Over the years, I have watched many films that impacted me on a deep level. I have always connected with mind-bending, emotionally resonant movies that require keen insight to unpack their latent meanings. Perhaps some of my favorite films are those by Christopher Nolan, such as Inception, Interstellar, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and more.
While this director may seem like a cliché choice to some fellow film lovers, and though I do recognize some of his directorial flaws, such as his reliance on exposition-dumps as opposed to natural world-building, his films have nonetheless made a profound impact on me. In this post, I will be focusing on one in particular: Interstellar.
This film connected to me on a deep level, evoking some of my favorite qualities in movies, such as a deeply layered plot open to interpretation in its meaning, amazing cinematography which captures the beauty of space accurately, a beautiful film score by the great Hans Zimmer, and at the heart of it all, a simple story of a father and daughters’ bond that transcends the space that divides them.
As with all films, the plot of Interstellar is split into six parts: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and the resolution. In the exposition, we have first introduced to both the main characters and the central conflict that plagues this world.
We follow Cooper, a former engineer, and NASA pilot, and his family, including two children and his father-in-law, as they try to make their way in a world where dust storms and other natural phenomena threaten to destroy all food sources across the Earth and, effectively, cause the end of human civilization.
This new “Dust Bowl” is slowly causing the Earth to be uninhabitable. In this society, it is shown that almost everyone has taken up an agrarian existence to combat the lack of food caused by these blights.
As humanity is facing its extinction, the inciting event of the film occurs: during a dust storm, Cooper and his daughter Murphy find a message on the floor of her bedroom made of dust. Cooper figures it has been caused by a “gravitational anomaly”, and when he decodes the message, it leads him to a secret base of NASA.
This marks the beginning of the plot, as in the days following his discovery of the base, he decides to join a mission to find inhabitable planets in the distant space in the hopes that humanity can find a new home amongst the stars.
What follows is the rising action, as Cooper and his fellow astronauts set forth on this journey, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. The group encounters several hurdles and setbacks, as they lose several members while journeying through these vast worlds while finding none of them to be a potential next home for humanity.
On one of the worlds, time passes by at a different rate due to the increased gravity and upon returning to his ship Cooper finds his children grown dozens of years older while only an hour passed for him. Murphy is now a scientist at the secret NASA base, trying to save humanity from its impending doom.
After being double-crossed by an astronaut who had been driven insane by the years he spent in isolation on the second planet they visit, Cooper and his last surviving crewmate, Brand, narrowly escape back into space.
As they board the ship, they decide their best chance is to slingshot around the black hole Gargantuan in the direction of the final possible planet and humanity’s last hope at survival.
During the maneuver, Cooper reveals there was never enough fuel for both of their shuttles to reach the last planet and undocks and begins to steer his vessel in the direction of the black hole in the hope that in his last moments he can observe beyond the event horizon at the singularity in its center and send the data back to Earth.
This marks the beginning of the climax of the film. As Cooper’s shuttle is damaged in the wormhole, he ejects from it and drifts through endless blackness before finding himself inside a tesseract created by unexplainable beings who placed the wormhole.
In the tesseract, Cooper finds he can interact with places or events across space-time, such as Murphy’s bedroom from the beginning of the movie. Eventually, he realizes he can send the data from the black hole to Murphy, and he precedes to encode it into the watch he gave Murphy before he left.
Essentially, Cooper set in motion the events that began the movie by interacting with his past across space-time inside the interdimensional tesseract. Upon deciphering Cooper’s message in the watch, Murphy is able to rescue humanity by creating a new home for civilization in space.
Then begins the falling action, as following Cooper’s actions, the tesseract collapses in on itself and he is left drifting in space. Following a fade to black, Cooper finds himself waking up in a hospital on Cooper Station, one of many more new homes for humanity in space.
His doctor informs him the station was named for his daughter, who is heralded for saving humanity. It is revealed that upon exiting the tesseract, they found him floating in space many years past when the events of the film take place.
This is shown by when his daughter comes to see him, she is now old and near death. He’s speaking to her marks the resolution of the film, as after embracing him she tells him to go, as “no parent should have to see their child die.” As Cooper goes, Murphy tells him to go to Brand, who is on the final planet of their journey and, as fate would have it, is inhabitable.
Works Cited
Barsam, R. M., & Monahan, D. (2010). Looking at movies: An introduction to film. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Nolan, C. (Director). (2014) Interstellar [Film] Paramount Pictures
