deathbed; having saved humanity from extinction with the quantum data. Let’s read through their final conversation together.

Read the Interstellar Ending Scene Explained

The Interstellar meaning lies somewhere between astronomical science and intimate human connection. It’s simultaneously a story about traversing the stars and fighting for what you love. For many critics, it’s this dual-narrative structure that makes the story so good – even if it can be a little scientifically vague and cheesy.

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• Read More: Inception Ending Explained →
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What is Tenet About?

Interstellar isn’t the only Christopher Nolan movie that left audiences scratching their heads. His 2020 film Tenet is just as, if not more confounding than Interstellar . In this next article, we break down the plot of Tenet and analyze some of the film’s biggest events.

Up Next: Tenet Movie Plot Explained →

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Film Review: ‘Interstellar’

Christopher Nolan hopscotches across space and time in a visionary sci-fi trip that stirs the head and the heart in equal measure.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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We begin somewhere in the American farm belt, which Nolan evokes for its full mythic grandeur — blazing sunlight, towering corn stalks, whirring combines. But it soon becomes clear that this would-be field of dreams is something closer to a nightmare. The date is an unspecified point in the near future, close enough to look and feel like tomorrow, yet far enough for a number of radical changes to have taken hold in society. A decade on from a period of widespread famine, the world’s armies have been disbanded and the cutting-edge technocracies of the early 21st century have regressed into more utilitarian, farm-based economies.

“We’re a caretaker generation,” notes one such homesteader (John Lithgow) to his widower son-in-law, Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA test pilot who hasn’t stopped dreaming of flight, for himself and for his children: 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), the latter a precocious tot first seen getting suspended from school for daring to suggest that the Apollo space missions actually happened. “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars,” Cooper muses. “Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

But all hope is not lost. NASA (whose massive real-life budget cuts lend the movie added immediacy) still exists in this agrarian dystopia, but it’s gone off the grid, far from the microscope of public opinion. There, the brilliant physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine, forever the face of avuncular wisdom in Nolan’s films) and his dedicated team have devised two scenarios for saving mankind. Both plans involve abandoning Earth and starting over on a new, life-sustaining planet, but only one includes taking Earth’s current 6-billion-plus population along for the ride. Doing the latter, it seems, depends on Brand’s ability to solve an epic math problem that would explain how such a large-capacity vessel could surmount Earth’s gravitational forces. (Never discussed in this egalitarian society: a scenario in which only the privileged few could escape, a la the decadent bourgeoisie of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium.”)

Many years earlier, Brand informs, a mysterious space-time rift (or wormhole) appeared in the vicinity of Saturn, seemingly placed there, like the monoliths of “2001,” by some higher intelligence. On the other side: another galaxy containing a dozen planets that might be fit for human habitation. In the wake of the food wars, a team of intrepid NASA scientists traveled there in search of solutions. Now, a decade later (in Earth years, that is), Brand has organized another mission to check up on the three planets that seem the most promising for human settlement. And to pilot the ship, he needs Cooper, an instinctive flight jockey in the Chuck Yeager mode, much as McConaughey’s laconic, effortlessly self-assured performance recalls Sam Shepard’s as Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (another obvious “Interstellar” touchstone).

Already by this point — and we have not yet left the Earth’s surface — “Interstellar” (which Nolan co-wrote with his brother and frequent collaborator, Jonathan) has hurled a fair amount of theoretical physics at the audience, including discussions of black holes, gravitational singularities and the possibility of extra-dimensional space. And, as with the twisty chronologies and unreliable narrators of his earlier films, Nolan trusts in the audience’s ability to get the gist and follow along, even if it doesn’t glean every last nuance on a first viewing. It’s hard to think of a mainstream Hollywood film that has so successfully translated complex mathematical and scientific ideas to a lay audience (though Shane Carruth’s ingenious 2004 Sundance winner “Primer” — another movie concerned with overcoming the problem of gravity — tried something similar on a micro-budget indie scale), or done so in more vivid, immediate human terms. (Some credit for this is doubtless owed to the veteran CalTech physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted with the Nolans on the script and receives an executive producer credit.)

It gives nothing away, however, to say that Nolan maps his infinite celestial landscape as majestically as he did the continent-hopping earthbound ones of “The Prestige” and “Batman Begins,” or the multi-tiered memory maze of “Inception.” The imagery, modeled by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax documentaries like “Space Station” and “Hubble 3D,” suggests a boundless inky blackness punctuated by ravishing bursts of light, the tiny spaceship Endurance gleaming like a diamond against Saturn’s great, gaseous rings, then ricocheting like a pinball through the wormhole’s shimmering plasmic vortex.

With each stop the Endurance makes, Nolan envisions yet another new world: one planet a watery expanse with waves that make Waimea Bay look like a giant bathtub; another an ice climber’s playground of frozen tundra and sheer-faced descents. Moreover, outer space allows Nolan to bend and twist his favorite subject — time — into remarkable new permutations. Where most prior Nolan protagonists were forever grasping at an irretrievable past, the crew of the Endurance races against a ticking clock that happens to tick differently depending on your particular vantage. New worlds mean new gravitational forces, so that for every hour spent on a given planet’s surface, years or even entire decades may be passing back on Earth. (Time as a flat circle, indeed.)

This leads to an extraordinary mid-film emotional climax in which Cooper and Brand return from one such expedition to discover that 23 earth years have passed in the blink of an eye, represented by two decades’ worth of stockpiled video messages from loved ones, including the now-adult Tom (a bearded, brooding Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain in dogged, persistent “Zero Dark Thirty” mode). It’s a scene Nolan stages mostly in closeup on McConaughey, and the actor plays it beautifully, his face a quicksilver mask of joy, regret and unbearable grief.

That moment signals a shift in “Interstellar” itself from the relatively euphoric, adventurous tone of the first half toward darker, more ambiguous terrain — the human shadow areas, if you will, that are as difficult to fully glimpse as the inside of a black hole. Nolan, who has always excelled at the slow reveal, catches even the attentive viewer off guard more than once here, but never in a way that feels cheap or compromises the complex motivations of the characters.

Nolan stages one thrilling setpiece after another, including several hairsbreadth escapes and a dazzling space-docking sequence in which the entire theater seems to become one large centrifuge; the nearly three-hour running time passes unnoticed. Even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of a universe in which the face of extraterrestrial life bears a surprisingly familiar countenance. “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” harks the good Professor Brand at the start of the Endurance’s journey, quoting the melancholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. And yet “Interstellar” is finally a film suffused with light and boundless possibilities — those of the universe itself, of the wonder in a child’s twinkling eyes, and of movies to translate all that into spectacular picture shows like this one.

It’s hardly surprising that “Interstellar” reps the very best big-budget Hollywood craftsmanship at every level, from veteran Nolan collaborators like production designer Nathan Crowley (who built the film’s lyrical vision of the big-sky American heartland on location in Alberta) and sound designer/editor Richard King, who makes wonderfully dissonant contrasts between the movie’s interior spaces and the airless silence of space itself. Vfx supervisor Paul Franklin (an Oscar winner for his work on “Inception”) again brings a vivid tactility to all of the film’s effects, especially the robotic TARS, who seamlessly inhabits the same physical spaces as the human actors. Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. Shot and post-produced by Nolan entirely on celluloid (in a mix of 35mm and 70mm stocks), “Interstellar” begs to be seen on the large-format Imax screen, where its dense, inimitably filmic textures and multiple aspect ratios can be experienced to their fullest effect.

Reviewed at TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Oct. 23, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 165 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount (in North America)/Warner Bros. (international) release and presentation in association with Legendary Pictures of a Syncopy/Lynda Obst Prods. production. Produced by Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Obst. Executive producers, Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull.
• Crew: Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan. Camera (Fotokem color and prints, partial widescreen, 35mm/70mm Imax), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor, Lee Smith; music Hans Zimmer; production designer, Nathan Crowley; supervising art director, Dean Wolcott; art directors, Joshua Lusby, Eric David Sundahl; set decorator, Gary Fettis; set designers, Noelle King, Sally Thornton, Andrew Birdzell, Mark Hitchler, Martha Johnston, Paul Sonski, Robert Woodruff; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Datasat/Dolby Digital), Mark Weingarten; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Richard King; re-recording mixers, Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker; visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin; visual effects producer, Kevin Elam; visual effects, Double Negative, New Deal Studios; special effects supervisor, Scott Fisher; stunt coordinator, George Cottle; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, John Papsidera.
• With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, David Oyelowo, William Devane, Matt Damon.

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Movie Review

Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Interstellar’

Christopher nolan discusses a sequence from his film..

By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 4, 2014

Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” blended the technological awe of the Apollo era with the trippy hopes and terrors of the Age of Aquarius. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” trilogy, set not in the speculative future but in the imaginary past, answered the malaise of the ’70s with swashbuckling nostalgia. “Interstellar,” full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.

Trying to jot down notes by the light of the Imax screen, where lustrous images (shot by Hoyte van Hoytema and projected from real 70-millimeter film) flickered, I lost count of how many times the phrase “I’m sorry” was uttered — by parents to children, children to parents, sisters to brothers, scientists to astronauts and astronauts to one another. The whole movie can be seen as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of our foolish, dreamy species. We messed everything up, and we feel really bad about it. Can you please give us another chance?

The possibility that such a “you” might be out there, in a position to grant clemency, is one of the movie’s tantalizing puzzles. Some kind of message seems to be coming across the emptiness of space and along the kinks in the fabric of time, offering a twinkle of hope amid humanity’s rapidly darkening prospects. For most of “Interstellar,” the working hypothesis is that a benevolent alien race, dwelling somewhere on the far side of a wormhole near one of the moons of Saturn, is sending data across the universe, encrypted advice that just may save us if we can decode it fast enough.

Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “interstellar.”.

What our planet and species need saving from is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Rather than explain how this bleak future arrived through the usual montages of mayhem, Mr. Nolan (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan) drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality. We are in a rural stretch of North America, a land of battered pickup trucks, dusty bluejeans and wind-burned farmers scanning the horizon for signs of a storm. Talking-head testimony from old-timers chronicles what sounds like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, until we spot a laptop on the table being set for family dinner.

The head of the family in question is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower who lives with his two children and his father-in-law (John Lithgow). Once a NASA pilot, Cooper now grows corn, the only thing that will grow after a blight has wiped out most of the planet’s other crops. The human population has shrunk to a desperate remnant, but the survivors cling to the habits and rituals of normal life. For now, there is plenty of candy and soda and beer (thanks to all that corn); there are parent-teacher conferences after school; and Cooper’s farmhouse is full of books and toys. But the blight is spreading, the dust storms are growing worse, and the sense of an ending is palpable.

The Nolans cleverly conflate scientific denialism with technophobia, imagining a fatalistic society that has traded large ambition for small-scale problem solving and ultimate resignation. But Christopher Nolan , even in his earlier, more modestly budgeted films, has never been content with the small scale. His imagination is large; his eye seeks out wide, sweeping vistas; and if he believes in anything, it is ambition. As it celebrates the resistance to extinction — taking as its touchstone Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with its repeated invocation of “rage against the dying of the light” — “Interstellar” becomes an allegory of its own aspirations, an argument for grandeur, scale and risk, on screen and off.

Dick Cavett , a son of Nebraska, used to ask (quoting Abe Burrows), “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?” Cooper and “Interstellar” are clearly marked for something other than agrarian pursuits, but the first section of the movie is the richest and most haunting, establishing a delicately emotional tone and clear moral and dramatic stakes for the planet-hopping to follow. Cooper is devoted to his children, in particular his daughter, Murph, played as a young girl by the preternaturally alert and skeptical Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain. When her father is recruited for a secret NASA mission to search for a habitable new planet, Murph is devastated by his departure. Her subsequent scientific career is both a tribute to his memory and a way of getting even.

The Nolans are fond of doubled characters and mirrored plots, and so “Interstellar” is built around twinned father-daughter stories. Among Cooper’s colleagues on board the spaceship is Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), whose father, also called Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), has developed the theories behind their quest. He and Murph remain on the ground, crunching the numbers and growing older in the usual earthly way, while Cooper and the younger Brand, thanks to relativity, stay pretty much the same age. (Cooper’s son, Tom, played by Timothée Chalamet as a boy, matures into Casey Affleck). The two pairs of daughters and dads perform variations on the theme of paternal and filial love, finding delicate and moving passages of loyalty, rebellion, disillusionment and acceptance.

A lot of other stuff happens, too, as it tends to out in space. A cynical critic might suppose that the last two hours of “Interstellar” were composed in a fit of spoiler hysteria. Nondisclosure pleas from the studio have been unusually specific. Forget about telling you what happens: I’m not even supposed to tell you who’s in the thing, aside from the people you’ve seen on magazine covers. I guess I can disclose that Cooper and Brand are accompanied by two other astronauts, played by a witty, scene-stealing David Gyasi and a deadpan Wes Bentley, and also by a wry robot who speaks in the voice of Bill Irwin.

The touches of humor those characters supply are welcome, if also somewhat stingily rationed. Nobody goes to a Christopher Nolan movie for laughs. But it is hard to imagine that his fans — who represent a fairly large segment of the world’s population — will be disappointed by “Interstellar.” I haven’t always been one of them, but I’ve always thought that his skill and ingenuity were undeniable. He does not so much transcend genre conventions as fulfill them with the zeal of a true believer. It may be enough to say that “Interstellar” is a terrifically entertaining science-fiction movie, giving fresh life to scenes and situations we’ve seen a hundred times before, and occasionally stumbling over pompous dialogue or overly portentous music. (In general, the score, by Hans Zimmer, is exactly as portentous as it needs to be.)

Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-"Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.

But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.

“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few expletives, a lot of peril.

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• Review: <i>Interstellar</i> Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Go Behind the Scenes of Interstellar

Read next: Watch an Exclusive Interstellar Clip With Matthew McConaughey

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Interstellar

By christopher nolan, interstellar study guide.

In 2014, Christopher Nolan 's epic science-fiction odyssey Interstellar exploded into theaters with the kind of gravitas associated with only a handful of its genre predecessors. It was Nolan's first movie after finishing direction on the Dark Knight trilogy, and the acclaimed director pulled out all the stops (literally, in the case of composer Hans Zimmer) to bring audiences a gripping, strongly-acted, well-written thrill ride of scientifically-accurate space exploration.

Interstellar's conception began in 2005, when film producer Lynda Obst phoned theoretical physicist and future executive producer Kip Thorne to brainstorm ideas for a sci-fi film that would go beyond what most before it had dared to show or tell, depicting "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans." After bringing Steven Spielberg on board as a potential director, the team hired screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher Nolan, to tackle the screenplay. Jonathan churned out three versions of the story between 2008 and 2010, studying relativity at the California Institute of Technology while writing to ensure the script's scientific accuracy. He drew inspiration from sci-fi films with apocalyptic themes, such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). However, when Steven Spielberg was forced to drop from the project in 2009, the film was left suddenly in limbo, without a director. It would remain that way for 2.5 years.

In 2012, after some prodding from his brother and Thorne, Christopher Nolan signed on to direct Interstellar , as well as to write the final version of the screenplay. The total budget for the film was set at an incredible $165 million, dually funded by Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Studios. Principal photography lasted four months in such locations as Iceland (on a glacier, no less, to set the world of Dr. Mann 's stark, barren planet), various parts of Canada, and Los Angeles. After a series of early screenings for The California Science Center and the Screen Actors Guild, the film opened in select American theaters on November 5, 2014, and more widely on November 7, 2014.

Interstellar grossed $132.6 million globally in its opening weekend, and would go on to earn a massive $675.1 million worldwide. The film was lauded by critics and general audiences alike for its stunning visuals, strong acting performances, powerful soundtrack, and bizarre and ambitious story. Scientists additionally applauded it for its painstaking dedication to scientific accuracy, from the effects of gravity on time to the visual depiction of wormholes and black holes. In fact, the film provided such an accurate image of what a black hole looks like that it went on to inspire two scientific papers. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film now has a rating of 71% based on 319 reviews, with a rating average of 7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, " Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent film-making moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its intellectual reach somewhat exceeds its grasp."

Interstellar Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Interstellar is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What does the ‘ghost’ show in the dust?

I believe the dust was always moving showing that the Ghost was Murphy's all along.

when dr.mann is trying to dock with the endurance the external scene have no sound. why is this?

They added no sound as they want to make the scene more realistic as theres no sound in space(vacuum).

When Dr.Mann is trying to dock with the endurance the external scenes have no sound why is this

I think the director is trying to give a sense of realism, that there is no sound in space.

Study Guide for Interstellar

Interstellar study guide contains essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Interstellar
• Interstellar Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Interstellar

Interstellar essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Interstellar.

• Interstellar: Abstract Made into Actuality
• Interstellar: Visual Splendor Eclipsing Storytelling & The Assertion of Film Values
• New Verticality in Film: How Interstellar (2014) Reflects Themes of Human Sustainability and Endurance

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Film Colossus

Your Guide to Movies

Interstellar (2014) | The Definitive Explanation

Welcome to our Colossus Movie Guide for Interstellar . This guide contains everything you need to understand the film. Dive into our detailed library of content, covering key aspects of the movie. We encourage your comments to help us create the best possible guide. Thank you!

What is Interstellar about?

Interstellar ’s primary theme has to do with logic versus emotion. The dynamic permeates almost every part of the film. For example, the school system has turned away from teaching kids to dream and instead grounded itself to what is the most practical and necessary. Most of the pivot points in the plot come down to characters acting out of logic, fear, or love. While Nolan does celebrate science and engineering, he doesn’t shy away from aggrandizing and lionizing the need for the emotional component. This is most obvious in his repeated references to Dylan Thomas’s legendary poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”, with special emphasis on the final line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” That ties-in to the idea of the survival instinct that can motivate someone to act beyond what logic is otherwise telling them.   

Movie Guide table of contents

The ending of interstellar explained, the themes and meaning of interstellar.

• Why is the movie called Interstellar?

Important motifs in Interstellar

• Questions and answers
• Joseph Cooper – Matthew McConaughey
• Young Murph – Mackenzie Foy
• Murph – Jessica Chastain
• Elderly Murph – Ellen Burstyn
• Young Tom – Timothée Chalamet
• Tom – Casey Affleck
• Donald – John Lithgow
• Dr. Amelia Brand – Anne Hathaway
• Professor John Brand – Michael Caine
• Romilly – David Gyasi
• Doyle – Wes Bentley
• TARS – Bill Irwin
• CASE – Josh Stewart
• Mann – Matt Damon
• Written by – Jonathan Nolan | Christopher Nolan
• Directed by – Christopher Nolan

The ending of Interstellar begins when Coop descends into the black hole Gargantua. As his ship is destroyed and his doom seems inevitable, he ejects, only to wind up in the fifth-dimensional space of a tesseract. Surprisingly, the tesseract gives him access to Murph’s bedroom, at any point in space-time. Coop uses this ability, initially, to lament his fate, signaling “Stay” in Morse code as he watches the moment where he said goodbye to his daughter before embarking on this very mission. Once he understands what this means, though, and that TARS has the quantum data about Gargantua, Coop manages to code the information into the second hand of the watch he had given Murph so father and daughter could feel connected. 

Murph, in the room, on the brink of epiphany, finally puts all of her memories together to realize that her ghost was her father. That he had kept his promise and returned, and been there, in this alternative form, for her entire life. Grabbing the watch, she recognizes the twitching of the second hand as Morse. Back at NASA, she translates the information, unlocks the data, then manages to save humanity by solving the gravity equation that will allow the population to leave Earth. 

Coop is finally aware that the alien superbeings inexplicably helping humanity are just humans in the future ensuring their own survival. The tesseract, having served its purpose, collapses, flinging Coop back through space-time, past his own self, making him the “alien” Amelia shook hands with in the wormhole. He arrives in the space outside Saturn, where he’s retrieved by Murph’s interstellar ark (Cooper Station). 

After two weeks, Coop has a brief reunion with Murph, who, old as she is, only has a little bit left to live. She tells her father that no parent should watch their child die, that she has her own family to be with, that he should do what he does best—explore. That means going after Brand and beginning the preparations for when humanity reaches the planet Brand’s preparing for colonization.

The final scene is of Brand, having buried Edmunds, looking off at the beginnings of the new colony of America. 

Thematically speaking

Interstellar ’s primary theme has to do with the often contentious relationship between logic and emotion. How they tend to be the opposites of one another. Someone acting out of logic might lack emotion. Someone acting out of emotion might lack logic. Most of the movie leading up to the final sequence had shown society and characters at each extreme. Or at least leaning one way over the other. Like when Coop leaves for the mission, Murph reacts purely out of emotion. Or when Tom makes the video saying he has to let his father go, it’s a logical choice. Then there’s the scene where Coop and Brand argue about which planet to explore after Miller’s. Brand wants to head to Edmunds because she loves him and wants to see him but also because she believes in the data. Coop writes off her point of view as purely indulgent and opts, instead, for the logical choice of going to Mann’s planet because it had the superior data. 

But at the very end, Coop realizes that love can transcend dimensions, just like time and gravity. Ultimately, it’s the combination of his knowledge and education with his love for his children that allows Coop to relay the necessary information to Murph. And it’s Murph’s combination of knowledge and education with her love for her father that allows her to receive the message. We have a synthesis of logic and love that results in humanity overcoming the miserable situation it’s in on Earth. 

Reinforcing all of that is the fact that Brand was right in wanting to go to Edmunds. Of the three potentially habitable planets, his was the only one that actually could sustain life. In reality, we could chalk it up to coincidence. But in a narrative that’s purposefully constructed, it’s confirmation of love’s powerful, extraordinary influence. 

Interstellar ’s ending does give us closure on several sub-themes throughout the movie. 

The beginning portion, while Coop’s still on Earth, introduces the idea that humans have become scared of taking risks and spend more time in the dirt than they do the sky, both literally and metaphorically. By the end, humanity is dreaming big again, returning to embodying the ideals of seeking knowledge and adventuring. 

The second quarter explores the individual cost of huge endeavors like this. Coop leaves his kids. Brand never got to have a meaningful relationship with Edmunds. Miller, Mann, and Edmunds all gave their lives to discover potential new worlds. The team loses Doyle. They lose decades. But the sacrifices weren’t in vain. Everyone contributed to the eventual survival of the human species. 

Then the third quarter brings up the idea of survival instinct and the way in which people will, when at the brink, fight back. Regardless of the logic of it all. Mann embodies this in a negative way, in the most selfish way. While Coop and Brand demonstrate the way in which survival often depends on others helping us. That leads right into the emotional component that is the focus of the final sequence. 

Practically speaking

The end of Interstellar is emotionally powerful and cathartic. But it does raise some plot-based questions. Like how did Coop and TARS survive being inside a black hole? How did humans evolve to operate on the fifth-dimension? If they’re that powerful, and have that kind of influence over space-time, why did they need to rely on a father sending a Morse code message to his daughter through a watch after entering a black hole? How did the evacuation of Earth go? What did solving the gravity equation actually do? What happened to Cooper’s son, Tom? 

There is an irony to the movie essentially telling us emotion trumps logic as it concludes with a stretch of story elements that create a number of questions without much in the way of satisfying answers. If you want to give the film the benefit of the doubt, you view this as an example of form meets function, a meta choice that formally reinforces the main theme. If you want to be critical, you might call it a bit of a cop out. Given the popularity and adulation the general movie-going audience has for Interstellar , it seems that Nolan’s thesis has been proven true—love is more powerful than logic. 

One-dimensional thinking versus multi-dimensional thinking

Coop’s children, Tom and Murph, each embody different ways of being that are at the core of Interstellar . Tom is a one-dimensional thinker who is concerned only with what’s immediate and practical. While Murph is a multi-dimensional thinker who cares about the future. 

In the film’s early sequences, Coop is saddened by the state of human civilization, especially the educational system. Coop feels like Tom has potential to do something more than just be a farmer. But the school says farmers are what society needs, anything more is not only unrealistic but unnecessary. They’ve gone so far as to start teaching that the moon landing was a hoax. Not because they believe it but because it means society will stay focused on the practical, immediate needs rather than “wasting” time and effort on “fruitless” endeavors like space exploration. 

When Coop tries to talk to Tom about this, Tom says he likes farming and is more than okay with having that be his future. Fast forward to the end of the film, and we see that Tom has grown into a simplistic person. He hasn’t changed much about his house or his life. When Getty and Murph tell him that he has to leave the farm because the dust has Tom’s wife and son on the brink of death, Tom refuses to go. That’s how rooted he is in short-term thinking and hanging onto the past. The reason he cites for not leaving? Because his mom, grandpa, and first son are buried in the backyard. He’d sacrifice his entire future just to hang on to his history. 

Murph, on the other hand, is the more daring of the two children. She wants to be more, do more, experience more. She’s a rule-breaker. A fighter. Her spirit is immense. And it’s that way of being and thinking that makes her the person who solves the extinction of humanity by literally communicating across dimensions. 

In this way, Nolan uses Tom and Murphy as a parable about ways of being and thinking. Tom is the negative example, the who not to be. Murph is the positive example, who we should all aspire to. 

At the very end of the movie, a character tells Coop they wrote a paper on him in high school. It’s seemingly a throwaway line that many will chalk up as simply a relaying of Coop’s fame. But it’s really a purposeful callback to the school subplot that opened the movie and shows that the school system post-Murph has gone back to a system that inspires kids to want more and want to be more. 

Learning how to adapt

We discussed how Tom wanted to stay at his house because of his family history. Even though it would mean the demise of his wife, son, and probably himself, due to lung complications from all the dust. That serves as a microcosm for what was happening on Earth. The remaining governments had mostly given up on finding a solution to the problem and were, instead, just biding their time, surviving for as long as possible. It’s a scarcity mindset. A shackling zeitgeist that says that nothing more is attainable, obtainable, or possible.

When Coop and his kids bring down the lost drone from India, Coop expresses how he plans on stripping it down, using its batteries to power equipment, etc. Murph, a bit sad, asks if they can’t just let the drone go. “It wasn’t hurting anybody.”

Coop follows up with, “This thing needs to learn how to adapt.” For her part, Murph quickly understands, demonstrating that multi-dimensional, growth-mindset thinking. Her response? “Like the rest of us.” 

Interstellar serves as a reminder that we can’t become stagnant. That if something isn’t working, we need to adapt. 

Isolation hurts

Throughout the movie, there’s a pretty big dichotomy between characters who are part of a group versus those who are on their own. The three astronauts who went out on Project Lazarus all ended up alone on their individual worlds. None of the three survived. Well, Mann did. But only because Coop’s team arrived. Even then, the time Mann spent isolated ruined him and reduced him to a selfish, desperate creature who was willing to sacrifice everyone else for his own benefit. Compare that to Coop having his crew of Brand, Romilly, Doyle, TARS, and CASE aboard the Endurance . While not everyone on the team survived, they fared much better because they had one another. 

We see this back on Earth, as well. Tom isolates with his family and grows more and more despondent and difficult. Meanwhile, Murph joins NASA and is around a community of people all working together on a dream. She isn’t necessarily happier than Tom, but you could argue her life is far more fulfilling and what she accomplishes is far more meaningful. 

Why is the movie called Interstellar ?

Merriam-Webster defines “interstellar” as located, taking place, or traveling among the stars especially of the Milky Way galaxy . On the surface level, the title makes sense—the movie is about a journey through space. An interstellar adventure. The characters literally travel to another galaxy. 

We can get a bit deeper, though. The root of the word is inter- and stella. Latin for between and star. So between stars. This phrasing is a bit more stripped down. It’s broader. And that works with the very end of the movie. Because while a bulk of the story is the journey Cooper and the team go on from one solar system to another, and the pilgrimage humanity will make to its new planet, to make that happen, Coop ends up in a tesseract, a dimensional place that exists between the stars that we can’t, at this point, perceive. 

So there’s something to the title as embodying not just the trek between stars but the travel between dimensions. 

If you want to go even further, we can flip the application of the word “interstellar”. The story is about individuals and a population doing everything they can to survive. That idea of survival, of raging against the dying of the light, comes up over and over again. With this in mind, instead of the title referring to the journey the characters go on through space, it would have a more poetic and existential application as referring to life itself throughout the cosmos doing what it must to survive. What we see with humanity in the movie is just one example of the universal struggle all living things face. “Interstellar” captures the totality of this plight throughout space and time.  

Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”

Here’s the full poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  -Dylan Thomas

There’s a cool dynamic going on where the concluding statements of each stanza— “do not go gentle into that good night” and “rage, rage against the dying of the light” — can serve as both statement and demand. As a statement, it’s the narrator saying that the Good men rage against the dying of the light. As a demand, it’s the narrator speaking to the Good men, reminding them that they should rage.

This duality doesn’t necessarily change the meaning of the poem so much as it affects the tone. 

As a statement that these wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men, all fight for life, each group serves as a role model for the narrator’s father. It’s the narrator essentially pleading for his dad to be like them. Everyone else is fighting, please, do the same. 

As a demand, the overall state of the world is a lot sadder. It’s the narrator looking around and seeing all these groups of people losing their will to survive and calling out to them to do something about it. It moves from the broader state of things to the more intimate and personal as we realize the narrator’s father is also at this point of lost fire. 

In the former, the macro state of the world is fine, it’s just the narrator’s father who isn’t fighting. The latter is a lot bleaker about the broader zeitgeist. Aside from the wise men, everyone else is allowing the night to consume them.

Given what we know about the film’s themes and the statement Nolan’s making about the human spirit and how people need to continue to strive for more, to improve, to dream, to not just fight to survive but fight to thrive—Dylan Thomas’s poem is the heart of the entire film. 

Questions & answers about Interstellar

Is murphy’s law relevant.

Since it’s mentioned specifically by characters in the film, it does feel worth discussing. But it’s also a bit odd. The saying is classically that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Yet when Murphy brings this up to Cooper, asking him why they named her after something bad, Coop replies that it’s less about what can go wrong and more about what can happen. It’s a much more positive interpretation of the law. You could see how it plays into some of the themes about one-dimensional thinking vs multi-dimensional thinking, as well as learning to adapt as Coop adapts the phrase to something a lot more neutral, even positive. 

It can also serve as a bit of a catch-all for the wild things that happen in the story. If someone asks how Coop could possibly survive in a black hole—Murphy’s law! What can happen, will happen. 

But it doesn’t necessarily feel meaningful enough to include as a main theme or motif. 

Why did the combines drive up to the house?

The magnetism of Coop from the future suddenly being present at the house. Essentially a byproduct of the tesseract. 

What does “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future” mean?

We’ve all heard of the concepts of nature and nurture. Genetically, we are the byproduct of our parents. Then, existentially, growing up around our parents has an impact on who we become. Nature and nurture are extremely powerful forces that set the stage for the future. We embrace some aspects of our parents while rejecting others. Good and bad. Does the child of a world famous athlete have to become an athlete themselves? Some try to follow that path and succeed. Others try but feel too much pressure and fail. Others go in a completely different direction in order to carve their own path. In most cases, the child’s future is a reaction to the parent. 

We see this with Murph and Tom. Murph embraces Coop’s adventuring spirit. The man he dreams of being. While Tom picks up where his dad left off as a farmer. Each follows in their father’s footsteps but in different ways. 

It’s a reminder of how important you are as a parent and the example you set for your kids. 

Why does Murph burn Tom’s corn?

Tom refused to leave the house even though Murph told him that Tom’s wife and son don’t have long to live if they stay there due to how bad their lungs are from the dust. At first, Murph accepts Tom’s refusal. But as she drives away, she has a change of heart. Setting fire to the corn means he leaves the house, which will allow her and Getty to collect Lois and the son and leave with them. Murph also wanted to revisit her old room because she’s on the brink of an epiphany being in the room was helping her figure it out. 

What happens to Tom?

His storyline ends a bit strangely. Murph has her realization that Coop was the ghost and that he left a message in the watch. Tom had just driven back to the house after extinguishing the corn fire Murph had started to distract him. He’s blacked from the smoke. Disheveled. Shocked. He has seemingly no reaction to Murph’s declaration about Coop as the ghost. And then we never see him again. 

We know Coop used the message in the watch to solve the gravity equation and launch the ship that allowed humans to leave Earth. But like…did Tom go? Did Getty save the wife and son? Did Tom get to NASA and reconnect with other people and have a renaissance? Did he refuse and wither in that house while everyone else left the planet? Did he live 10 more minutes or 10 more years? How did he react to knowing his father “came back”? 

Even weirder is the fact that we never see Coop ask about Tom. Maybe it’s something that happens off-camera? But his relationship to both his children was such a big part of the movie that reducing everything to just caring about Murph is…unsatisfying? Or unrealistic? It seems like something you’d want to at least mention, even if the scene is a minute or less. Especially given that Coop had two weeks until Murph arrived at the ship. There was nothing in the house about Tom? No video footage? No note? He didn’t ask anyone if they knew anything? 

So there were no aliens? 

Nope. We have two instances in the movie of the others and both cases are just Coop. First, what he does within the tesseract. Second, when he travels through the wormhole and shakes hands with Brand. NASA had recorded other anomalies that made them believe in the existence of those fifth-dimensional beings. It’s unlikely that every single instance was also just Coop transcending space-time. We do know that the future humans placed the wormhole, saved Coop from the black hole, and built the tesseract. So they exist. 

How do humans end up becoming fifth-dimensional beings? Who knows. Murph did have the quantum data that allowed him to solve the gravity equation. That could be the thing that sets humanity on the course to evolving beyond our current three-dimensional existence. There’s no indication when that would happen though. Dozens of years in the future? Hundreds? Thousands? Millenia? 

We also don’t know what human society even is at that point. Is it just a collective conscience? Are there still individuals? Do they have a physical form? Have we grown eight arms and three heads? 

What was the gravity equation?

Humanity couldn’t survive on Earth. Which meant finding a way to get people off of Earth. This was seemingly impossible, as anything large enough to transport the remaining human population probably couldn’t escape the Earth’s gravity to actually leave the planet. So how do you manipulate gravity in a way that would allow such heavy objects to escape? That seems to be, from the little information we have, the goal of the gravity equation. 

Essentially, once you solve for g (g = gravity), you could manipulate it. Increasing it if you wanted to increase it. Or decreasing it altogether. Something that would allow NASA to launch the Cooper Stations. 

Is there any connection to Tenet or Inception

Nope. 

Why the focus on baseball?

It’s a team sport and we discussed how much working together matters. It’s also classically American. As popular as the NFL and NBA have become, baseball predated them by decades. It was the first major national sport in America. So you could view it as indicative not just the teamwork aspect but of society being back to its roots. While things aren’t quite where they were before the crisis changed the world, we still have baseball. In some ways, it serves as a promise of everything else that will follow. Not just in the world of organized sports but in terms of civilization returning to what it had been. Then surpassing it. 

What was Coop’s job before becoming a farmer?

He’s a former NASA pilot. But he suffered a crash due to a gravitational anomaly. That combined with the government temporarily shutting NASA down is what led to Coop becoming a farmer.

Nolan worked with a scientist on the movie?

Kip Thorne! Who wrote an entire book about The Science of Interstellar . So if you really want to dive into the nitty gritty of the physics, that’s what you’re looking for. Kip has won a Nobel Prize and wrote another book called Black Holes and Time Warps . So Interstellar is right up his alley. 

Why was there a secret NASA facility?

Global society had been decimated enough by climate change and food shortages that the general public saw NASA spending as wasteful. So the government shut it down. Only to soon realize how stupid that was. So NASA resumed operations but in secret, so the public wouldn’t get mad about money being used on something that wasn’t immediately helpful to the myriad of issues everyone now faced. 

Because it was a secret, Cooper had no way of knowing about it aside from the coordinates he would eventually leave himself. 

Isn’t there a time paradox at the center of Interstellar ?

Yeah. It’s the classic chicken and the egg situation. Coop in the future leaves the coordinates to NASA for his younger self. But the only reason Coop in the future can do that is because he found them when he was younger. Except he couldn’t have found them when he was younger unless his older self left them there. 

As paradoxical as this may seem, we’re told pretty specifically that the tesseract gives Coop access to various moments throughout space-time. That means what happens isn’t causal, as in “this then that”. Rather, it’s simultaneous. “This and that”. So it’s not that Cooper moved forward through time then circled back. Instead, it’s that each version of him existed in that moment, which is what allowed him to convey the coordinates to himself. 

Now it’s your turn

Have more unanswered questions about Interstellar ? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!

Chris Lambert is co-founder of Colossus. He writes about complex movie endings, narrative construction, and how movies connect to the psychology of our day to day lives.

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‘interstellar’: film review.

Christopher Nolan aims for the stars in this brainy and gargantuan sci-fi epic

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Interstellar

Preoccupied with nothing less than the notion that humankind will one day need to migrate from Earth to some other planet we can call home,  Interstellar   so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. Feeling very much like Christopher Nolan ‘s personal response to his favorite film,  2001: A Space Odyssey,  this grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.

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Critical and public reaction will range across the horizon, from the mesmeric to outright rejection for arguably hokey contrivances. But it is certainly some kind of event, one that Paramount, domestically, and Warner Bros., overseas, will massively promote as a hoped-for must-see for audiences everywhere.

The Bottom Line A grandly conceived epic that engrosses but never quite soars

While it technically occupies the realm of science fiction, this gargantuan enterprise brushes up against science fact—or at least intelligent speculation—as much as it can in an effort to make the idea of leaving and returning to our solar system as dramatically plausible as possible. But audiences tend to be accepting of even far-fetched premises as long as the rules of the game are clear. Where Nolan takes his big leap is in trying to invest his wannabe magnum opus with an elemental human emotion, that between parent and child; it’s a genre graft that has intriguing wrinkles but remains imperfect.

Citizens of the world convinced that our planet and civilization are now in a possibly irreversible decline will readily embrace the postulation of the script, by the Nolan brothers Jonathan and Christopher, that life here will shortly be unsustainable. Shrewdly, the writers don’t reflexively blame the deterioration on the catch-all “global warming” or “climate change,” but rather upon severe “blight” resembling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; wheat and other produce are done for, while corn growers, such as Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), may have a bit of time left.

Cooper belongs to a lost generation; a former engineer and test pilot, he expected to become an astronaut, but dire economic conditions forced the closure of NASA and the abandonment of the space program. His precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) shares her father’s long-ago enthusiasm and one of the wittier scenes has an elementary school official reprimanding Murph for believing that the Apollo moon missions actually took place; history has been rewritten to insist that they were just propaganda designed to speed the bankrupting of the Soviet Union in its effort to compete (Nolan restrains himself from adding the canard that Stanley Kubrick filmed the fake moon landing).

There are echoes as well of  The Wizard of Oz  emanating from Cooper’s remote farmhouse, which he shares with his 15-year-old son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and Donald (John Lithgow), his late wife’s father. All the same, any fantasies of escape to a better place cannot be indulged — as Cooper laments, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars, now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.”

But, lo and behold, NASA exists after all; it’s just gone underground. Under the auspices of wise old Professor Brand (Michael Caine), the agency is secretly resurrecting its efforts to find a new home for Earthlings, with the suitably named Lazarus mission. The path to it, Brand explains, is through a wormhole visible near Saturn, and plenty of technical dialogue and physical demonstrations are devoted to detailing how the astronauts will slip through this envelope in space and emerge in a different galaxy near another planet that might support life as we know it (eminent theoretical physicist Kip Thorne receives executive producer credit for his contributions to this and other astronomical aspects of the story).

Cooper cannot resist the invitation to pilot this secret mission, but the angst of having to leave his family behind, specifically Murph, gives him the emotional bends. ”I’m coming back,” he gravely intones, echoing The Terminator, but even if he does return, it seems that, on the other side, he and his crew will age at just a fraction of the rate that Earthlings do at home. Murph is inconsolable and single-mindedly remains so for years.

Nolan employs a nifty little homage to  2001  at the 43-minute mark with an abrupt time-jumping cut from Cooper’s pickup truck speeding away from his house to the fiery blast-off of his rocket. Other editing ploys emphasize the complete silence of outer space, which provide a sharp contrast to a soundtrack otherwise filled with lots of talk and Hans Zimmer’s often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.

The small crew also consists of Brand’s oddly guarded scientist daughter Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), thoughtful astrophysicist Romilly (David Gyasi, in an intriguingly underplayed performance that makes you wish he had more to do), insufficiently written scientist and co-pilot Doyle (Wes Bentley) and, last but not least, the mobile computerized robot TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), an occasionally humorous cross between Hal and R2D2. What goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia, in particular, remains an annoyingly vague and unpersuasive character in contrast to McConaughey’s exuberant, if regret-laden, mission leader, a role the actor invests with vigor and palpable feeling.

It’s a two-year trip out to Saturn, during which the crew hibernates in what’s cleverly called “the long nap” (a perfect title for a short story version of  The Big Sleep ) prior to the rough ride through the hole. Perhaps the most implausible detail in the entire film is that, even from another galaxy, a degree of communication with home is possible. But 23 Earth years have passed, meaning that Murph is now in her 30s and is played by Jessica Chastain . She’s just as resentful of her father having abandoned her as she ever was—it’s a refrain that’s seriously overplayed—while Amelia is gratified to learn that her dad, who looked 80ish when they left, is still alive.

What happens once they arrive on a barren, snowy but not entirely inhospitable rock is best left undisclosed, even if the identity of a surprise presence there of a previous voyager won’t remain a secret for long. But aside from  2001,  which is obliquely referenced again in a late-on cutaway to an ancient Cooper lying in bed in a sterile room, the landmark sci-fi film that  Interstellar  intriguingly echoes is the 1956  Forbidden Planet;  both involve a follow-up journey to a planet in a different galaxy where humans have previously landed and intensely dwell upon a father-daughter relationship.

But while the double use of this parent-child bond suggests the great importance of this theme to Nolan and represents a legitimate and rare attempt to emotionalize sci-fi, the issue is over-stressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother, played as an adult by Casey Affleck, remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.

For all its adventurous and far-seeing aspects,  Interstellar  remains rather too rooted in Earthly emotions and scientific reality to truly soar and venture into the unknown, the truly dangerous. Startling at times, it never confronts the terror of the infinite and nothingness, no matter how often the dialogue cites the spectre of a “ghost” or how many times we hear Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and its famous “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Interstellar  optimistically and humanistically proposes that, even if the light is slowly dying in one place, a reasonable facsimile might be found as a substitute. But there’s no rage here, just a healthy belief in mid-20th century-style Yankee gumption and a can-do attitude. Whether that’s enough anymore is another question.

Production: Syncopy, Linda Obst Productions Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, Timothee Chalamet, William Devane, Matt Damon Director: Christopher Nolan Screenwriters: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Lynda Obst Executive producers: Jordan Goldberg, Jake Myers, Kip Thorne, Thomas Tull Director of photography: Hoyte Van Hoytema Production designer: Nathan Crowley Costume designer: Mary Zophres Editor: Lee Smith Music: Hans Zimmer Visual effects supervisor: Paul Franklin Casting: John Papsidera

PG-13, 169 minutes

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Interstellar Explained (Plot, Ending, Plot Holes Too)

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Interstellar was the much-awaited 2014 Nolan film. It was visually stunning and had an incredible storyline. The Interstellar cast includes Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in the leading roles, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine in supporting roles, and Matt Damon in a short cameo. Was it Nolan’s best  science-fiction  work? I personally don’t think so. In that genre, I still think  Inception  was his masterpiece, an air-tight piece of work. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Interstellar, the concept, the visuals, and everything that came with the package, but it was so complex it led to a few loose ends. Without further ado, here’s the plot, plot holes, and ending of the film Interstellar explained; spoilers ahead.

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Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer .  You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

• – Plot Explained
• – Intro
• – Miller’s Planet
• – Mann’s Planet
• – Ending Explained
• – Other Frequently Asked Questions
• – Plot Holes And Gaps Explained

Interstellar: Plot Explained

What happened to earth why was earth dying.

Earth was dying due to a global agricultural disease, which caused the widespread failure of crops and famine, leading to the collapse of civilization. This was due to a combination of environmental factors, such as climate change and soil degradation, as well as human overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources. The blight was an existential threat to humanity as the Nitrogen levels were increasing, and eventually, everyone would perish by suffocation.

What is NASA up to?

NASA had to operate secretly because people were unhappy to see funds being directed to space exploration when no food was on tables. NASA first observed a wormhole (a shortcut through space) appear near Saturn 48 years ago. Their theory is that it was put there by an alien race that wants to help humans find a new home in another galaxy.

Who is Dr Brand? What does he know?

Dr Brand heads the NASA division and has built a gigantic space station but is unable to come up with a solution as to how to get the station into orbit.

Dr Brand realized 10 years ago that Earth and its people are doomed because there is no way to solve the gravity problem without getting information from inside a black hole. So his secret alternate solution was to save the species instead.

What are Plan A and Plan B, then?

Plan B is the Population Bomb . To take to a planet 5000 fertilized ovaries, incubate the first 10, and then exponentially increase the population to begin a new human colony with surrogacy. Population Bomb is an apt phrase as the plan involves infecting some poor unsuspecting planet with humans.

Plan A , which is to get all the people of Earth to a new world to restart their lives,  is a lie . If Dr Brand told people they would all die and yet have to work to save a future human race kept inside containers, no one would do it. Dr Brand creates a false sense of hope so that people would work together.

What is the Lazarus Project?

10 years ago, the Lazarus Project sent 12 astronauts through the wormhole to explore 12 planets in the galaxy on the other side. They were to reach the planet and send a signal via their beacon to say if the world was habitable or not. After that, they were to enter cryosleep and wait till people from Earth arrived with the Population Bomb. 

In the present day, NASA has received 3 positive signals from 3 worlds in one system with Gargantua, a black hole, at the centre. Dr Miller, Dr Edmunds, and Dr Mann are the three astronauts who have sent back positive signals.

Who is Amelia, and what is her connection to Dr Wolf Edmunds?

Amelia is Dr Brand’s daughter, and she loves Dr Edmunds. In the present day, it has been 3 years since there has been any communication from Dr Edmunds, and she secretly hopes to reunite with him as part of the mission.

Who is Cooper?

Cooper is an ex-pilot who once flew for NASA. He now lives as a farmer, but since he’s an engineer, he also salvages machine parts to build stuff for himself and others. At the film’s beginning, Cooper follows a stray Indian Airforce Drone and highjacks it for its remarkable solar cells. Cooper lives with his two kids, Murph and Tom, and his wife’s dad; his wife died from a Tumour.

What is the gravitational anomaly?

Over 50 years, there have been recordings of many gravitational anomalies causing interference with the navigation systems of multiple vehicles; the Indian drone is an example of that.

Murph’s Ghost And The Coordinates In Dust

Murph believes there are ghosts in her house trying to communicate with her. The ghost pushes her toy down and later knocks down books. One day, when a dust storm hits, Cooper and Murph notice the dust falling to the ground in a specific pattern. Cooper figures it to be Binary Code which spells out coordinates. He sets off to those coordinates, and Murph sneaks into his truck. 

The coordinates lead them to NASA, where Cooper meets Dr Brand, Amelia, Romilly and Doyle. None of them has real flying experience except Cooper, so Dr Brand urges Cooper to take up the mission. Dr Brand also explains that the aliens used gravitational anomaly to help Cooper find NASA just in time. Believing Plan A is real, Cooper agrees.

Murph is furious and refuses to talk to Cooper. She even tries to tell him that her ghost’s message via the fallen books’ morse code pattern spells STAY. Cooper gives her a watch which she throws away. Cooper is unable to reconcile but leaves anyway.

Endurance: To Saturn and into the Wormhole

Cooper joins the crew and two advanced CASE and TARS to begin their mission on a centrifuge ship called Endurance. They get constant video messages from their families and send back responses. Cooper finds out about Amelia and Dr Edmund’s relationship from TARS. After a two-year cryosleep journey to Saturn, they enter the wormhole, and as they do, Amelia gives her first handshake to an extra-terrestrial presence. A wormhole is a shortcut through space, so on the other side, the crew is still in the same time as Earth.

Choosing the first planet

Miller’s planet is the closest to their coordinates but is very close to the black hole Gargantua. This means that as Endurance gets closer, their relative time will become much slower than Earth’s. 1 hour on the planet is about 7 years for the people on Earth. Cooper suggests an alternate route of heading on Endurance till a point and then using the pods to get in and out of the planet. They would lose a few years on Earth, but not enough that everyone back home is dead. Cooper, Amelia and Doyle head in the pod.

Miller’s Planet Explained

Once they set foot on Miller’s Planet, they realize it has only water and massive tidal waves caused due to Gargantua. Due to the enormous time dilation on this planet, it turns out Dr Miller died just moments before they landed. Her initial message about water has just been looping, giving a false impression that she has consistently sent out signals and that the planet was inhabitable.

Interstellar: Why did Doyle die?

Doyle asks TARS to help Amelia, who is stuck under debris trying to get Dr Miller’s data despite Cooper asking her not to. This causes them to lose time, and before Doyle can enter the ranger, he is drowned and killed by a giant tidal wave.

Why can’t they leave Miller’s Planet immediately?

The pod’s engines get flooded and hence have to be drained out, which is a 1-hour wait. What was initially estimated to be a total of an hour’s trip turns out to be over 3 hours, including the wait time. Hence their total time lost is 23 years.

23 Years of Time Dilation

When they return to the Endurance, Romilly and everyone on Earth has aged. Romilly has not become 23 years older because he did go into cryosleep multiple times in between. Romilly has been unable to send any messages but has been receiving many from Earth. Murph is now a grown woman, working with Dr Brand on the gravitation problem. She decides to send out her first message to her father because she is now the same age as Cooper was when he left (Cooper mentions to young Murph that they may both be the same age when he returns). 

Dr Brand confesses and goes out into the night

Soon, Dr Brand starts fading due to old age and tells Murph that he lied about the whole thing. The equation could never be solved without the black hole information, and there is no getting information from the inside of a black hole. And that he sent the team only hoping for the Population Bomb. 

Earlier in the film, we see Murph noticing this about his equations – that Dr Brand has not bothered keeping time a variable while solving it. She tries to confront him, but he evades the topic. Murph relays information to the centrifuge, saying Dr Brand has passed and questions if Amelia and Cooper already knew about this and how her father could leave her to die. 

Choosing their next planet

Because of the 23 extra years, Edurance has lost fuel, and resources are available to visit only one more planet before heading back to Earth. Mann’s planet is closer, but Amelia wants to go to Edmunds’ planet. Cooper brings up Amelia’s relationship with Edmunds, Amelia is voted out, and they decide to go to Mann’s planet.

Mann’s Planet Explained

On landing, Dr Mann is Matt Damon, ooooh, the well-kept secret! They wake Dr Mann from cryosleep, and he shows them awesome planetary readings ( which is all a lie ). Everyone’s happy. From the Endurance, CASE relays Murph’s message about Dr Brand’s lie. Amelia and Cooper are devastated, but Dr Mann already knows about the lie and says there was never any hope for Earth. Cooper decides to head back to Earth, thinking they have already found an inhabitable planet.

Interstellar: Why did Mann lie about the planet? 

Dr Mann discovered that the planet was inhospitable and unsuitable for human life and wouldn’t be able to survive, and he became desperate for a way to escape. Mann sent a false signal to Cooper’s team, indicating that his planet was habitable and suitable for human life. This lie was intended to lure Cooper’s team to his planet. Mann’s actions were motivated by his fear of dying alone.

Interstellar: Why did Mann attack Cooper? Why did Dr Mann betray?

Dr Mann wants to use Endurance to get to Dr Edmunds’ planet to use the Population Bomb to restart a new human colony. But Cooper intends to take Endurance back to Earth; hence Dr Mann attacks Cooper. Dr Mann throws away Cooper’s comm device and cracks his helmet. Knowing the others would see Dr Mann as a traitor, he decides to head to Endurance alone and head to Edmunds’ planet. Cooper finds his comm and calls out to Amelia for help, and she rushes over to him.

Interstellar: Why did KIPP explode?

Dr Mann had programmed his robot KIPP to detonate when a human authorized themself. It appears Dr Mann contemplated suicide at one point, and an explosion was a quick way to go, but instead, he put himself in an endless cryosleep.

When TARS asked Dr Mann if it could try and restore KIPP, Mann mentioned it needs a  human touch . This means Dr Mann rigged KIPP a long time ago, much before the crew arrived. There was no way for him to know how things might pan out when a crew did arrive. So it is unlikely that Dr Mann rigged KIPP to kill the team. On the other hand, KIPP had all the data regarding the uninhabitable planet, and he didn’t want that going out, and in case someone tried to boot it up, kaboom. In this case, Romilly gets killed in the explosion.

Back to Endurance

Cooper and Amelie take the other pod and chase after Dr Mann. Dr Mann gets to the centrifuge and tries to dock manually; he fails and gets blown up. The process sets Endurance into an uncontrolled spin. Cooper performs a spinaroonie with the pod, anchors with the centrifuge and stops the spinning. But by now, they start being pulled by Gargantua’s gravity.

The Sling Shot

Endurance is severely damaged, and there is no way to return to Earth, considering they are falling into Gargantua. Cooper suggests that using the black hole’s gravitational pull, they can slingshot to Edmunds’ planet and work on the Population Bomb. In the process, they prep TARS to drop off into the black hole and try to relay the information required to solve the gravity equation.

Interstellar: Why did cooper detach?

Just as they prepare for the slingshot, Cooper sacrifices himself, disengages and falls into the black hole. The extra weight he and his pod added to Endurance would not allow the slingshot to happen. Cooper sends Amelia alone to Edmunds’ planet.

Interstellar: Ending Explained

The ending of Interstellar reveals that the aliens are humans from a far future who have become 5-dimensional beings and are helping Cooper and Murph save the race, and therefore themselves, from extinction by constructing the Time Tesseract inside the black hole.

Amelia’s theory on love – what did it mean?

The concept of love is crucial in understanding the climax. We perceive love as a human emotion. Maybe it means something more, something we can’t yet understand. Perhaps it’s some evidence of some artefact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive.

To a being of 2 dimensions, it will view a sphere as only a circle. The 2-dimensional creature can’t consciously perceive the sphere; it only experiences rings that change size based on the sphere’s movement. This is a physical example. What Amelia asks is, what if love is like the circles? What if we perceive only a lower dimension of the actual artefact?

Love is something we can perceive that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it yet. 

Why can’t the 5-dimensional beings just give Murph the data from the black hole?

The 5-dimensional beings are far too evolved to understand and operate like the 3-dimensional humans we are. Every moment is infinitely complex. They have access to infinite time and space, but they’re not bound by anything. Therefore they can’t find a specific place in time to communicate with Murph or Cooper. The 50 years of gravitational anomalies on Earth are probably the numerous failed attempts of the 5-dimensional beings trying to share the data.

The Tesseract: Multi-Dimensional Space Explained

The Tesseract, built by the 5-dimensional beings, represents the 4th dimension of time in 3 dimensions of space. Moving around in this construct takes a person across various points in time but in the same location in space, Murph’s room.

Interstellar: What happened in the black hole? How did Cooper survive?

Cooper falls into the black hole, and his controls give up on him. He then ejects, and just as he’s heading to his death, he suddenly finds himself safely transported inside a multi-dimensional Tesseract. Here time is non-linear. Cooper understands that gravity transcends space and time.

The Predestination Paradox in Interstellar: Who is Murph’s ghost?

Cooper is Murph’s ghost who uses gravity to communicate with her at various points in time. In time travel, the Predestination Paradox is one where an event is its own cause, meaning the future predestines the past.

Cooper can see a young Murph on the other side. He tries to send a message to Murph by dropping books in Morse Code spelling out STAY. But Cooper sees himself leave and realizes that he was Murph’s ghost all along.

From the Tesseract, Cooper alters the dust in Murph’s room to let it fall in thick and thin lines, which form the binary equivalent of NASA’s coordinates. Another event in the future that causes the event in the past.

Cooper also realizes that Murph is the one to whom the extra-terrestrial beings are trying to reach out, but they don’t know when they need to do it. Cooper realizes  love is the key  and looks for the time he gave Murph the watch.

The Ghost And The Black Hole Data

TARS resumes communications with Cooper but is unable to transmit the black hole information outside. Cooper realizes his role in all of this. He is the bridge the multi-dimensional humans are trying to use to get the black hole information across to Murph. 

Cooper navigates to the point when he gives Murph the watch. He knows that she would keep it or come back for it because it was his last gift to her. Cooper relays the black hole data into the watch’s second hand in Morse code. He does this by altering the gravitational fields around the watch. 

Grown-up Murph, who has come to her old room because she has a hunch about the ghost and the gravitational anomaly, realizes that her dad is the ghost. She looks at the watch to notice the twitching arm and identifies it as morse code. Murph’s love for her father compels her to look for the answer from her ghost, which a scientist would otherwise consider supernatural and not pursue.

As he expects, Murph puts together that the ghost is, in fact, her father, and he’s trying to communicate from another time via the watch and book stand. She collects the information from the watch, translates it and solves the gravity equation.

Interstellar: How did Murph save the world? What was the equation? Did they save Earth?

Murph’s solution of the gravity equation eventually allows for gigantic space stations to propel outside Earth’s gravitational fields. Earth can’t be saved, but over the years, humans relocate to various stations in space. Murph grows old and has a family knowing that her dad didn’t abandon her but instead went somewhere in time to save her and all the other Earth’s people. Around 80 years go by, and one day Cooper is found.

Did cooper die?

No, the 5-dimensional beings dismantle the Tesseract and place Cooper in the vicinity of Saturn for Cooper Station to find him. On his return trip, he passes the moment when Amelia does her handshake. Amelia was merely witnessing Cooper passing by in a future time. 

Though Cooper has not aged, being near and inside the black hole has caused more dilation and for the people of Earth, 80 years have passed (the scientist mentions Cooper is 124 years old). A significantly aged Murph meets Cooper, and they talk about him being her ghost. She’s happy to see him exactly how she saw him last but says she has her children to take care of her now and that Cooper should go find Amelia. 

Although totally unnecessary because it was Cooper Station, Cooper  steals  a NASA craft and heads out while Amelia is shown setting up camp on Edmund’s planet. Dr Edmunds seems to have died as she is alone in the base.

Interstellar: What happened to Edmunds? How did Edmunds die?

The movie doesn’t show that Edmunds is dead, but the official novella states clearly that Edmunds dies in his hypersleep because of a landslide that destroys his pod. It’s logical to assume that Edmunds didn’t make it, as we’re shown Amelia to be alone on the planet in the end.

Interstellar: Did Cooper find Brand?

The film leaves this ambiguous, but the real question is how old Amelia would be when Cooper does meet her on Edmunds’ planet, assuming she wasn’t killed like Dr Edmunds. Since they separated, they would have aged at different rates. Amelia and Cooper did a large portion of the slingshot together, so they aged at the same pace till then. After that, Cooper spent some time inside the black hole. 

Assuming Cooper was 44 when he started his journey, 80 years have passed by the time he reaches Cooper Station. Of this, 23 is due to Millers Planet. 51 because of the slingshot and apparently around 7 because of the Tesseract. We don’t know the time dilation on Edmunds’ planet, but it appears that Amelia and Cooper should be around the same age they saw each other last (give or take 5 years).

Other Frequently Asked Questions Answered

Interstellar: why did they burn crops.

The characters burned crops to combat the global agricultural plague devastating Earth’s food supply. The blight was caused by a fungus rapidly spreading and destroying crops, and the burning of crops was meant to stop that and prevent it from infecting other crops. While the burning of crops was a desperate and extreme measure, it was necessary to preserve what little food was left.

Interstellar: What happened to Jesse? Did Jesse die?

In one of the recordings, Tom mentions that they buried his granddad out in the back forty next to Mom and Jesse. It looks like Tom’s son Jesse died from something unknown, but it’s logical to assume it resulted from what was happening to Earth.

Interstellar: What happened to Tom? Did Tom die?

Sadly the movie doesn’t refer to him after one point; Cooper doesn’t look for him in the Cooper Station, indicating that Tom passed away a while back because of the epidemic resulting in a variety of diseases. In the film, we are told that Tom’s wife and son have developed some kind of respiratory disease because of the dust in the air. It’s likely that they all eventually died of it.

Interstellar: How long was Cooper in space? How many years passed?

For Cooper, it was around  3 years , but for the people of Earth, it was  80 years since Cooper had first left Earth  to the time he was found near Saturn by the Cooper Station.

Interstellar: What Happened to Brand? Did Brand die?

Well, Amelia Brand safely makes it to Edmunds’ planet and sets up the first human colony there; poor planet. However, her father, Dr Brand, passes away peacefully because of old age.

Interstellar: Did Cooper go back in time?

No, at no point Cooper physically goes back in time. He only uses gravity to affect objects at moments in the past. We see this as falling books, sand and the ticking of the watch.

Interstellar: Plot Holes And Gaps Explained

This section is up for discussion; there will be some subjectivity.

Tones Of Data Through A Watch

Relaying the information of a black hole through Morse code to a watch’s second hand. This is going to be tonnes of data! For how long would the data need to be relayed? Assuming the data is being looped repeatedly, it would be challenging to understand where it starts and ends. Also, why would the watch continuously tick like that in loops? Cooper relayed the information only time.

Time Dilation Because Of The Black Hole

Considering that merely slingshotting beside the black hole can make them lose 51 years, entering it should have caused Cooper to lose exponentially more years. By the time he exited it, he should have lost another 50 – 70 years and by then. Which means both Murph and Amelia would be dead.

Why not a handful of Plan Bs?

If the idea was to anyway go with Plan B, and the Lazarus astronauts knew of this, they could have each taken fertilized ovaries and started a colony of humans on whichever planet was suitable. Why build a centrifuge ship and send it with a bunch of fertilized eggs as a second step, given the pipeline of astronauts was drying out?

What were your thoughts on the plot and ending of Interstellar? Do you have other details or plot holes to share? Drop a note in the comments section below.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

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Interstellar

• When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.
• Earth's future has been riddled by disasters, famines, and droughts. There is only one way to ensure mankind's survival: Interstellar travel. A newly discovered wormhole in the far reaches of our solar system allows a team of astronauts to go where no man has gone before, a planet that may have the right environment to sustain human life. — ahmetkozan
• In the near future around the American Midwest, Cooper, an ex-science engineer and pilot, is tied to his farming land with his daughter Murph and son Tom. As devastating sandstorms ravage Earth's crops, the people of Earth realize their life here is coming to an end as food begins to run out. Eventually stumbling upon a N.A.S.A. base 6 hours from Cooper's home, he is asked to go on a daring mission with a few other scientists into a wormhole because of Cooper's scientific intellect and ability to pilot aircraft unlike the other crew members. In order to find a new home while Earth decays, Cooper must decide to either stay, or risk never seeing his children again in order to save the human race by finding another habitable planet. — jmvd8
• In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand, a brilliant N.A.S.A. physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a womhole. But first, Brand must send former N.A.S.A. pilot Cooper and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home. — Jwelch5742
• A single father that flew for NASA in the past is raising a son and daughter along with his father-in-law. After NASA was cut from governmental funding due to environmental problems, he becomes a farmer. The last sustainable crop is corn and it's only a matter of time until that too becomes extinct. Mysterious clues begin emerging that he and his daughter believe are coming from a supernatural being, or aliens. What they decipher leads them to a mission where he leaves the planet and his family to save mankind. — liamguts
• In the future, crop blight has caused civilization to regress into a failing agrarian society. Former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) runs a farm with his family. Humanity needs more farmers to feed the world & the current scientific thinking believes that NASA Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviets (a belief that pisses Cooper off like nothing else). Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), Cooper's 10-year-old daughter, believes her room is haunted by a ghost trying to communicate with her. They discover the "ghost" is an unknown intelligence sending coded messages using gravitational waves, leaving binary coordinates in the dust that direct them to a secret NASA installation led by Professor John Brand (Michael Caine). Dr Brand tells Cooper that every year one crop dies & gets eliminated from the planet forever due to change in climatic conditions & severity of the dust storms. Soon, no crop will ever grow on Earth & the species will starve to death. Brand reveals that a wormhole, apparently created by an alien intelligence (& first discovered 48 yrs ago), leads to new planets that may offer hope for survival. NASA's "Lazarus missions" have identified three potentially habitable worlds orbiting the black hole Gargantua: Miller, Edmunds, and Mann, named after the astronauts who surveyed them. Originally 12 astronauts were sent to 12 different worlds. Their craft had hibernation capabilities through which the astronauts could live on for decades & wait to be rescued after transmitting habitat data back to Earth. But if the planet was assessed to be uninhabitable, there was no plan for rescue as Earth did not have the resources to again visit all 12 planets. Brand recruits Cooper to pilot the spacecraft Endurance to recover the astronauts' data from the 3 planets; if one of the planets is habitable, humanity will follow on space stations. But Brand has still not solved the problem of lifting enough of Humanity into space & to the identified planet. So plan B is to population bomb the identified planet with human embryos. The Endurance will carry 5000 human embryos, of which 10 will be incubated & once they grow up, they will be artificially inseminated so as to create a colony of 100s of humans in a few decades. Cooper's departure devastates Murphy, and they part on bad terms. On Endurance, Cooper joins Brand's daughter, bio-technologist Amelia (Anne Hathaway) (& Brand's daughter); scientists Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley); and robots TARS and CASE. Amelia tells Cooper that Mann was the leader of the expedition that took 12 brave people to uncharted territory. Amelia has great respect for Mann. They enter the wormhole and head to Miller (as the meager data provided by the respective explorers puts Miller's planet as the best option), but discover the planet is so close to Gargantua that it experiences severe gravitational time dilation: each hour on the surface is seven years on Earth. A team descends to the planet, which proves inhospitable as it is covered by a shallow ocean roiled by enormous tidal waves. As Amelia attempts to recover Miller's data, a wave hits, killing Doyle and delaying the shuttle's departure. When the others return to Endurance, 23 years have passed. Murphy is now grown up & is working with Dr Brand (who is now very old) in solving the gravity equation that is the key to lifting the humanity off Earth in an attempt to recolonize another planet, as per Plan A. On Earth, the adult Murphy (Jessica Chastain) is now a NASA scientist assisting Brand with an equation that will enable NASA to launch the space stations via gravity. On his deathbed, Brand admits he already solved the gravity problem and determined that project is impossible as he needed more data from a black hole singularity to completely solve the equation. He concealed his findings to keep hope alive and put his faith in "Plan B": using frozen embryos aboard the Endurance to start humanity anew. He also knew that there was no way back to Earth via the wormhole. However, Murphy concludes that Brand's equation could work with additional data from a black hole's singularity. Low on fuel, Endurance can only visit one more planet before returning to Earth. After a tense vote, the team selects Mann's planet, as Mann is still transmitting. Amelia wanted to take Endurance to Edmund's planet as the data showed organic life, but Mann's data was more recent (but showed no organic life). Amelia's theory was that the 3 planets were orbiting a giant black hole & hence all accidents that happened in the universe to create life, simply did not happen in this system, so no asteroids, comets nothing. Her point was that planet showing organic life hence had more promise. However, they discover Mann's planet is icy and inhospitable; Mann (Matt Damon) always knew Plan B was the mission's true goal (he even tells Cooper that Brand knew that he needed a black hole's singularity data before Mann left Earth. And Singularity data is impossible as it hides behind a black hole, through which light itself cannot escape). Romily suggests that the robot TARS can enter the black hole horizon of Gargantuan fast enough & just might survive long enough to transmit data on the singularity. Mann faked data about his planet's viability so Endurance would rescue him. Mann breaks Cooper's spacesuit visor and leaves him to die, and flees to Endurance on a shuttle; Romilly is killed by a bomb Mann set to protect his secret. Amelia rescues Cooper on the other shuttle, and they arrive at Endurance in time to witness Mann docking improperly. The airlock explodes, killing Mann and causing serious damage, but Cooper uses the shuttle to get Endurance under control. Nearly out of fuel, Cooper and Amelia plan to slingshot Endurance around Gargantua on a course toward Edmunds. Due to being directly in the heavy gravity of Gargantua, several more decades actually pass back on Earth while TARS and Cooper detach into the black hole, sacrificing themselves to collect data on the singularity and to propel Amelia by dropping the ship's mass. They emerge in an extra-dimensional "tesseract", where time appears as a spatial dimension and portals show glimpses of Murphy's childhood bedroom at various times. Cooper realizes the alien beings are future humans who have constructed this space so he can communicate with Murphy and save humanity. Using gravitational waves, Cooper encodes TARS's data on the singularity into the adult Murphy's watch, allowing her to solve Brand's equation and evacuate Earth. Cooper somehow is ejected from the singularity & awakens aboard a NASA space station near Saturn and reunites with the now elderly Murphy (Ellen Burstyn), who has led humanity's exodus. Murphy convinces Cooper to search for Amelia and CASE, who have completed their one-way trip to Edmunds' planet, and are setting Plan B into motion.

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"Interstellar" Movie Review: Exploring the Plot, Characters, and Visual Spectacle

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Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch  Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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Interstellar: An Analysis of the Film

Introduction, a brief plot of the film, the idea of a father-daughter relationship, correction of perception, uncertainty of the anomaly, perception adjustment, the unresolved question of cooper station, works cited.

A deeper study of literary works, based not so much on superficial reading as on searching for hidden meanings and interpreting details, is an essential part of informed criticism. In fact, no work in the world, be it a book, a movie, or even a TV show, is created for the sole purpose of comfort; instead, authors build a line of narrative and overall plot on a multitude of micro-themes, each of which can convey a specific message to the reader, listener, or viewer. The more such subthemes there are in a work — and the more harmoniously they are connected to each other — the more likely it is that the work will be complete and attractive to the audience because it will be able to touch some of its deepest thoughts. In this interpretation, it is well established that criticism of works can be accomplished through the paradigm of the reader’s experience. This school of aesthetics defines Reader-Response Criticism, in which the audience and its experience with the work act as the central filter. This essay uses the paradigm of this form of criticism to analyze in depth Christopher Nolan’s internationally acclaimed 2014 film Interstellar. The fundamental thesis is that Interstellar is perfectly described through the receptive theory of criticism in view of the depth of the story.

The primary point is to briefly describe the film’s overall plot so that further discussion makes sense to readers who have not been familiar with the motion picture before. The plot is based on the idea of exploring the horizons of the universe with a search for a planet that is optimal for the continuation of the human race. This is the not-too-distant future, 2067, when severe natural disasters, hunger, and poverty occur on Earth: in fact, these are the factors that are the reason for the active search for a planet to colonize. Former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper is forced to leave his family behind to pursue a human-scale goal, and as a result of this breakup, Cooper’s relationship with his son and younger daughter is damaged. During their space journey, Cooper’s team visits several exoplanets and encounters severe threats in the form of mile-long tsunamis and lifeless frost, but they eventually find a candidate planet. This is just a general storyline, showing the movement of the characters from the starting point to the ending point. However, the film is much deeper than it might seem at first glance and contains multiple uncertainties and understatements.

One of the major themes of the film, besides the idea of intergalactic civilization, is that of relationships with one’s family and love. There are many hidden meanings and rhetorical tools in Interstellar, which Nolan has used to create a fascinating and engaging motion picture. Tyson teaches that reader-response criticism is based on the reader’s perception of uncertainty in the text and how that uncertainty is turned into meaning — not necessarily true — for the reader through the lens of individual experience (Tyson 189). In this sense, one of the most critical scenes in the film, a fragment of which is shown in Figure 1, reflects the depth of the relationship between father and daughter, between whom there must probably be a permanent separation. It is worth saying that the relationship with the protagonist’s son is significantly colder and more restrained: their goodbye takes less than a minute. The nature of the bond with his daughter has not been fully revealed in the film before, and it is not entirely clear how strong the love between them is; however, this is something that each viewer learns through their own experience. Through the screen, one can see that the news of the departure breaks Cooper’s daughter, but the veracity of her emotions and the pain she feels is perceived uniquely by each viewer. It is only natural that for some, such a scene may have seemed ordinary or even superfluous, while others found in it the experience and pain of remembering the relationship with their own parents.

In the 40th minute of the film, in which the encounter described takes place, it is not yet clear what exactly Murphy means to her father. As the plot progresses, however, it becomes clear that the daughter is the center of Cooper’s life, and without her, he is broken and shattered. The perception of their bond is particularly adjusted in the most emotional scenes when Cooper leaves home and when he watches a video message from his grown daughter (Figure 2). These shots most fully fill in the gaps that existed earlier through the demonstration of the pain Cooper feels when he loses his daughter. Thus, the reticence regarding the loving relationship between father and daughter may be perceived ambiguously by the audience until Nolan introduces additional shots to convey specific information.

Another crucial point, which can also be described through the paradigm of receptive criticism, is expressed in the analysis of the literal ambiguity of the picture. At the beginning of the film, when Cooper had not yet left the children, an anomaly was occurring in his daughter’s room: books were falling off the bookshelf by themselves, and sand was forming a pile. The movie did not give a specific answer to this question but instead said that the possible cause lay in the peculiarities of the magnetic field. This seems like an odd solution since the connection between the falling books, and the magnetic anomaly does not seem transparent, but Nolan did not devote much time to the problem. The presence of such uncertainty has led to many theories that the viewer’s mind could construct. For example, it could be a poltergeist or a ghost, as well as Murphy’s desire for attention: until this point was revealed at the very end of Interstellar, the magnetic phenomenon remained an unresolved problem that created new associations as the plot progressed. The situation became more complicated when Murphy, already an adult, realized that the books were falling for a reason, but there was some code encrypted in them. For the viewer as a whole, this information did not add any new insight, as the fundamental question of what exactly causes the anomaly had not yet been answered. Only at the end, when Cooper finds himself in a whole new dimension, incomprehensible to the human mind, does it become clear that it was he who had moved the books in his daughter’s room to thus transmit the cipher to her. In other words, the viewer is again confronted with the adjustment of the perception of the story through the clarification of details.

Interestingly, the magnetic anomaly from Interstellar can be viewed from a different perspective. From a plot point of view, the tipping over of the books and the moving of the clock hand are scripted moves to advance the overall story: with these tools, Cooper conveys the necessary knowledge of gravity and time so that Murphy can save humanity. However, there is a more metaphysical meaning to these scenes, namely the connection between the living and dead people. For Murphy, her father, who abandoned his daughter decades ago and has not made contact, is dead. For this reason, examining the scene through her daughter’s eyes shows an incomprehensible connection to something supernatural, and this connection is one-sided. It seems to hint that dead people may contact living relatives and friends to share important information or bring messages. From this perspective, then, the primary perception of the anomaly as something otherworldly makes sense again.

Notably, despite director Nolan’s frequent technique of explaining uncertainties as the plot unfolds — as was evident, for example, in the Tenet — not all of the film’s unresolved questions are answered. One significant understatement concerns the film’s ending: Cooper and his crew flew through a black hole, or wormhole, to other galaxies, but after a scene with an alternate dimension and a binary transmission to his daughter, he ends up on Cooper’s station orbiting near Saturn (Figure 3). Determining why humans live near Saturn when Cooper and crew began colonizing the exoplanet is a significant uncertainty with no answer. On the one hand, it might seem that the station near Saturn is a temporary stronghold for humanity, which will soon relocate outside the solar system. On the other hand, it is likely that humanity will never be able to move beyond the wormhole, which means it is doomed to live inside the solar system. In this sense, readers’ minds self-construct the plot and determine that the purpose of the entire expedition was never to relocate but to colonize. Thus, Murphy will never see his father again, who has once again poisoned himself to colonize the planets instead of living with his already elderly daughter on a station near Saturn. Nolan does not provide an answer to this question and forms an open finale. It is open finales that are one of the main tools of the reader-response criticism because it allows for the creation of understatement that the individual experience of the audience will perceive. That is why, in fact, there are many interpretations of the ending of Interstellar — because the meaning of the finale has not been clarified, which means that each viewer can interpret the finale in their own way.

Turning again to the philosophy of receptive criticism, one finds an important detail: this school of aesthetics refers to the author’s use of hidden sub-themes as a tool for interacting with the audience. The scenes discussed earlier were examples of obvious understatements or issues that were directly or indirectly discussed in the film. However, the depth of Interstellar is more significant: it includes subthemes that were not described on the surface but hints that were given. One of the lows is the idea of hope as salvation in hopeless situations. In particular, when Cooper falls into a black hole, the viewer takes advantage of the experience he has already had to realize that Cooper will die. This is a well-known truth taught in schools and talked about in scientific writings: there is no way out of a black hole (Weitering). However, in moments of hopelessness and expectation of doom, salvation awaits the protagonist, namely the tesseract as a new dimension. Nolan does not say why he decided to make such a move, so the reader can only explore it through his own experience. Thus, one interpretation might be the idea that there are no hopeless situations, and one must always hope for salvation. Little attention has been given to the question of the supernatural forces that watch over humanity: it was they who gave Cooper entrance into the tesseract. This raises doubts about the fact that there are other forms of life in this universe besides Earth, which is one of the leading existential questions. Remarkably, unlike in classical mythology, these forces are not deities, according to the film, but humans themselves. A viewer who has watched this film carefully might think of the descendants of humanity, who have made such progress that they are able to connect through the fabric of time with their ancestors as a supernatural force.

In conclusion, it should be noted that every work, regardless of genre, has its primary meaning, which can be transparent, as well as additional sub-themes. Interstellar is such a work, which, among others, is perfectly analyzed from a viewer’s perspective. There are many details and questions hidden in this Christopher Nolan work that are not immediately resolved or not resolved at all. In this sense, the audience is left to guess and make assumptions based only on personal experience. Among others, personal experience allows one to experience key moments in the film with a special emotional force behind the audience’s experiences and feelings. All of this leads to the conclusion that the interaction of film and viewer perception creates meanings that are selective and specific to each individual.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today . Routledge: 2006.

Weitering, Hanneke. “How Do Particles Escape Black Holes? Supercomputers May Have the Answer.” Space , 2019.

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Film Review – Interstellar

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