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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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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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'Interstellar' is ambitious, flawed and inspiring

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Interstellar is a movie with a lot of bright ideas, and a few dim ones. At 3 hours, it's an epic that harkens back to heady, cerebral science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris , where asking big picture questions about the nature of life and the universe is paramount.

This review contains mild spoilers for Interstellar.

Interstellar melds that approach with a touch of family drama, a dollop of social commentary, and a pinch of apocalyptic paranoia, all of which serve to heighten the stakes throughout the movie. It doesn't make good on all of its ambitions, but it does a hell of a job trying.

The film centers on Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an ex-astronaut living in a dreary near-future where there's no need for astronauts. About all there is to do is farm, since an environmental disaster called "the blight" has been eating up most of the world's resources.

Cooper isn't happy with the lot he's drawn in life. He loves his family — his budding genius daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), crotchety but down-to-earth father in Law, Donald (John Lithgow) and son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — but the anti-science rhetoric in his small town has him furious, and being grounded is stifling for him.

He gets by by indulging Murphy's fascination with science and engineering, tracks the odd errant drone and catches the a baseball game every now and then. But the movie heats up when his and Murphy's explorations uncover a massive secret that leads to Cooper's second chance at space exploration, with a mission to a nearby galaxy to save humanity. No big deal.

There are bumps along the way, naturally. Cooper, along with Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Dr. Romilly (David Gyasi), Dr. Doyle (Wes Bently) and robot companions TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin) and CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart) have to travel unimaginable distances in order to find another habitable planet. They face off against dramatic environmental phenomena, crazy technology and the nastier side of human nature on their journey.

It's a commendable film that attempts to explore tricky, unanswerable questions earnestly. But in its quest to explore big-picture questions, Interstellar stumbles over itself. Some scenes miss the mark, and some characters are better drawn than others. Cooper is a quick-thinking badass with a big heart. Dr. Brand is hero material as well, a scientist with a cool head and dedication to her mission. Unfortunately, they both battle clunky dialogue and weird chemistry as much as any other obstacle. They fare light-years better than Dr. Romilly and Dr. Doyle, whom the script never really gives a chance to break out of the stock "brainy scientist" mold.

Interstellar doesn't go completely off the rails, but it did lose me a couple of times. It was never hard to understand the science or the technobabble, but on a couple of occasions, I didn't have the foggiest notion what the characters' motivations were. On more than one occasion, a major character's death was treated without the necessary gravity or breathing space. These are writing flaws — I didn't need Interstellar to explain the finer points of relativity to me, but I did need to care about these people and understand what they were doing. Referencing Dylan Thomas' immortal poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night more than three times doesn't count as smart, profound writing.

The actors do a fine job with their material, even if, in the case of Romilly and Doyle, they aren't given much to work with. Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain, as the younger and older Murph, respectively, bring the best performances of the film, and I constantly found myself wishing more of the movie focused more on Murph, the woman who has the gall and the faith to try to save earth from itself. The story indicates that Murph is an incredibly important character with a key role in the business of saving humanity, but Interstellar gives her far less screen time than her father.

What Interstellar gets right is an incredible sense of scale and awe. Space travel is treated like a dangerous but grand undertaking, and the final frontier is presented imaginatively. There were scenes in Interstellar that I watched on the edge of my seat, mouth agape, taking in the starry scenery. It's very well paced for such a long movie, with plenty of action and harrowing escapes that break up the more ponderous scenes.

The movie is smart in the way it presents a depressed, environmentally bankrupt earth. The world has turned into a literal dustbowl, conjuring strong associations with the great depression. Cooper's early battles with narrow-minded schoolteachers reflect much of what we deal with today, in an education system that often fails to serve its students, particularly in struggling communities.

There are not-so-subtle hints that human greed and climate change are the culprit — that humanity's folly creates the responsibility to do something to fix this mess. It works well, and further serves to underscore Murph's vital importance to the world of Interstellar .

This is a movie about big ideas, and it wants badly to also be a movie about small moments and family ties. It's flawed, certainly, but its vision is undeniably appealing and ultimately the film's saving grace. I will always prefer a movie (or game, or book) that overreaches with ambition and inspiration over a safer, more polished product. Interstellar is that movie, a little unsteady at the stick, but with bolder ideas than almost any other film in 2014.

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‘interstellar’: what the critics are saying.

Christopher Nolan's space-set epic stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Casey Affleck

By Ashley Lee

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Interstellar , out Wednesday in Imax and Friday nationwide, is the space-set epic that searches for a suitable home for humans in another dimension, yet is grounded in a story about love and family . Directed by Christopher Nolan , the super-secret drama stars  Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Ellen Burstyn , John Lithgow , Michael Caine , Casey Affleck , Wes Bentley and Mackenzie Foy .

Read more THR Cover: Interstellar’s’ Christopher Nolan, Stars Gather to Reveal Secrets of the Year’s Most Mysterious Film

See what top critics are saying about Interstellar :

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy  warns, “ 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. … 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. … 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.” Hans Zimmer ‘s compositions add up to an “often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.”

The theme of the parent-child bond “is overstressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s [Chastain] persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother [Affleck] remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.” Additionally, “what goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia [Hathaway], 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.”

See more ‘Interstellar’ Premiere: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Christopher Nolan Hit Hollywood

The New Yorker ‘s David Denby says the film “is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. … There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.” Visually, the film’s “basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. … But, over all, Interstellar , a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it.”

USA Today ‘s  Claudia Puig  gives the film three out of four stars. Among impressive special effects are “minimalist exchanges between McConaughey and Hathaway, whose chemistry as space-exploring partners is lacking. Hathaway’s character is not given much dimension. Other members of the space team are even less well-drawn, so it’s hard to care what befalls them.” Also, “what is meant as a climactic humanistic ending seems to tie things up far too neatly for a film about the complex messiness that comes with a world that has taken dramatic wrong turns.”

See more ‘Interstellar’: Inside THR’s Roundtable With Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey

Time ‘s  Richard Corliss  calls it “a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps. …  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.” In comparison to  Gravity , “ Sandra Bullock  and  George Clooney  gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.” Still, “McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero is notable.”

The Guardian ‘s Henry Barnes writes, “ Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. … It saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors — even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway — are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant.”

Email: [email protected] Twitter: @cashleelee

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Interstellar review – if it’s spectacle you want, this delivers

Despite a plot full of holes of various kinds, Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic remains enthralling and amazing

Christopher Nolan: the man who rebooted the blockbuster

T he title of Christopher Nolan’s behemoth space epic says it all – a grandiloquent declaration of scale that smacks simultaneously of ambition and hubris – like Titanic, both the ship and the film. The good news is that this flawed but frequently awe-inspiring movie about wormholes and black holes does not implode into a dark star of disappointment; if it’s spectacle you want, then Interstellar delivers, particularly when viewed in Nolan’s preferred 70mm Imax format.

Yet while the film’s massive gravitational pull guarantees astronomical box-office returns, fans of Nolan’s finest works ( Memento , The Prestige , Batman Begins , Inception ) will long for more narrative rigour as raw science, rich sentimentality and rank silliness battle for the heart and soul of this very personal project. As a diehard Nolanoid, I found myself largely enthralled, often amazed and occasionally aghast.

Seamlessly amalgamating his own semi-formed stories about space travel with a script that his brother Jonathan (“Jonah”) had been developing for Steven Spielberg, Nolan’s long-gestating magnum opus is a futuristic fable firmly rooted in the age-old traditions of sci-fi. We open in a dust-bowl dystopian future where blighted food supplies are dwindling and inhabitable Earth is dying. Harking back to Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie’s 1933 novel When Worlds Collide (a Depression-era text brought to the screen by producer George Pal in the 1950s), Nasa builds a “space ark” – a giant ship that will take mankind to a new home in the stars, provided the “problem of gravity” can be solved by avuncular Professor Brand (Michael Caine).

Meanwhile, Right Stuff -style pilot-turned-farmer Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) is prompted by ghostly forces to lead an exploratory mission through a wormhole beyond the rings of Saturn, abandoning his family in search of a future for all humanity. What follows is a dizzying mash-up of The Haunting , Slaughterhouse-Five , Silent Running , Event Horizon and the director’s cut of Aliens , with the inverted time shifts of Inception (an hour on a distant planet equals lost years back on Earth) thrown in for extra emotional heft.

While it’s temptingly easy to cite 2001 (anything invoking a dimensional “star gate” triggers rarely positive Kubrick comparisons), the movie that hangs over Interstellar like the dust cloud atmospherically engulfing its earthbound scenes is Contact , with which it shares much more than just leading man McConaughey. Adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan (with signature input from Interstellar ’s theoretical physicist Kip Thorne), Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 epic similarly centred on a daughter crying out to a lost father whose soul seems to abide somewhere across the universe.

In both movies, it is these daughters who detect the first stirrings of an “alien” encounter: Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) identifying recurrent sequences in the white noise of interstellar radiation in Contact ; Murph (very affectingly played in her younger years by Mackenzie Foy) spying morse code in poltergeist disturbances in Interstellar . From such discoveries are missions launched, voyaging across time and space at the apparent instruction of a superior intelligence offering cryptic hands across the universe.

Intergalactic portals are breached, timescales bifurcated, science and faith reconciled. Crucially, for all their astro-maths exposition, the constant in both stories is neither time, space, nor gravity, but love. More than once I was reminded of Contact ’s Ellie striking the outer limits of the universe and breathlessly declaring: “They should have sent a poet.” In dispatching Nolan beyond the stars, that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Despite the clunkiness of its dialogue (would an astronaut really need to have wormholes explained to him just as he approached one?) and ludicrousness of its plot (I can only accept the final 15 minutes if it’s all an illusion – which I suspect it isn’t), Interstellar is the work of someone who dreams with their eyes wide open. There is no one working in cinema today who has as much faith in the overwhelming power of the image as Nolan and who trusts their audience to be similarly awestruck. Like visionary film-maker Douglas Trumbull (who conjured 2001 ’s most memorable effects), Nolan’s primary register is light, and one can legitimately trace his love of celluloid back to the earliest experiments of Georges Méliès, who first used movies to send us on A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Watching Insterstellar , I felt connected to a century of mind-boggling spectacular cinema – to films such as The Ten Commandments , The Robe and Ben-Hur, which made you catch your breath at the sheer scope and intensity of the imagery. As Roy Batty says in Blade Runner : “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe...”

Whether such ocular delights are enough to assuage any anxieties about the plot remains a moot point. Critics and audiences turned their noses up at Transcendence , the directorial debut from Nolan’s long-time director of photography Wally Pfister (here replaced by keen-eyed Hoyte van Hoytema) which was sneeringly dismissed by many as “ Inception -lite”. Yet there is nothing in Pfister’s nostalgically ambitious directorial debut that is any more foolish than the heavily signposted twists and turns of Nolan’s latest.

Similarly, Gravity may have seemed philosophically flimsier, but it made more sense (and arguably pushed the visual effects envelope further) than Interstellar . Nolan’s regular composer Hans Zimmer has the measure of the madness, cooking up an eerie score that swerves from the creaky Goblin-esque horrors of mid-period Dario Argento to the imposing hallelujahs of what sounds like a massive church organ.

While the end result may not represent the pinnacle of Nolan’s extraordinary career, it nevertheless reaffirms him as cinema’s leading blockbuster auteur, a director who can stamp his singular vision on to every frame of a gargantuan team effort in the manner of Spielberg, Cameron and Kubrick. “Whose subconscious are we in?” asked Ellen Page in Inception . The answer here, as always, is unmistakably Nolan’s.

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'Interstellar' review

• By Josh Dzieza
• on October 27, 2014 12:07 pm
• @joshdzieza

From the opening scenes of sprawling cornfields accompanied by a revelrie-like brass note, it’s clear that Interstellar is working in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey . It has the grand scope of Kubrick’s classic, promising to take us from humanity’s past to its distant future, and proceeds with the same stately pace that encourages you to ponder the themes it offers along the way. It throws out plenty to think about — the nature of time and space, the place of humanity in the universe — but somewhat unexpectedly for this type of film, and for Christopher Nolan, whose work tends toward the cerebral, it explores these ideas in human terms. Interstellar is as interested in how general relativity would affect your family life, for example, as it is in the theory itself.

Before you proceed: this review has a few spoilers, but nothing beyond what you’d glean from the preview and the first ten minutes or so of film. Turn back now if you care about that sort of thing.

Directed by Christopher Nolan ( Memento , Inception , the most recent Batman trilogy) and written with his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan, Interstellar takes place in a near future that harkens back to the recent past — like the 1950s Midwest or maybe the Dust Bowl, but with laptops and drones. There’s very little exposition; through telling details and offhand comments, you get the sense that there’s been an environmental disaster followed by a famine, and that humanity has scaled back its ambitions to bare subsistence. People farm corn — the one crop left unravaged by blight — watch baseball games in half-empty stands, and flee towering haboob dust storms announced by air raid sirens.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a NASA pilot who has turned to farming — like everyone else at the time, an odd cut to faux-documentary footage informs us. He lives in a ramshackle house, complaining to his father (John Lithgow) about humanity’s diminished horizons and doting on his daughter Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy with a believably teenage mix of mischief and exasperation.

McConaughey eventually leaves Foy and Earth behind to scout out a new home for for the human race, but it’s their relationship that grounds the movie. As action-filled as Nolan’s films are, they can sometimes feel abstract, like symbolic sublimations of some offscreen mental trauma. So many of his characters get their motivation from some prior loss — the dead wives from Memento and Inception, the dead parents of Batman — that they then work through according to the game-like rules Nolan excels at, whether those rules are imposed by amnesia, consciousness, or a supervillain. But Foy is an actual character, not a cipher, and the relationship between her and McConaughey gives the film an emotional heft that Nolan’s other work sometimes lacks.

Interstellar features some of the most beautiful images of space I’ve seen on film. Space feels vast, with the spinning white vessel often relegated to a corner of the screen or lost against the rings of Saturn. The depiction of a wormhole accomplishes the seemingly impossible and makes, well, nothingness look dazzling, as light slides and warps around it like water off a bubble of oil. The black hole is even more amazing. Present throughout the movie, it’s in these lingering shots of a tiny spacecraft floating through the galaxy that the influence of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is most clearly felt.

Some of the most beautiful images of space I've seen on film

Not that it’s all languorous drifting through the galaxy. Nolan has a genius for landscape-scale action sequences, and the planets, with their alien weather and gravity, give him ample opportunity to stage them. The camera races and plunges and, especially in IMAX, creates classic theme-park pit-of-your-stomach thrills. There are gigantic waves, frozen clouds, and other dangers that feel threatening despite looking totally surreal.

The biggest danger the shuttle crew faces, however, is time. Time isn't just running out — it's compressing and stretching as they travel through space. The Nolans use relativity to create some original and urgent crises as the shuttle crew figures out how to best spend their shifting time. Time is a resource, like food or water, Hathaway warns. The time differential between the crew and those they left behind also gives rise to the movie’s most melancholy scenes. In this respect it feels less like Space Odyssey and more like Homer’s Odyssey , with McConaughey getting detained and delayed as time passes and things go wrong back home.

As in 2001 , things get trippy toward the end. Without revealing too much, I can say that after a series of mostly comprehensible events, it swerves into either deeply theoretical physics or sentimental spirituality. Possibly both. The shift is jarring, but also visually interesting enough that I mostly went with it.

There’s always the question with Nolan of what it all means. His movies tempt you to demand a thesis, partly because his characters always seem to be grasping for one. They talk almost aphoristically about the human condition, ghosts, time, evil, love, and other heavy but abstract things, and they quote Dylan Thomas a few too many times. Fortunately, McConaughey brings some wry levity to the role, as does the robot TARS, a toppling metal block with adjustable honesty and humor settings, voiced by Bill Irwin. Ultimately I took the grander bits of dialogue as thematic signposts, telling you to keep your head at the level of death and humanity and time but not meaning much in themselves.

Which is fine. The movie is most powerful when it’s at its least abstract — when it’s working through the messy decisions and sacrifices that actual interstellar travel would entail, finding dramatic potential in the laws of physics. Interstellar is sometimes confusing, melodramatic, and self-serious, but Nolan managed to make a space epic on a human scale.

Interstellar opens November 5th.

Interstellar Review

07 Nov 2014

166 minutes

Interstellar

Warning: this review contains mild spoilers

Christopher Nolan is a director whose name has, quite literally, become synonymous with realism. The Nolanisation of cinema, which made the gloomy streets of Gotham a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace, now grounds countless fancies within the mud of our reality. With Interstellar, arguably his first ‘true’ science-fiction project, Nolan inverts expectation once again, with a film rooted in the mundanity of maths homework but spliced with the fantastic.

Born a year after the Apollo landing, Nolan grew up in the aftermath of the space race, when young eyes still turned upwards in wonder. Decades later, with the Space Shuttle decommissioned and children staring blearily down at the glow of their smartphones, it’s his disappointment at NASA’s broken promise that forms the driving force behind Interstellar.

Opening, tellingly, on a dusty model of the shuttle Atlantis, the film’s near-future setting sees humanity starving, squalid and devoid of hope. Eking out an existence in a post-millennial Dust Bowl, Matthew McConaughey ’s Cooper and his two children — ten year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her older brother Tom (Timothée Chalamet) — lead a life of agrarian survivalism (while, hearteningly, still reading a great many books). But in Cooper we find a new man cut from old cloth: an all-American hero pulled straight from Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff. Played with a drawling, Texan swagger underpinned by startling emotional depth, he is Nolan’s most traditional lead to date, embodying the wide-eyed wonder of the director’s youth; a man for whom we are “explorers and pioneers, not caretakers”, who casts his lot among the stars as the human race’s last, best hope.

With the ailing Blue Planet left behind, Interstellar shifts smoothly into second gear. The black abyss rolls out like Magellan’s Pacific; an unknowable frontier, final in a way that Roddenberry’s never was. According to über-boffin co-producer Kip Thorne, the spherical wormhole (it’s three-dimensional, obviously) and the spinning event horizon of the film’s black hole (named Gargantua) are mathematically modelled and true to life. Sitting before a 100-foot screen, though, you won’t give a toss about equations because Nolan’s starscape is the most mesmerising visual of the year. Gargantua is as captivating as it is terrible: an undulating maelstrom of darkness and light. Like the Hubble telescope on an all-night bender, this is space imagined with a dizzying immensity that would make Georges Méliès lose his shit.

The planets themselves are no less spectacular. Let The Right One In cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (replacing Nolan regular Wally Pfister) captures the bleak expanse of southern Iceland as both a watery hell with thousand-foot waves and an icy expanse where even the clouds freeze solid. With more than an hour of footage shot in 70mm IMAX, you’ll want to park your arse in front of the biggest screen available to fully appreciate the spectacle.

In contrast to the grandeur of space, the ship itself is a scrapyard mutt. Modular and boxy, the Endurance looks like an A-Level CDT workshop, with no hint of aesthetic flourish or extraneous design. Ever the practical filmmaker, Nolan has constructed a functional, utilitarian vessel. Its robotic crew-members, TARS and CASE, are ’60s-inspired slabs of chrome; AI encased in LEGO bricks that twist and rearrange (manually operated by Bill Irwin — there’s no CG trickery here) to perform complex tasks with minimalist efficiency.

Beneath Interstellar’s flawless skin, the meat is bloodier and harder to chew. The science comes hard and fast, though Nolans Christopher and Jonah shore up the quantum mechanics with generous expository hand-holding. Astrophysics is the vehicle not the destination, however, and Interstellar’s gravitational centre is far more down to Earth. Embodied by Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (quoted in the film at several points), this is a defiant paean to the human spirit that first took man to the stars. But far more than Thomas’ villanelle, Interstellar scales the heights and plumbs the depths of humanity, pitting the selfish against the selfless, higher morality against survival instinct. As Cooper, scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway) and crew draw closer to their destination, complications require tough decisions; the sanctity of the mission wars with the hope of a return trip. That the undertaking isn’t quite as advertised doesn’t come as a shock, but the cruelty of the deception lands like a body blow. Nature isn’t evil, muses Brand (played with soulful nuance by Hathaway). The only evil in space is what we bring with us.

When Interstellar began life back in 2006, Steven Spielberg, not Nolan, was the man in the cockpit; a presence still felt in the relationship between Cooper and Murph. The betrayal of a child abandoned is potent from the outset but the guilt is magnified tenfold when the Endurance’s first stop, within the influence of the black hole, means that a few hours stranded planet-side result in two decades passing back on Earth. Cooper’s tortured face as he watches his family unspool through 20 years of unanswered video missives is agony, raw and unadorned. Beneath everything else, this is a story about a father and his daughter, the ten-year-old giving way to Jessica Chastain ’s adult in the blink of a tear-filled eye.

With the endless pints of physics chased by shots of moral philosophy, Interstellar can at times feel like a three-year undergraduate course crammed into a three-hour movie. Or, to put it another way, what dinner and a movie with Professor Brian Cox might feel like. The final act compounds the issue, descending into a morass of tesseracts, five-dimensional space and gravitational telephony. It’s a dizzying leap from the grounded to the brain-bending that will baffle as many viewers as it inspires. More than the monolithic robot and his sarcastic, HAL-nodding asides (“I’ll blow you out of the airlock!”), it’s the psychedelic, transcendental climax that feels most indebted to Kubrick’s 2001; something that will undoubtedly prompt some to accuse Nolan of disappearing up his own black hole.

Inception posed questions without clear answers. Interstellar provides all the answers — you just might not understand the question. This is Nolan at his highest-functioning but also his least accessible; a film that eschews conflict for exploration, action for meditation and reflection. This isn’t the outer to Inception’s inner space (his dreams-within-dreams are airy popcorn-fodder by comparison), but it does wear its smarts just as proudly. Yet for the first time, here Nolan opens his heart as well as his mind. Never a comfortably emotional filmmaker, here he demonstrates a depth of feeling not present in his earlier work. It’s no coincidence that the film’s shooting pseudonym was Flora’s Letter, after Nolan’s own daughter. Interstellar is a missive from father to child; a wish to re-instil the wonder of the heavens in a generation for whom the only space is cyber. Anchored in the bottomless depths of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking. And if the emotional core is clumsily articulated at times (Brand’s “love transcends space and time” monologue being the worst offender), it’s no less powerful for it.

As a light-year-spanning quest to save the human race, this is the director’s broadest canvas by far, but also his most intimate. And against the alien backdrop of black holes, wormholes and strange new worlds, Interstellar stands as Nolan’s most human film to date.

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What happened to post's version of the pop-tart: are country squares still sold today, the perfect way to make sicario 3 is sadly impossible now, interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling..

In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar , Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival. To that end, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed father of two, is now a farmer tasked with growing one of the planet's last remaining sustainable crops: corn. In a time when humankind has been asked to put aside personal desire in the interest of a greater good, Cooper has attempted to make peace with farm life, providing for his teenage children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), as well as his aging father-in-law (John Lithgow). Yet, even as conditions become increasingly dire on Earth, Cooper's thirst for scientific discovery remains.

However, when Cooper is reunited with an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), he is offered a new chance to fulfill an old ambition. Informed that the situation on Earth is much more serious than he previously knew, Cooper is asked to leave his family behind (in an increasingly dangerous world) and set out on an uncertain journey into space - to find humankind a new planet.

Director Christopher Nolan has built a career on cerebral storytelling - starting with his feature debut,  Following , in 1998. Since that time, the filmmaker has delivered one thought-provoking drama after another ( Insomnia , Memento ,  The Prestige , and Inception ) - while also setting a new bar for comic book adaptations with a contemplative three-film exploration of Batman (and his iconic villains). As a result, it should come as no surprise that Nolan's  Interstellar  offers another brainy (and visually arresting) moviegoing experience - one that will, very likely, appeal to his base (those who spent hours pouring over minute details in the director's prior works); however, it may not deliver the same casual appeal that made Inception  and The Dark Knight  cross-demographic hits.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling (or particularly memorable action). For a film that is rooted in the love between a father and his daughter, Interstellar  offers surprisingly cold (and often stiff) drama - albeit drama that is buoyed by high-minded science fiction scenarios and arresting visuals. Nolan relies heavily on lengthy scenes of surface-level exposition, where characters debate or outright explain complicated physics and philosophical ideas, to educate the audience and ruminate on humanity (both good and bad) in the face of death and destruction.

It's a smart foundation to juxtapose personal desire and our place in the larger universe - as well as evolved levels of understanding we have yet to achieve - but unlike Nolan's earlier works, the filmmaker's passion is most apparent in his science (based on the theories of physicist Kip Thorne) - rather than his characters. This isn't to say that Interstellar doesn't provide worthwhile drama, but there's a stark contrast between the lofty spacetime theories and the often melodramatic characters that populate the story.

Viewers who reveled in McConaughey's philosophical musings on  True Detective will find the actor treading similar territory as Cooper. McConaughey ensures his lead character is likable as well as relatable, and manages to keep exposition-heavy scenes engaging. Still, despite a 169 minute runtime, Interstellar never really develops its central heroes beyond anything but static outlines - and Cooper is no exception. Viewers will root for him, and come to understand what he cherishes and believes about humanity, but any major revelations come from what happens to him - not necessarily what he brings to the table or how he evolves through his experiences.

The same can be said with regard to the supporting cast. Everyone involved provides a quality turn in their respective roles, but they're shackled by straightforward arcs - limited exposition machines that add to the film's thematic commentary and/or advance the plot, but aren't particularly well-realized or as impactful as Nolan intends. To that end, in a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon, two of the most memorable characters are actually non-humans - quadrilateral-shaped robots, TARS and CASE, that aid the crew on their adventure (and inject much-needed humor into the proceedings).

Interstellar is also playing in IMAX theaters and the added charge is definitely recommended. Much of the film was shot with actual IMAX cameras and the filmmaker makes worthwhile use out of the increased screen space and immersive sound - especially when the crew visits alien worlds. IMAX won't be a must for all viewers, but given that the film's visuals (many of which relied on practical sets and effects) are one of Interstellar 's biggest selling points, moviegoers who are excited about Nolan's latest project shouldn't hesitate in purchasing a premium ticket.

Casual filmgoers who were wowed by the director's recent filmography may find that Interstellar  isn't as accessible as Nolan's prior blockbuster movies - and dedicates too much time unpacking dense scientific theories. Nevertheless, while the movie might not deliver as much action and humor as a typical Hollywood space adventure, the filmmaker succeeds in once again producing a thought-provoking piece of science fiction. For fans who genuinely enjoy cerebral films that require some interpretation, Interstellar  should offer a satisfying next installment in Nolan's well-respected career.

That said, for viewers who are simply looking to get lost in a thrilling adventure with memorable characters (from the director of Inception and The Dark Knight ), Interstellar  may not provide enough traditional entertainment value to balance out its brainy scientific theorizing. On many levels, it's a very good film, but  Interstellar  could leave certain moviegoers underwhelmed - and feeling as though they are three-dimensional beings grasping for straws in a five-dimensional movie experience.

_____________________________________________________________

Interstellar  runs 169 minutes and is Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Now playing in IMAX theaters with a full release Friday, November 7th.

Confused about Interstellar 's ending? Read our  Interstellar Ending & Space Travel Explained article.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our  Interstellar   Spoilers Discussion . For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our  Interstellar  episode  of the  Screen Rant Underground Podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick  to let me know what you thought of  Interstellar .

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• Movie Reviews
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'Interstellar' Review: Christopher Nolan's Latest Might Be Too Ambitious

There's no denying the visceral power and prowess of Christopher Nolan 's Intersellar . The ninth film from the popular director is his most ambitious, and it looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The sets, miniatures, and images of space travel and planets all combine to make a film the scope of which rivals any other space movie.

Emotionally, the film comes close to achieving a similarly momentous effect. Interstellar follows Coop ( Matthew McConaughey ), a father forced to leave his family in a possibly mad attempt to preserve the future of humanity by finding another habitable planet. The tale is filled with drama, humor, intense action and surprising plot twists. There's rarely a dull moment in the movie because the story is so compelling and poignant.

But maybe it's all a bit too much. The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, packs ideas and theories in every single scene. Concepts about love, survival, physics, and time burst from the film more prominently than the emotion and visuals. Even with a nearly three-hour runtime, so many ideas are presented that the film rarely has time to focus on one over another. The result is a technical marvel with a powerful narrative that ends up feeling a tad empty because we aren't sure exactly which point it's trying to make.

One of the best things about Interstellar is the manner in which it distinguishes itself from every other space movie. There's no big training sequence, the shuttle take off sequence is truncated, we don't get to space for 40 minutes of screen time. Right off the bat Nolan tells us we're going to see something different. Then once in space (which is where the majority of the movie takes place), everything gets bigger. He's not interested in our solar system. Nolan is interested in something far beyond it.

In the same way Intersellar attempts to stand out as a sci-fi film, it works to distinguish itself from a dramatic angle. On its own the story is direct, with good dramatic tension. Clear goals are presented, then attempted, and then either met or failed leading into the next scene. Anything you may think doesn't match up or feels superfluous eventually pays off in a pretty solid way. Sure there's a misstep here or there, but at its core, Interstellar is always interesting.

One of the biggest complaints in Nolan's earlier films is they rarely include rich female characters. This film has two of them, Coop's colleague Brand, played by Anne Hathaway , and the grown up version of his daughter Murph, played by Jessica Chastain . Each represents a step forward for Nolan as they're well-written and strong characters. Unfortunately, the relationships they develop are much weaker. The relationship between father and daughter Coop and Murph is a strained and incomplete one, but that's demanded by the narrative. Coop and Brand also have a bit of a budding connection which becomes increasingly important as the film goes along. However, it feels like an afterthought as it's casually dropped in with a few short lines of dialogue and then hardly developed.

Then, just when you start to scratch your head about Interstellar , it sucks you back in with its intense action scenes. They're few and far between but when they happen, you'll be glued to your seat. By taking his time to flesh out the story, Nolan earns lots of good will and you never quote know what's going to happen. There are at least two big turns later in the movie that really keep you on your toes and divert from some other issues.

Issues such as the fact he's provided so many different narrative strings and questions, he's forced into some convenient narrative choices near the conclusion. These pay off emotionally but when everything else in the film has been pushing toward unpredictability and originality, they're a little disappointing, albeit understandable.

McConaughey has a lot of heavy lifting to do in Interstellar and he does it well. Obviously he's dynamic, charming and confident, but the real surprise is how he hits all the big dramatic peaks and valleys. Hathaway is steadfast with her limited role and Chastain, in an even more limited role, makes Murph the real star of the movie. She's a force to be reckoned with, infusing multiple layers into the few scenes she has.

As Interstellar ends, there's no doubt you've been on a ride. A thoroughly enjoyable and memorable cinematic experience that's well-made and acted. On those notes, Nolan totally succeeds. Afterwards though, you'll be more inclined to talk about the actions scenes and narrative twists rather than the multitude of themes he's placed throughout the film. That's because it's just too much to talk about. What does love mean? How do we handle time? What does it mean to survive? Is it okay to offer hope when there is none? The film's questions are endless and overwhelming.

Which leads to one last question, do we care? That's a something you'll have to decide. Interstellar is a good film with big flaws that may or may not matter because everything around them is done so well.

/Film rating: 7.5 out 10

Interstellar

Review by brian eggert november 7, 2014.

Humanity has grown beyond its means. Centuries ago, the number of human beings on the planet reached into the millions. Now our numbers are approaching 7 billion and that number is expected to double, and then some, by the end of this century. How can Earth’s natural resources possibly keep up? Along with rampant reproduction, humans have explored the planet’s surface to its limits. After conquering the Western frontier, few places on Earth remain unexplored. And with the decline of manned missions into space, our ever-growing species has become stagnant, growing outward, on top of ourselves, and apathetic; whereas humanity is often at its best and most ambitious when it’s exploring. Human beings are curious creatures, and when we stop exploring, we stop developing as a species. And yet, a final frontier—which, in itself, is endless—awaits out in the stars. This could not only provide a solution to overpopulation and dwindling natural resources, but also to humanity’s desperate need to continue growing, both in terms of pure numbers and also in sociological progress. Deep space missions may seem like science-fiction at present, but so was landing on the Moon in 1961 when JFK announced a space race.

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar brings us one very necessary, yearning step closer to a realistic vision of a manned space flight into deep space, just as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey did for a Moon landing and beyond in 1968. Long in development with Steven Spielberg at the helm, the film is the dreamchild of producer Lynda Obst and her scientific collaborator on Contact (1997), theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Johnathan Nolan wrote the script’s first draft for Spielberg and, after studio shuffling caused Spielberg to drop out, the writer’s brother took over the $165 million co-production—an unheard of partnership between Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures. Director Nolan retooled his brother’s screenplay to meet his own needs for emotional urgency and approached the production like an event, his unique brand of secrecy jealously guarding its many secrets. Even its distribution is epic; his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot in anamorphic 35mm and IMAX photography, and a special 35mm roadshow print screened at select theaters. But more significant is how Nolan’s film calls to humanity and asks, What comes next for the human race, apathy or action?

When Cooper and Murph follow where the code leads, they find a secret NASA installation where Professor Brand (Michael Caine) makes plans to find another planet for earthlings to colonize. A wormhole discovered near Saturn, seemingly put there by design by an alien race, offers a gateway to another system where three habitable planets could provide a potential new home for humans. Other one-man astronaut probes have already gone through to explore potential homeworlds. Now Brand wants Cooper to pilot a larger mission to confirm their findings, which means he must leave his family behind. The parting is worse for Murph, who refuses to speak to her father since he doesn’t know if or when he’ll return. But Cooper is an explorer at heart and knows humanity is never better than when it’s out there discovering: “We’ve forgotten who we are,” he says at one point. “Explorers, pioneers. Not caretakers.” His crew of astronauts on the Endurance mission—Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romilly (David Gyasi), Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), and blocky interactive robot TARS (Bill Irwin)—believe in their years-long mission through shifting space-time and know the possibility that, by the time they return, everyone they know on Earth may be dead. Worse, they may get back too late to save anyone .

What follows is not only an exploration of three planets—each near a black hole named Gargantua—that may contain elements to sustain the future of the human race, but also a deeply emotional, philosophical, and scientific consideration of several lasting science-fiction themes. It’s all presented in a near-three-hour epic that, like Nolan’s entire Dark Knight trilogy or Inception , delivers a fully developed concept that uses every component in its complex narrative structure, and finally wraps around in a Mobius strip. At the forefront of Cooper’s story is his pain over leaving his children; through transmissions received over the mission’s years, he watches Murph and Tom grow older (now played by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck). From this, the film weighs our individual needs against the needs of the many. Should the mission be Prof. Brand’s Plan A, to somehow transport the Earth’s population to a new planet, or his Plan B, to establish a new colony and forget about finding passage for Earth’s doomed inhabitants? But Insterstellar also plunges into the fascinating plot device of relativity, where shifts in gravity slow the passage of time, not unlike the various levels of dream-reality in Inception .

Nolan’s visionary approach reaches every aspect of his production, supporting the narrative’s severity and importance. The spatial effects inspire awe, recalling Douglas Trumbull’s work on The Tree of Life (2011). Hans Zimmer’s organ score imbues the film with a cathedral-grade gravitas, reverberating through the picture like Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra from 2001: A Space Odyssey . Other details, such as how Nolan avoids using sound in space exterior scenes (where sound cannot occur anyway), implant sometimes beautiful and sometimes haunting visuals into our heads. However, Nolan’s most valuable component is McConaughey. The actor’s soulful turn searches for meaning and weighs the film’s arguments between devoted familial bonds and the advancement of the species. His breakdowns instill infectious tears and perpetuate the film’s emotional core. Hathaway, Chastain, Affleck, and Caine are all excellent. Though, particular attention should be paid to Matt Damon, who appears later on as this film’s narrative equivalent of HAL-9000, charming and so focused on the mission that he terrifies.

Rarely do epics of this scope and intelligence reach theaters anymore; such serious commercial filmmaking seems like a market almost exclusively maintained by Christopher Nolan. His primary inspiration is Kubrick, more specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey , both of which have an undoubted influence on the Nolans, their story structure, and their intended impact on the future of space exploration. For this, Interstellar is not just an engrossing, blockbuster-sized, artfully made, thinking-person’s picture; it’s also a landmark that calls for humanity to stop seeing themselves as earthlings and begin to envision themselves as citizens of the universe. (Cooper’s lines “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here,” resonates.) This outlook, along with the film’s university-level descriptions of intergalactic wonders, may divorce some lesser-versed viewers from the material. But Nolan has never been about catering to the lowest common denominator; quite the opposite. And so, his picture is a resounding challenge that poses questions human beings either don’t ask enough or have stopped asking altogether. Interstellar shows us that the answers reside in the stars.

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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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17 comments

First off, this is a sham. Interstellar cannot be explained. Ranks up there with Unicorns and Rainbows. And the ‘cringeworthy’ dialogue that was mentioned I find needful and required, given the scenario, but that might be me. And thousands of others who quote that line on a daily basis. Lastly, it’s a movie, not real life. Just enjoy it. Sheesh.

How do you explain Copper ending up in the Cooper land and everyone inhabiting the new planet? Not clear from the explanation.

Really the movie is very interesting,give us the opportunity to think more deeply the universe system is working beyond the the formality of something we called past.

I agree, makes you think and we do not know much about the universe.

It’s so much deeper than that.

It would have been a great movie if Brand (Anne Hathaway) character wouldn't have turned it into a soap opera with her dialogue on "feelings beats science" bullshit. Feelings don't belong in science and distort the reality, just look at how many people react illogically during this pandemic. You don't prove anything based on feelings in science, otherwise you turn it into something else: Religion.

Great visuals and well acted but the plot is way more complicated than it needed to be and I don't think the movie excels at helping you follow it. I had to read a good synopsis afterwards and I was left shaking my head. IMO, the plot could have been simplified while still maintaining the same effect.

Who’s to say feelings can’t be based on science.

it was the soundtrack that led me to the movie. I have never seen such a science fiction that provokes emotion while simultaneously, telling a story about traversing the stars using astronomical science. I was emotional, not because I wanted to watch an emotional movie, but because I felt I could grasp the message which is a thin line between astronomical science and intimate human connection.

Florin, Being that space travel does and will rely on humans for the foreseeable future, there was great reason to include human emotions and responses in the name of love in the movie. No matter how much technology is used, you can’t take out the human element. Yeah, I agree maybe they overdid it a bit, and Edmund was a bit of a tangent but feelings had an undeniable effect on the endurance’s mission.

good summary

Tq for good review

i loved this film. i streamed it two nights in a row.. I am a little familiar with physics, and that definitely helped. but the gravity question (which they do solve by sending a probe over the event horizon and then relay the data back to earth, and via Dad, into her watch) was fascinating and also a great sequencing of an impossible riddle. The story lines were great as was the time/ merge with both events climaxing almost together. the space shots and the black hole — wow!!

Incredibly thought provoking, and although most tend to not understand, the plot fillers while Cooper was within the fifth dimension gave such an emotional thrill ride. After crossing the event horizon, the scientific element isn't meant to be understood, because we aren't able to convey the unexplainable. But incorporating the fifth dimension to transmit a message, along with making it "home" to see his daughter before she died brought the emotional climax that was needed for a satisfying ending to this story. Now it's time for me to find part II.

I found it just as the engine of 2001

I think we can all agree that the movie was profound enough that it got you all into a conversation.

This article had interesting analysis and helpful explanation of wormhole vs blackhole. One problem is that the name Romilly is thrown into paragraph with zero previous explanation as to who this character is. Same thing with Miller. You write they decide to "scout" out Miller's planet. Who is that? Zero prior explanation.

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Review: Interstellar

Set in the near future,  Interstellar  predicts the effects of humankind’s rapacious materialism: raging dust storms tear through the land, crop yields are an annual disappointment, and the earth is no longer capable of sustaining its six billion inhabitants. Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, a former NASA astronaut turned corn farmer and inspirational father to Murph (Mackenzie Foy, later Jessica Chastain) and Tom (Timothée Chalamet, later Casey Affleck). Cooper wants his children to be inquisitive and ambitious, despite being part of a ‘caretaker generation’, burdened with the responsibility of finding a new home for mankind but destined never to reap a reward for their efforts.

The relationship between Murph and Cooper has an endearing spark to it, cruelly snuffed out by a script more interested in flashy sci-fi set pieces. Mackenzie Foy puts in the film’s most moving, appealing performance as the young Murph – smart, loving and pathologically curious – though this is sadly not sustained after Murph grows into Jessica Chastain. Cooper’s scientific, logical outlook on life is challenged by Murph’s conviction that there is a ghost in her room: a ghost that can communicate by manipulating dust into binary code.

The code leads Murph and Cooper to a top-secret NASA base, where final preparations are underway for a spacecraft mission to find a planet for human habitation, led by Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and her father (Michael Caine). One of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe is why every Nolan film must involve Michael Caine in the role of a wise-cracking older man who’s good with technology; the warm charm he effused as Alfred in the latest Batman reboot has utterly dissipated. He now plays himself with a total lack of enthusiasm. Nonetheless, Cooper is excited by the project, and agrees to take a leading role.

This is a film on a huge scale, boasting a budget of $165 million. Until now, the real appeal of Christopher Nolan as a director has been his outstanding track record of making blockbusters with brains – 2010’s  Inception  being the perfect example.

His are films that deserve, and bountifully reward, repeat viewings; that ask for a level of engagement most big-budget directors are not brave enough to demand.

Yet in the case of  Interstellar , something has gone badly wrong. It is a real mess of a film, and tragically seems to suggest that Nolan has got too big for his boots, has gone too far.

The scientific accuracy (or not) of the concepts Nolan explores, so lambasted by the scientific community on Twitter, are ultimately irrelevant, and are frankly the least of the film’s problems. The plain weirdness of Stanley Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey , to which  Interstellar  owes a colossal debt, works precisely because it refuses to give any sort of rational, coherent explanation for its haunting strangeness. Here, a painfully contrived effort to pull a series of dubious scientific strands together results in an utterly unsatisfying and laughable end, with the only mystery being how Nolan could permit such a narrative travesty.

Of course, it might be that once this comes out on DVD, all the naysayers will be proved wrong, as the benefits of being able to pause, rewind and over-analyse are felt. There are countless videos and articles online trying to decode Nolan’s previous work; some cogently, others through the exaggeration of insignificant detail. But even if a whole network of deeper meaning exists beneath  Interstellar ’s surface – doubtful, but just possible – will it ever properly excuse a first viewing experience that is so unsatisfying?

In any case, the script is alarmingly clunky, particularly in the first half of the film, where exposition is clumsily and unconvincingly shoehorned into the dialogue. Anne Hathaway’s character, Dr Amelia Brand, is riddled with issues: as the only female member of the exploration team she is seen to prioritise emotional attachment over rationality at key junctures, before making a near-parodic speech about how ‘love’ might just be the one thing that really can transcend space and time, or something. It’s staggering that such a lazily drawn character could be tolerated by a director otherwise so meticulous and intelligent in his film making.

The dialogue that’s there is hammy, but, more frustratingly, some dialogue is lost altogether, swamped by a badly mixed soundtrack that seems to have prioritised subwoofer rumblings over the delicacies of dialogue, making the lines of  Jamaica Inn  seem crystal clear and beautifully enunciated in comparison. From a hurried and utterly unscientific google of ‘Interstellar sound problems’, I’m reassured this isn’t anything to do with the particular screening I was in.

Despite these irritations, it doesn’t feel like a 3 hour film; its totally unpredictable narrative at least make the time tick along nicely, or maybe ‘that’s relativity folks’ as one of the shuttle crew cheerfully puts it. The cinematography is unquestionably stunning, and provides enough distraction to maintain interest, but Nolan fans will be disappointed.

This doesn’t reach anywhere near the magical heights of  The Prestige ; the precision of execution that we’ve come to expect from Nolan is nowhere to be seen.

When dead-ends are reached, the film simply heads straight through a narrative wormhole, always conveniently emerging at a point where all is resolved and the next chapter can begin.

There are brief flashes of the better film that  Interstellar  could have been. The examination of the father-daughter relationship between Murph and Cooper has moments of emotional subtlety and tenderness.  Their separation, in both space and time, provokes interesting questions about what exactly constitutes the parent-child bond, and makes for some of the most moving sequences in the film. Matthew McConaughey is solid enough as Cooper; both he and his character are given the seemingly impossible task of holding their own whilst everything around them descends into chaos.

If there’s one silver lining though, it’s the thought that in future Nolan will have go to back to the intricate, self-contained beauty of his earlier work.

After all, where can he go from here? He’s simply tried to do too much, even within the scope of three hours.

To give  Interstellar  the benefit of the doubt, as a number of critics have been tempted to do, is to utterly undervalue the cinema-going experience: the idea that the messy, incoherent plotline somehow cleverly evokes the thrilling sensation of a journey into the unknown smacks of a desperation to incorporate this bum-note into Nolan’s otherwise celebrated oeuvre.

Instead we should just admit that, this time, Nolan has failed. Films that earn a repeat viewing usually provide a renewed sense of wonder on each revisiting, but those that seem to demand it through an arrogant faith in their director’s legacy are in danger of leaving everyone disappointed.

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Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, floats in space in "Interstellar." (Paramount)

Arts and Entertainment

Review: human nature vs. moral obligations in ‘interstellar’.

A train is speeding down the railway; shortly ahead there is a split in its tracks, and the direction that the vehicle will continue is determined by a lever on the side of the road. On the main track where the train is currently traveling stands five people, all of whom are oblivious to the impending danger. However, one person also stands on the opposite split of the track. The train will either kill the group of people or the lone person. What would be the right choice to make?

This classic ethics experiment, known as the Trolley Dilemma, drives people to introspect about their moral values and weigh the consequences of their actions. Killing the single person certainly bears a lighter loss quantitatively, but what if it is a loved one who is standing on that end? Would the choice be as easy as “thinking about the collective over the individual?” Interestingly, Christopher Nolan presents a difficult choice similar to the Trolley Dilemma in his film “Interstellar.”

The story of “Interstellar” revolves around a major conflict that multiple characters in the story encounter, and the audience can’t help but chime in this deliberation: the choice between ensuring a possible future for humanity or giving in to human instincts. The film portrays Earth as a dying planet riddled with constant sand storms, infertile soil, and most crops unable to survive under such harsh environmental conditions.

Since Earth is uninhabitable, humans need to find a new place with adequate living conditions for survival. The main protagonist Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is burdened with the mission to pilot a spaceship along with his team in search of a suitable planet, while scientists remaining on the ground resolve the evacuation method from Earth.

As their “Plan B,” Cooper’s team carries samples of human genomes to ensure human civilization survival in case the attempt to transport people from Earth fails. However, when the team later discovers that the Earth evacuation plan was a scam because it was almost impossible (unless with quantum data) to begin with, the story presents a difficult ethical question: would it be a better option to ensure the future of human civilization or consider loved ones back home?

“Interstellar” embodies trademarks that Nolan implements in his works — exceptional cinematography, dramatic orchestral music, and exciting sci-fi action — these factors ultimately contribute to themes of human nature and the balance of moral obligations, with different approaches presented through key characters that deeply resonate with the audience.

Dr. Brand: Future over Present

John Band, played by Michael Cane, before he speaks his final words in “Interstellar.” (Paramount)

Non-Linear Storytelling

When the characters discover that Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), the scientist who worked on a method to transport people out of Earth, tricked Cooper and his crew to leave the planet because his plan failed, the shock introduces the moral conflict of choosing between future and family. Nolan intensifies the weight of such a decision through his iconic style of non-linear storytelling. Dr. Brand concludes long before Cooper’s mission that there is no way to propel human settlements into space, but Nolan chose to reveal this crucial information in the middle of the film. This non-linear plot structure allows Nolan to control the flow of what is given to the audience, thus emphasizing its weight. In the case of “Interstellar,” the audience knows about this news simultaneously as the other characters, relating themselves with the story. Was Dr. Brand right in making this choice? In this matter of life and death, who can decide which is the better option?

Background music

Music also dramatizes this epiphany. At the crucial scene when Dr. Brand admits to Cooper’s daughter Murph, who remained on Earth to work on propelling settlements, that he has lied, a haunting soundtrack creeps in the background. Nolan is known for utilizing powerful tones in his works, and this film is not an exception. As Brand gradually arrives to tell his secret, the music crescendos in accompaniment and the audience’s surprise rises as well. Along with the shock comes hopelessness, and everyone is driven to consider whether Dr. Brand’s actions are justified. Between people on Earth and the future of humans, he chose the latter and risked keeping an enormous lie until his last breath. He sacrifices his humanity for our species’ civilization, and with Nolan’s signature film techniques, a heavy moral conflict that resonates in viewers emerges because of this character.

The disguised selfish nature

Dr. Hugh Mann, played by Matt Damon, reveals his true hugh-mann nature. (Paramount)

Storytelling structure

Contrary to Dr. Brand, another character in the story chooses his innate survival instincts over the future of humanity. Mann (Matt Damon) is a member from a previous mission that searched for habitable settlements in outer space; each explorer is assigned a planet and has to remain there for the rest of his/her life. Mann’s planet is uninhabitable, but he chose to stay in a sleep chamber and continue sending out live signals so rescue may come in later years. When Cooper’s team arrives, he tells them that his planet is habitable to ease their wariness, then attempts to kill Cooper in order to take off in their spaceship alone. However, Nolan chooses to reveal Mann’s true intentions at the very last second, again displaying his use of non-linear storytelling. This is also a plot twist that Nolan designs to give the audience more surprises and allow Mann’s actions to resonate with more emphasis. As Mann is about to push Cooper down a snowy cliff, eerie music crescendos again in the background, hinting at the sudden twist of events.

The indications made by cinematography

Nolan’s camera shots in this scene also demonstrate the danger of human nature. In one clip, Mann and Cooper fight desperately while the view gradually takes in more of their foreign and desolate surroundings, showing that wherever people end up in this universe, human nature will always drive them to be in conflict with each other. Although many may think that Mann is selfish because he is inconsiderate about the collective, it is also understandable that the desire to live is genetically rooted in human nature. It is easy to blame him for almost ruining the mission to save humanity, but at the same time, no one wants to die alone on an icy, uninhabitable planet that is light-years away from Earth. Unlike Dr. Brand, Mann chose himself over the collective; he is the other end of the moral spectrum, the side that is often viewed as pusillanimous and reveals another facet of human nature.

Cooper’s struggles between time and survival

Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, inside a spacecraft in “Interstellar.” (Paramount)

Example of excellent cinematography

On the other hand, Cooper’s situation is much more complex than those of Brand and Mann. He is torn between going to the mission and staying with his family, whom he cares bout deeply; he ultimately took part in this expedition as he saw the natural deterioration directly impacting his family’s safety. His emotional connection with them runs throughout the film, and the excellent cinematography reinforces this theme. One exceptional scene that stirs thought is when Cooper returns from Miller’s planet and 23 years have passed on Earth. Video logs have piled up, and the camera focuses on Cooper’s reaction as he watches his children grow up. The light from the videos flickers on his face; he smiles, sometimes laughs, but there is also pain that shines through his eyes, unspoken sadness that he wasn’t there to accompany them. He later bursts into tears in the scene as the melancholy music slowly fades into only raw audio of Cooper’s muffled sobs.

Cooper’s sacrifice 

Matthew McConaughey’s acting, complemented by the music and lighting, is a masterpiece that instantly stirs emotion. It provokes thoughts about the most painful way that people realize the value of something only after it’s gone. In this case, Cooper lost years of time with his family and still doesn’t know how much longer he would wait before seeing them again. It is a great sacrifice for Cooper to leave the ones that he loves deeply and pursue a mission into the unknown, which extends his heroism. His story is filled with bittersweet feelings, and it drives the audience to realize the importance of cherishing the times when the presence of loved ones is still the normality.

The famous saying goes, “children are the future of the world,” and “Interstellar” instigated my realization of the immense responsibility my generation carries. As the climate change crisis exacerbates and the United Nations releases a “code red for humanity,” I can’t help but wonder if the scenes in the movie will become an inevitable reality. From a teenager’s perspective, this movie’s sci-fi fantasy and twisted plots make it an extremely thrilling, captivating adventure; however, I also cannot help but wonder what tomorrow will behold for upcoming generations on Earth. What if we are required to choose between choices similar to what is given to Dr. Brand, Mann, and Cooper?

“Interstellar” opened my eyes to the facets of morals and humanity. We can be people like Brand who are willing to lie to provide a future for our civilization, but we can also be Mann who gives in to their survival instincts. Maybe we fall into the same situation as Cooper, who chose to act courageously for the security of his family. This movie has taught me how complex human nature can be, but it also gives me hope that love can push us to exceed our potential and reach the impossible.

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How Well Do You Remember Interstellar Movie?

Interstellar is one of the best brain-twister movies ever made by Christopher Nolan. If you have watched it, check out this Interstellar movie quiz and check how well you still remember the movie's plots and characters. We bet only a true fan would ace this quiz. The movie follows the story of ex-NASA pilot Joseph Cooper who must leave his family and Earth to find a new planet for humans. It's time to check your knowledge about the Interstellar movie.

When was the movie released?

November 7, 2014

March 8, 2015

November 7, 2016

July 19, 2017

Rate this question:

What is Joseph Cooper forced to do after the global famine?

Which actor plays the role of joseph cooper.

Jonathan Nolan

Christopher Nolan

Matthew McConaughey

Leonardo DiCaprio

Who proposed a slingshot move in the movie?

All of the above

The name of Joseph's daughter is

He doesn't have a son.

Which planet is near the wormhole in Interstellar?

Who is actually the ghost in interstellar.

It's not mentioned in the movie.

What is the genre of the movie?

Who solves the gravity equation and helps humanity escape the earth in the movie, who tries to hijack the endurance spaceship in the movie.

Professor Brand

NASA explorer, Mann

NASA scientist, Dr. Amelia Brand

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INTERSTELLAR

"an epic voyage with some faulty worldview notions".

What You Need To Know:

(Pa, HH, BB, CC, Ro, FR, PP, Cap, AC, LL, VV, A, M) Light mixed pagan worldview with strong humanist elements (especially at the end), but with characters exhibiting strong moral, redemptive values of courage, sacrifice, love, forgiveness, and reconciliation along with positive references to prayer and to some Biblical figures, including one character even says he was raised from the dead by his rescuers, with light Romantic elements and minor influences of pantheism, plus strong Pro-American, somewhat capitalist theme of innovation and pioneering with some statements that go against leftist politically correctness; 16 obscenities (including one “f” word) and five profanities (including a few uses involving name of Jesus); strong, intense action sequences in space, on planets with dangerous ecological elements, explosions, one character attempts to kill another man by throwing him off a cliff but fails, another man is punched, dead body floats in water; no sexual content, just one kiss; no nudity; light drinking; no smoking or drugs; and, a character tells a major lie that puts others in danger but this is rebuked and another character starts destroying someone else’s crops.

More Detail:

INTERSTELLAR is a riveting science fiction adventure from Director/Writer Christopher Nolan (THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, INCEPTION). INTERSTELLAR has some strong moral, redemptive values and messages within its characters, including Christian references, but there are some significant worldview problems, especially towards the end.

Set sometime in the future, Earth has been devastated. Plagued by dust storms that has wrecked the agriculture and clearly have killed the majority of Earth’s population.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former pilot, grows corn on his farm, one of the last food sources they are able to grow. A widower, Cooper has a deep bond with his young son and daughter, Tom and Murph. Tom wants to pursue farming and Murph, a daughter after Cooper’s own heart, is more of a problem solver with an interest in science.

A series of random events that are unexplainable by science seem to be pointing Cooper to an undisclosed location, as if someone, or something, is drawing him there. Cooper investigates with his daughter Murph and discovers a secret NASA facility led by Cooper’s former mentor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine). Brand explains to Cooper that earth is deteriorating and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. If they don’t leave earth, the next generation will be the last.

NASA has found a wormhole outside of Saturn they believe can connect regions of spacetime that have been separated. If entered, the wormhole will allow humans to travel to distant galaxies with possible habitable planets. Since Cooper showed up on their doorstep right in the nick of time, Brand asks him to pilot the spaceship that will hopefully find their new home.

Knowing that if the mission fails, the human race will die, Cooper agrees to undertake the mission. Not being able to guarantee if or when he’ll return, Cooper leaves Tom and Murph in the hands of his father-in-law. Murph is devastated and furious at her father for leaving and refuses to say goodbye.

Along with fellow scientist and the Professor’s own daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), and two other scientists, Cooper launches a spacecraft into space to explore the unknown. Cooper is resolved not only to keep his promise to return to his children, but to provide them and future generations a habitable home. Cooper’s journey to unknown regions of the universe, traveling between space and time, pushes him against impossible odds in unimaginable circumstances.

INTERSTELLAR is a cinematic experience that is deeply contemplative. The movie takes time to develop and has a few odd editing choices with jump cuts, but it’s mostly a thrilling immersive adventure, both emotionally and visually. Grounded in reality, INTERSTELLAR does its best to use real science, though much of it is theoretical. Even the devastation of earth is borrowed from past disasters such as the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. The reason for Earth’s deterioration is mostly ambiguous, however. Also, the movie implies that the planet’s eventual un-habitability is inevitable and perhaps even designed.

The movie’s epic vastness puts the story firmly into the science fiction genre. That said, at its core, INTERSTELLAR is a family drama about a father who desperately misses and loves his daughter, and a daughter who’s unable to forgive her father. The incredible visual aspect to the story will awe audiences, but the intense, powerful human story will move and inspire them. Strong performances by Matthew McConaughey and Mackenzie Foy as Murph, when she’s young, ground viewers in the story. The conflict and tension is extremely high and the odds seem impossible, keeping this story extremely entertaining.

It’s also worth recognizing the craftsmanship in which Nolan creates his sets and visuals and chooses to use practical visual effects rather than computer generated images. The gorgeous canvases of both space and earth as experienced in IMAX 70mm is a museum of rich images added by a majestic score provided by the great Hans Zimmer.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW) To really examine INTERSTELLAR’s worldview content requires some spoilers. First, its characters at the beginning are guided by an outer force that they refer to as “they” or “them.” Whether it be other human beings, aliens or supernatural, they don’t know, but they follow it anyways. Without giving too much away, it’s ultimately discovered that man, through the determination of the human spirit, is the sole responsible agent for his future existence. Mankind, interconnected, more biologically than spiritually, looks out for its own existence, because we’re survivors. This “oneness” idea isn’t thoroughly pursued in the movie, but its presence is borrowed from pantheistic ideas.

The worldview is primarily humanist existentialism, especially at the end, but it’s not the only worldview represented. The outlook provided by the characters is extremely positive and optimistic, truly believing, not only in meaning and purpose, but also in hope. Even some Romanticism is pursued, as when Amelia Brand says, “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” Though romantic love is briefly touched upon when Amelia desires to follow her heart, Cooper exhibits a redemptive, moral kind of love guided by a love for his family that is much more grounded.

Happily, INSTERSTELLAR has some strong moral, redemptive values and messages within its characters, including Christian references. Cooper is a good father, forced to make an impossible decision to leave his family so he can save them. Throughout the movie, he pursues moral choices and fights to protect others. Additionally, there are messages of forgiveness, courage, reconciliation, love, and selflessness. A former mission is named after the Bible figure Lazarus, and one character from this mission even says his rescuers raised him from the dead.

The main message in INTERSTELLAR lies in its point that mankind should pursue space travel, because creative human beings are explorers and innovators. This spirit of pioneering is even patriotic, and it’s this mindset that pushed America to become what it is, a leading nation. Engrained in the movie is a theme of innovation, entrepreneurship and visionary creativity for the betterment of man. There’s even an anti-politically correct moment when Cooper confronts the government school for trying to brainwash his children into believing that the Apollo missions were faked.

The worldview is mixed, because clearly, the filmmakers are asking a lot of questions, but are finding the answers in various worldviews and ideas. Sadly, none of the worldviews pursued, other than the Biblical worldview, gives a holistic perspective and blueprint of life. The Bible answers all of the questions INTERSTELLAR raises. For example:

There is indeed hope for mankind: Jesus Christ.

We do all have a commonality: We are made in the image of God.

Love indeed transcends space and time: Not human love, but God’s brand of love (see 1 Corinthians 13:1 through 14:1).

The plot even makes it clear that man needs interceding and help, something that’s entirely Biblical, but the intercession made in the movie isn’t what humanity really needs. Ironically, the answer they give actually results in the main plot hole of the movie and its theoretical time travel idea. If the filmmakers had followed a Biblical worldview more closely, they would have resolved this problem.

There is very little violence in INTERSTELLAR, but the action sequences are still intense. A strong caution is advised for brief strong foul language and a mixed worldview that’s ultimately influenced by humanist existentialism, but with strong moral, redemptive values engrained in the characters. INTERSTELLAR is a very enjoyable movie and is definitely bound to be a conversation starter.

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