Interstellar

“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” Those words, spoken by the protagonist of the American science-fiction drama Interstellar (2014), effectively serve as the film’s mission statement. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Interstellar follows the heroic attempt by a group of scientists and astronauts to save the human species from going extinct on a dying Earth by finding a habitable planet in the far cosmos. It also is a tear-jerking melodrama that explores how despair and resignation can be overcome by passion and love. The film opened to critical and box office success and has been hailed as a modern classic in the tradition of such great Hollywood space epics as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83).

Production and scientific background

The idea for what became Interstellar originated with an eight-page film treatment created in 2006 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne and film producer Lynda Obst. The pair wanted to create a narrative that exploited the dramatic potential of the scientific concepts that Thorne had studied in his career. These included gravity waves, black holes and how they warp the space-time continuum, and, especially, wormholes, which link moments in time and locations in space and therefore, in theory, could facilitate time travel. Though the final script, with its story rewritten first by Jonathan Nolan and then by his brother Christopher Nolan, barely resembled the original treatment, Thorne and Obst remained involved as scientific consultants and executive producers. Thorne’s role, as he explained to The New York Times, was to keep the film’s science plausible enough as to be “something serious physicists would at least discuss over beer.” He published the book The Science of Interstellar (2014) to expand on the theoretical physics that inspired the film.

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Jonathan Nolan initially pitched the idea for Interstellar to director Steven Spielberg, and the two worked together on the project for about three years. Spielberg exited in 2010, and Nolan then brought in his brother Christopher to direct. The pair had previously collaborated on Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). “I’d been hearing about [Interstellar] over the four years [Jonathan] worked on it,” Christopher Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I really felt that there was an extraordinary opportunity there…So when I had the chance to get involved, I wanted to jump on it.”

Plot

Interstellar begins sometime in the 21st century in a United States that is beset by constant windstorms reminiscent of those that caused the 1930s Dust Bowl. Many of the staple foods grown by humanity have been wiped out by blight, and corn is one of the only crops to still grow successfully. Among the dwindling populace, many people blame the fallen state of the world on what they see as the technological hubris of the 20th century—exemplified by the Apollo space program, the space race, and the creation of nuclear weapons. As such they shun technological advancement and focus on living off the land.

It is in this world that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed former NASA pilot, tends his corn farm alongside his two children, Murph (played as a child by Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothée Chalamet in one of his first prominent film roles), and father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow). Cooper laments that humanity has lost its ambition and confidence, saying, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

The precocious Murph begins observing unusual events, such as books falling off her shelf in apparent patterns, and insists that they are coded messages from a “ghost.” Cooper realizes that the pattern is being created by gravitational disturbances and that it contains, in binary code, latitude and longitude coordinates for a specific location. He and Murph drive to the spot and discover that NASA still exists and is operating in a secret compound there.

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A NASA scientist, John Brand (Michael Caine), explains that blight will soon wipe out corn crops and lower the planet’s oxygen levels, putting humanity’s future at dire risk. In order to escape a soon-to-be-uninhabitable Earth, NASA has initiated the Lazarus missions, as part of which a dozen spaceships have been dispatched to search for exoplanets to colonize. (The name of the missions comes from the biblical Lazarus, who was said to have been brought back from the dead by Jesus.) Astronauts leading these missions have already traveled to another galaxy via a wormhole that the NASA scientists believe was created by an unknown entity, perhaps alien, which communicates in binary code contained in gravitational anomalies like the one Murph encountered.

Cooper is recruited to pilot the space shuttle Endurance on a mission to enter the wormhole and investigate three planets on the other side that may have the ability to sustain human life. His compatriots on that task are three scientist-astronauts—Brand’s daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley)—and two intelligent, talking robots, CASE and TARS. When exploration of a first planet proves fruitless and results in Doyle’s death, the remaining crew reroutes toward a planet previously investigated by the astronaut Mann (Matt Damon). There they discover that Mann, still alive on the grim, icy surface, faked promising data about the planet’s viability in order to be rescued. Once his deception is discovered, Mann attacks Cooper and kills Romilly. In the ensuing action Brand rescues Cooper and the two escape, and Mann dies in an explosion while trying to commandeer the shuttle.

Meanwhile back on Earth, time passes faster than for the crew of the Endurance because of the effects of relativity. Murph (now played by Jessica Chastain) reaches adulthood and begins working with John Brand on an equation that would allow humans to depart Earth en masse and live on a huge space station, which they term Plan A. Eventually, however, Brand confesses to Murph that for years he has believed Plan A is not possible and that the people on Earth are doomed. Instead, he places the only hope for the human species with the crew of the Endurance, counting on them to find a viable planet and use embryos that are stored aboard the ship to populate it; this is Plan B.

Cooper and Brand, now short on fuel, route toward the third planet. Cooper and TARS separate from the Endurance in a small lander craft and enter a black hole, where they emerge into a fifth-dimensional “tesseract.” There Cooper can glimpse into his daughter’s bedroom at different points in time. He realizes that the entities that were communicating with humans via gravitational anomalies were actually future, highly advanced human beings, who created the tesseract to give him the chance to save humanity. Cooper is able to communicate with Murph through the tesseract, allowing her to solve John Brand’s equation and save humans on Earth through Plan A.

In the film’s finale Cooper wakes on a NASA space station, reunited, finally, with his daughter (now played by Ellen Burstyn). She is elderly and surrounded by her children and grandchildren. At her urging Cooper leaves with TARS on a ship to seek out Brand on the third planet, where they hope she has started the plan to establish a new home for the human race.

Reception

Interstellar grossed $203.2 million in the United States and $758.6 million worldwide on a $165 million budget. The film was a critical success as well. The New York Times’s A.O. Scott wrote, “full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind) [Interstellar] is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.” Several critics noted that the film spoke eloquently to contemporary concerns, including pessimism about the future amid escalating climate change and a renewed interest in space travel sparked by the emergence of new private companies such as SpaceX.

The film received five nominations at the 2015 Academy Awards, including for original score and sound design, and won the Academy Award for best visual effects. In 2025 Interstellar was ranked number 89 on The New York Times’s list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.