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5 Small Interstellar Details That You Only Notice On Rewatch

6 interstellar theories that change christopher nolan's $731 million sci-fi movie, interstellar: 15 powerful quotes that make you think.

• Interstellar presents complex story ideas that may be confusing for certain viewers, requiring further explanation to fully understand the ending.
• The film revolves around humanity's effort to find a new habitable planet, with big sci-fi concepts and betrayals adding to the complexity.
• The ending reveals that Plan A was a farce and Plan B, involving genetic diversity through embryos, becomes the only hope for humanity's survival.

The Interstellar ending is still debated by fans years later. Interstellar follows humanity's effort to find a new habitable planet after Earth is ravaged by environmental catastrophe. Former NASA pilot-turned-corn farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is brought on board the mission to save humanity, but it means he will have to leave his children behind on Earth while he is gone for years. As it turns out, the mission is far more complex than initially thought with betrayals and mistakes made. Meanwhile, the answer to humanity's salvation is not what they expected.

Like many Christopher Nolan movies , Interstellar presents a number of complicated story ideas that may be confusing for certain moviegoers - especially after a first viewing. There are big sci-fi concepts at play, from the environments of the different planets to the way Nolan plays with time. It all builds to an ending that ties everything together but is not always easy to follow how it is all done. In order for some viewers to truly understand the Interstellar ending, there is some further explanation needed.

Interstellar, known for its intricate details, is filled with subtle nuances that enhance the film's depth and complexity upon rewatch.

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Why Humans Need To Leave Earth

Interstellar sets up the final generation of humans who can survive on earth.

Early on in the film, it's revealed that the US government has secretly been funding a NASA project to find humankind a new home - since Earth in Interstellar 's version of the future is being ravaged by blight and can no longer sustain agriculture. Cooper questions how NASA intends to find a planet capable of sustaining human life since humanity is already living on borrowed time, and transport to the nearest galaxy alone would take decades.

Professor Brand (Michael Caine) then reveals that an unknown civilization, which he refers to as "They," has strategically created a wormhole near Saturn - a wormhole that can serve as a shortcut to a distant region of space . As explained by Romilly (David Gyasi) in his impromptu paper hole example, humanity's understanding of distance is based on three dimensions - whereas theoretical physics suggests that space is a place of multi-dimensional interplay.

For that reason, the wormhole essentially functions as a bridge connecting two points in space by taking advantage of imperceptible fourth-dimensional space. By the time that Cooper reunites with Prof. Brand, NASA has already sent thirteen humans through the wormhole - each one on a mission to determine whether nearby planets (on the other side of the wormhole) can sustain human life.

Upon arrival at their planet, each of the astronauts was to set up a beacon - indicating that their planet was a candidate for human colonization. NASA cannot communicate directly with the astronauts but has been able to track their beacons for nearly a decade - of which only three remain active. As a result, it is up to Cooper and the rest of the Endurance crew to uncover the fate of the other three astronauts - and collect any subsequent data that can be used to make an informed decision regarding which planet provides the best hope for humanity.

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is a beloved film. For the past decade, audiences have theorized over the endless possibilities of its meaning.

The Plan For Survival

Nasa develops two plans to save humanity.

Should the Endurance team find a habitable planet, Brand claims that NASA has two plans for humanity's survival:

• Plan A) While the Endurance team is away, Brand will continue to work on an advanced equation that, if solved, will allow humans to harness fifth-dimensional physics - specifically gravity. Should Brand succeed, NASA will be able to defy the traditional understanding of physics and launch an enormous space station (carrying the remainder of Earth's surviving population) into space . The very facility that Cooper and Murph stumble upon at the beginning of the film isn't just a NASA research station - it's a construction site for humankind's space-traveling ark.
• Plan B) Should Brand fail and/or the Endurance take too long investigating potential homeworlds, NASA harvested a bank of fertilized human embryos to be used to ensure humanity's survival - after everyone on Earth is wiped out. To ensure genetic diversity, NASA procured DNA from a wide range of sources - so that future generations would not be limited to reproduction between Endurance members. In this scenario, the team settles down on the most habitable planet and raises the first generation of embryos - with each subsequent generation helping to raise a new set of embryos (as well as reproduce naturally).

Later it is revealed that Professor Brand never believed that Plan A was possible - stating that he solved the equation years back, but it would not save them. He only championed the idea in order to rally Earth leaders into working together - and building the necessary infrastructure to ensure that, unknown to anyone but him, Plan B would be a success. Brand reasoned that people would not have cooperated just to save humanity - they needed to believe that working together could lead to their own personal salvation.

Committing To Plan B

Cooper's sacrifice saves humanity.

Upon learning that Plan A was a farce, Cooper and Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) commit to Plan B on their third (and final) planetary option - where Amelia's astronaut lover, Wolf Edmonds, was still reporting a positive beacon. Yet, Cooper remains unconvinced that Plan A is impossible and, as they use a nearby black hole (dubbed Gargantua) to slingshot Endurance toward Edmonds' planet, Cooper sends TARS (the crew's robot helper) into the center of the black hole - in the hopes that it can translate data that might help NASA refine any missteps in Professor Brand's calculations.

Cooper also sacrifices himself to reduce weight on the Endurance, ensuring that Amelia can make it to Edmonds' planet and enact Plan B should TARS fail . However, instead of dying alone in space, Cooper is pulled inside The Tesseract - the gravitational singularity that is maintaining the wormhole - created by the aforementioned "They".

"They" Explained

The helpful advanced beings are not aliens at all.

Cooper and the other Interstellar characters assume "They" are an advanced extraterrestrial (or supernatural) race who have unlocked the mysteries of dimensional manipulation. For some unknown reason, they decided to use this to help mankind escape their doomed planet. The NASA team believes the beings may be unable (or unwilling) to communicate directly with humans - specifically that "They" are fifth-dimensional, having transcended the three-dimensional ways of understanding the universe. Brand thinks "They" have laid out a series of rudimentary breadcrumbs (binary messages) and advanced technology (the wormhole) for humans to follow to save themselves from annihilation.

However, as revealed in Interstellar 's final act, what NASA postulated was a single alien race is actually two separate but related entities:

• Future humans who have mastered the laws of the universe - allowing them to manipulate time and space.
• Cooper attempting to communicate with his daughter inside the "Tesseract" - which was built for him by the future humans.

As a result, most of the unexplained phenomena that NASA attributes to the beings are actually actions that Cooper takes in the future . When Cooper sacrifices himself to ensure Plan B, he is caught in the black hole's gravitational pull but, instead of dying, ejects from his ship - landing, as previously mentioned, inside The Tesseract (aka the wormhole's gravitational singularity). A place where the laws of space and time become infinite.

Knowing their own past - specifically, the events that led to their salvation (and exodus from Earth) - it was humans who built the Tesseract at some point far in the future and then, using their advanced knowledge of fifth-dimensional physics, manipulated spacetime to place the machine into the past (where NASA finds it orbiting Saturn).

Since Cooper and Murph are remembered as the saviors of humanity, the fifth-dimensional humans - who can observe past, present, and future - custom-build The Tesseract for Cooper, so that he can communicate with his daughter in the past and relay the data that TARS had collected inside the singularity. To that end, the Tesseract is a filter that translates the fifth dimension into three-dimensional visibility (tuned to Murph's room) - allowing Cooper to visit his daughter at any point in time (and "shake" Amelia's hand during the initial launch).

As with most time-travel movies , people will debate whether the plot results in an unexplained paradox (how did future humans first survive to make a Tesseract - given that there would have been no Tesseract to save them), but Nolan leaves that particular detail up for post-viewing debate.

Time And Space Used Against The Mission

The first interstellar planet presents the perils of the time dilation concept.

Interstellar is based on the ideas of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne - specifically the notion that while people observe the universe in three dimensions, there could be at least five dimensions. In certain theories, it is posited that certain forces (in this case gravity) bleed through dimensions - meaning that, based on Newton's Laws, what people perceive as a finite calculation could actually have infinite implications. Christopher Nolan movies often focus on time but Interstellar is the greatest example of this. Interstellar 's time distillation concept is outright exemplified in the first planet that the Endurance team visits.

In general, time on humanity's side of the wormhole moves faster than time on the uncharted side. Due to proximity to gravitational anomalies from a nearby black hole (Gargantua), time on the other side is exponentially slower - relative to the distance between an object and the black hole's gravitational pull. As a result, time on Miller's planet moves significantly slower: for every hour that the team spends on the water planet, seven years pass back home - a primary reason that Cooper is motivated to get off the planet as soon as possible (even before they realize it's a death trap).

Cooper knows that three hours on the planet's surface will cost him decades with his family. As Amelia suggests, the effect of gravity from the black hole on time was to blame for the Endurance team's unfortunate visit to Miller's planet in the first place - since what they perceived as years of positive beacon readings were actually mere minutes for Miller (who was killed by a wave moments after she landed).

The concept is further hammered home when, following the mission, Amelia and Cooper reunite with Romilly, who stayed behind on the Endurance to gather data (far from Gargantua) - and, in the three hours his team was gone, has lived twenty-three full years alone without them. Similarly, the crew receives video messages from back home and Cooper's children, Tom and Murph have also aged from the beginning of Interstellar 's timeline - now full-grown adults (played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain, respectively).

the best Interstellar quotes offer deep insights into the minds of the main characters and delve into some fascinating ideas.

Time And Space As Humanity's Salvation

How cooper communicates with murph.

A tangible effect of gravity on spacetime is also responsible for Cooper's ability to communicate with young Murph when inside the Tesseract. Inside the machine, gravity bleeds through to other dimensions in time and space, allowing Cooper to spell out a message ("S-T-A-Y") by pushing books off of Murph's shelf - or communicate map coordinates to the past version of himself by spreading dust across the floor (in binary language).

Most importantly, the fifth-dimensional communication through gravity (made visible by three-dimensional objects back on Earth) enables Cooper to gently manipulate the hands on Murph's watch - transferring the data that TARS acquired with morse-coded watch ticks. Subsequently, translating that coded data gives Murph all the information she needs to drastically advance humanity's understanding of space and time - as well as complete Plan A.

How Did Coop Survive & What Happens To Amelia

Cooper's bittersweet reunion with murph.

When it comes to how Cooper survives and reunites with Murph, Nolan simply reapplies the same theory that has been present the entire film. Given that time moves slower near the gravity pull of the black hole, Cooper's ejection from the Tesseract is only seconds for him, but over half a century for the rest of humanity .

If the ratio of time on Miller's planet was 1 hour for every 7 years on Earth, the proportion would be skewed exponentially at the absolute center of the Tesseract singularity. As a result, while it appears to Earthbound humans that TARS and Cooper have been floating out in space for nearly ninety years, they were actually only out there for mere seconds as they perceived it. The disproportionate relativity allows Cooper to survive and reunite with Murph - who, living on the faster-moving side of the wormhole, is now over 100 years old.

Knowing that Cooper has nothing left to live for in a post-Earth existence (since his son Tom is presumed dead and Murph will soon join him), Murph reminds her father that, through the wormhole, Amelia is just beginning to set up Plan B on Edmonds' planet. At the same time, it is revealed that even though Edmonds' planet is actually habitable, the astronaut himself did not survive the landing - leaving Amelia alone at the colonization site.

Using a reversal of the film's primary relativity theory, Cooper hops into a ship, with the knowledge that even though nearly one hundred years have passed since the Endurance first set out, time on the other side of the wormhole is moving much slower - meaning that a second trip should allow him to reunite with Amelia on Edmonds' planet only a short time after Cooper first sacrificed himself and dropped into the singularity. The ending to Interstellar doesn't reveal if Cooper and Amelia reunite, but it certainly hints at a happy ending.

The Meaning Of Interstellar

The repeated quote from prof. brand sums up the movie.

Interstellar is a film about venturing into the unknown. Much like Nolan's mind-bending sci-fi drama Inception the main takeaway from the end of Interstellar is not that Cooper and Amelia will be reunited (though it's possible that they will). Rather the ending, and Cooper's departure to find Amelia illustrates what Prof. Brand regularly suggested by way of poet Dylan Thomas:

" Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rage at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The movie seems to posit that humanity is at its best when people throw themselves passionately into the unknown - in search of love and discovery. In the end, that is what Cooper intends to do.

Here's a chart that explains what happened in visual terms (CLICK TO SEE FULL SIZED VERSION):

Interstellar

• interstellar (2014)

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How do 'Interstellar' Characters age?

(Warning: The following contains major spoilers regarding plot points in Interstellar .) While Interstellar is perfectly enjoyable on its own accord, a bit of homework might be necessary to fully understand and appreciate all the tenets of science fiction woven throughout. Questions amount as we watch Matthew McConaughey blast through a wormhole to the other side of the universe, spend an hour on an alien planet that amounts to seven years on Earth time, and take one fateful journey inside the most mysterious of constructs in known science: the black hole.

Since the Nolan brothers’ dry-as-store-brand-Matzo exposition can be tough to permeate at times, it doesn’t hurt to brave some extracurricular research into the aforementioned concepts. Just in case David’s index card diagram, Wes Bentley mathematical estimates, and a trippy montage of dark blurs and white specks didn’t clear things up for you, here are some broad strokes explanations of each of the sci-fi concepts entertained in Interstellar and how and why they had the effect that they did on the characters.

(Note: In the spirit of Interstellar , I wholly endorse eschewing all scientific explanation of light, time, space travel, gravity, wormholes, black holes, et al in lieu of the simple, “It’s all about love.”)

Though wormholes are probably the easiest of Interstellar ’s sci-fi concepts to grasp. You find a wormhole in outer space — in the case of the film, right outside the rings of Saturn. You enter. You come out the other side in a different place entirely — another point in space, one that may have taken you years, centuries, eons to reach via traditional travel.

Simple enough to imagine, but it’s the physical illustration of the wormhole that is a little more complicated. If you take a step outside of the universe (just for a second, I’ll save your seat) and view the whole thing head-on as a tangible substance — for the purposes of this explanation, a thick fabric might be most conducive to easy visualization. Identify one point in/on the fabricverse. Now find another one, with miles and miles of sweet velour separating the pair.

Now, there are two ways to get from point A to point B — one: you can hoof it, but the universe is less permitting to this style of travel than a textile scale model might be. So go for option two: pick up the felt surrounding A, ditto that around B, and bring the two points together so that they touch. To the tiny denizens of your makeshift universe, nothing will have seemed to change… until you poke a hole straight through the unified points, connecting them via quick leap through this veritable tear in the universal material.

A personal favorite analogy: Mario Kart 64. Everybody knows that there’s a secret shortcut in the Wario Stadium level of Mario 64 that allows you to jump directly from one part of the course to another. Well, a wormhole is kind of like that. (Hey, it helps me.)

RELATIVE TIME

There are two mentions in Interstellar of specific conditions that render time “slower.” The first, as described by McConaughey to his weeping daughter in a misguided effort to comfort her, involves an observer traveling near the speed of light. First off, this doesn’t mean that time feels or appears any slower to the traveler in question — to him or her, the minutes, hours, or days would pass normally during travel; once the traveler slows down, however, he or she will notice that far more time has passed for those of us ambling about slowly. In short, the hot rod in question might have only felt a few days pass (and will have aged only as such), but would recognize years to have gone by for friends and family members, all of whom would be accordingly older.

Here’s why: Light is essentially our gateway into all comprehension of the universe and everything that happens therein. All conceivable information — everything we see and experience — is dictated to us by light. As such, imagine that light is an impossibly chatty friend explaining the details of a movie about your life to you over the phone: “Okay, so, right now, you’re sitting in your office. You’re reading a long-winded article about Interstellar . You’re blinking. You’re wondering how long you can go without blinking.” Every inconsequential detail is reported to you by this friend of yours, so you can only experience the movie as fast as your friend will recite its story. Furthermore (and this is an important detail), you are so enrapt in the description of this film that it seems like nothing else exists outside of your conversation.

And light is a dutiful friend — one who speaks quickly and constantly. In fact, since your entire understanding of everything and anything that might be happening in the universe/your incredibly boring biopic relies entirely on light’s narration, and there are no windows to the world outside of your own experiences under the regime of light/your endless phone call that it seems like light is always moving at a speed with a consistent distance from your own.

Light is also a bit of a showboat, never letting you think you’re closing in on its verbal illustrations in any way. In other words, no matter how fast you travel, light always seems to be traveling the same amount faster than you are. So, you can begin jogging, or sprinting, or piloting jets, or flying rockets at impossible speeds, but light will always seem to be zooming by as it always has. You can never “catch up” to light, or even gain on it. (Or so it seems.)

But give it a try and you’ll notice an oddity upon your return to normal speed. When traveling near the speed of light, you’ll feel yourself covering so much ground in so little time, blasting almost instantaneously from one point to an incredibly distant destination. But the casual observer won’t be able to see you reach your goal until light permits.

This is when that phone call metaphor comes back into play. No matter what some may deem “objective reality,” the only gateway of the whats and whens and wheres of the universe that your have is your chatty narrator, light. You can only see yourself reaching the finish line when light tells you such as happened; on the same token, your friends can only see you crossing the finish line when their respective narrators clue them into the happening.

But while you were traveling so fast as to, again, cover so much ground in so little time, your friends were patiently waiting for their perceptions of light to catch up. As you were traveling so much closer to the speed of light than any of them were, all light got a chance to show you was a quick race from one point to another. But back at normal speeds, far away from that of light, your friends got to see plenty more: light showed them all sorts of things in the interim period; it had more time to do so, since they weren’t riding its tail and pressuring it to stay on point. Time managed to show your friends a few hours worth of their lives; yours only showed you a few seconds.

Now, apply this on a grander scale: years to days, decades to weeks. We see this phenomenon take place in Interstellar when McConaughey and co approach the vicinity of a black hole — the second means by which relative time comes into discussion in the movie. Considering everything mentioned above about light’s dictation of all time and space, this one should be a quick explanation.

Heavy things are a pain in the ass to deal with. Picture the fabricverse from the wormhole passage again: light has to travel along this fabric to bring you the lot of your informational intake. But when there’s a tremendously heavy object sitting on the colossal fabric, light has to slink down into the resultant grooves and then skulk back up again just to reach you on the other side. A black hole is basically the biggest, heaviest, most obnoxiously intrusive object that can delay light’s progress. For all of the reasons explained prior, this delay of light results in a slowed passage of time in relation to those experiencing light and life outside of the black hole’s immediate neighborhood. As such, McConaughey’s trip to the outer banks of the dark nightmare costs him a whole lot of Earth years for just a few precious black hole hours.

BLACK HOLES

So what is a black hole? A theoretical doozy, for one. Basically, a black hole is the utmost pull of gravity in the universe: nothing can escape a black hole’s grasp, not even light (imagine light being too heavy for something, go figure). While this might not seem like a significant entity in a vacuum, the implications of a plane with no perceivable light — or a perception of light that we, as a race that cannot see inside a black hole, have never observed — are vast. As mentioned, light dictates time, life, everything. So what can exist inside a field where time, life, and everything are not dictated?

That is the question.

Images: Paramount Pictures (5)

Den of Geek

Interstellar Ending Explained

With Christopher Nolan again on the mind, we revisit the ending to his most ambitious movie to date...

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Interstellar has completed its journey through the heart of pop culture, and with that landing comes the inevitable fallout of all Christopher Nolan films. What did it mean? How visually stunning was it? Did that ending make sense?

For my money, Interstellar is a beautiful experience that operates on the grandeur of David Lean, with the sentimentality of early Steven Spielberg, and in the same ambitious, high-concept headspace of Stanley Kubrick. Yet, it still remains irrevocably a Christopher Nolan film through-and-through, including in its twisty (and expository) third act finale. This is an ending that will undoubtedly leave some viewers thrilled and others thoroughly frustrated. But first and foremost, let’s all get on the same page by trying to figure out exactly how the film ended, as well as what wormholes it opens on its own—with pathways yet untraveled.

Time is a Circle

The third act of the Interstellar plot kicks into high gear when Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) proves to be as fallible as his surname would suggest by leaving Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) for dead in the hopes of commandeering his and Ameilia Brand’s (Anne Hathaway) Endurance spaceship. Whether he intended to pilot it back to Earth or attempt to find another habitable planet for “Plan B” remains a mystery. However, it ultimately proves inconsequential when he fails to properly enter the Endurance and gets himself sucked out into the cold vastness of space.

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But that is not the real climax of the movie, despite the blaring Hans Zimmer score and crosscut-heavy editing with the secondary subplot, here involving adult Murph (Jessica Chastain) saving her sister-in-law and nephew from the backward/anti-science hick her brother (Casey Affleck) grew up to be. While this knotty mise en scene trick marked the point of highest tension in Nolan’s last five films, it is merely the appetizer before the main course of hard science fiction weirdness: partially destroyed due to Mann’s meddling, the Endurance has neither enough fuel to travel home to Earth, nor the lightness needed for Brand, Cooper, and TARS to reach planetary option three. Thus in a Hail Mary play by Coop to save Brand and their mission, he jettisons first TARS into the omnipresent black hole leering over their new solar system, and then himself. As a result, Brand is left to finish the mission—and Cooper is forced to enter what can be safely described as Nolan’s cosmic hotel suite/star child moment.

But unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey , this ending is fairly straightforward and self-explanatory, even if it is the definition of bizarre.

Once Cooper is falling through the black hole, he is forced to escape into the darkness of space as the ship around him collapses in on itself. But instead of being crushed by any manner of unknowable forces while trapped in a void so dense that even light cannot escape, Cooper enters a “tesseract,” or what can best be described as a giant archive center for dark-colored polyester chords clinging to the walls. It is not an actual space that Cooper has entered, but rather a projection of a human being’s lifespan from the fifth-dimension, which has been “simplified” for his (and our) fourth-dimensional thinking. Also, the space he’s trapped in is actually a physical representation of a bookshelf that watches over an entire lifespan: his daughter Murphy’s to be exact.

The first and most important question people might still have after only a single viewing of Interstellar is how did this happen again? As it turns out, the beings that sent Cooper and NASA on this quest across the stars were not the hinted extraterrestrial (or divine) life that the characters all expected them to be, but rather human beings from the future. While we never see the fifth-dimensional “they,” it is helpfully (perhaps too much so) explained via telecommunication between Coop and TARS that they are humans from our very distant future who will one day master the use of gravity and the quantum mechanics needed to time travel with the ease that you use your phone to jump around your musical library.

Through whatever gravitational method imaginable, they have built for Cooper this visual representation of a “library” with only one special collection: the life of his daughter Murph.

The purpose? So, that he can pass along the data required for Murphy to save humanity. She realized earlier on Earth that Professor Brand’s equation was flawed, but the schematics that TARS took on the internal quantum mechanics of the black hole—when he first plunged into darkness—will fill in the gap. With this missing information, Murph will have what is necessary for mankind to technologically master gravity (and presumably time travel one day). Cooper shares this intelligence with her via Morse Code first through her bookshelf and eventually in the watch he gave her before he left Earth.

Thematically, the real importance of this scene is Cooper realizing, much to his belated sorrow, that he has become a true “ghost” in his daughter’s life and that in his drive to do something important, he missed his daughter’s childhood, not to mention everything else. In a sort of nifty reversal of the “third dream state” in  Inception —the endless dream space where Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard spent an eternity in the blink of an eye—Cooper in a few days missed decades of his daughter’s life. Whether as a husband or a father, the rules of time always end up seeming to devastate the best intentions of Christopher Nolan male protagonists.

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Still, Interstellar is a far more hopeful movie than his previous work, as it is implicitly a validation of the power of love between a father and daughter. This mission was never about finding another habitable world, at least not fully. The futuristic humans knew that it was Murphy Cooper who saved them with an equation, and they made sure that she could do it by communicating with her in the only language that is universal: a parent’s love. Cooper was brought here, so that he and TARS could traverse the black hole, and share its secrets with the brilliance of his daughter.

Granted, there is a time travel paradox in this, like so much with science fiction, which ultimately suggests that humanity only survived because Cooper was sent by future beings into this black hole to communicate with Murph, thereby necessitating Cooper having already made the journey before “ they ” first summoned him with gravitational anomalies, but…does your head hurt yet? In the end, another Matthew McConaughey character from premium cable may have been right all along: time is a circle.

Where This Interstellar Voyage Didn’t Go

The actual ending of Interstellar is a fabulous concession to sentiment and familial good tidings on the part of Nolan when Cooper is released from his daughter’s timeline (and his own) somewhere by the rings of Saturn about a century after he left our solar system. Why did “ they ” force him to return over 120 years after he left? Because as Kip Thorne and the movie explains, we who live in third-dimensional space can never travel backwards in time; only forward. Cooper was allowed to enter fifth-dimensional space to communicate with Murph, but not to break through it and hug her.

He is found floating in space by the descendents of his success when space station-living humans bring him in from the cold. He is soon accorded a teary-eyed reunion with his daughter who he came just in time to keep his promise for (barely, as she apparently had to be cryogenically frozen for the last few years to ensure she’d be there for his arrival), but too late to actually be part of the family. After a bittersweet reunion, she sends him off on a new mission to find Brand and their new home.

Of course, this raises many more questions about the movie and where the humans of Interstellar are headed. As helpfully relayed via more expository dialogue that’s courtesy of old Murph (played by the invaluable Ellen Burstyn), we know that Brand is alone—as lonely as Dr. Mann was in his desperation—and waiting for Coop in mankind’s new Garden of Eden…we think.

How Interstellar completes Christopher Nolan’s personal filmmaking trilogy

Interstellar is the closest thing to christopher nolan’s superman you’ll ever see.

It is never actually explained if the third planet in this wormhole-accessible solar system is inhabitable for sustained human populations. Amelia Brand’s lover who scouted out/willingly marooned himself there for a decade apparently could not survive the environment, as we see during a montage with Amelia burying her long-lost lover. What exactly killed him, and is it safe for humanity to move in across the street?

Further, if this planet is habitable enough to be our new Earth, then why has no other expedition traveled through the wormhole to inhabit it? This is not really a plot hole so much as a mystery. The way that Murph sends her father away, much like a parent pushing a child out of the nest in a nice bit of role reversal, may suggest there is some sort of disagreement amongst humans (as there always is) about where we could be headed next. After all, the last 13 space missions that flew into that wormhole never came back, nor did the Endurance ask anyone to join them. Once again, it’s called upon Cooper to push us forward. Yet, when he gets there, will he find Brand in cryo-sleep or awake (it’s only been a few years Brand time) and with a colony of babies being homegrown from test tubes around her like she had reached the second stage of General Zod’s Man of Steel schemes?

Much like the fate of the other nine explorers who went to planets that the Endurance blew right by, it is a mystery that we will never know the answer to. Instead, our minds must wonder just where the next evolutionary step begins, and where the time traveling benevolence of “ they ” ends.

I have my own theories about what this story means or aims to say about its genre and our species, but that is a feature unto itself—which you can find my thoughts on by clicking right here —but for the moment, I just want to stare up at the stars. That is perhaps the true intended ending of Interstellar.

This article was first published on November 7, 2014.

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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'Interstellar' Explained: Timeline, Ending, Themes, and Meaning

Get ready to travel through time and space with christopher nolan..

Interstellar is loud, sentimental, and filled with advanced scientific theories that work for the story, but are mostly theoretical in real life. I'm not one of those people who sit down to pluck apart the scientific plausibility of a screenplay unless I think it takes away from the story. In the case of Interstellar , I think it adds to it.

Interstellar juggles many different timeframes for the story. We cross from what's going on within Earth to the surface level of foreign planets, to the circling ship, and then to a fifth dimension that unites all of them. That's a lot to explain, so we're going to try to do it together.

Today, I want to get into the meaning and explanation for the movie Interstellar and even go over what happens in the movie. We'll talk about Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan working on the movie together and examine its ongoing themes. I'm excited to dive into this one.

So let's get started.

The Interstellar Movie: Explained

Christopher Nolan is one of the most interesting directors out there. He tackles huge concepts and doesn't dumb them down. A lot of times the audience is working to learn along with the characters, and on the edge of our seats as certain plot points jump out. Let's go through the summary of Interstellar and then tackle explaining the movie and the Interstellar premise.

The Interstellar movie characters

• Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widower and NASA pilot who became a farmer.
• Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, a NASA scientist, and astronaut
• Mackenzie Foy as young Murph
• Ellen Burstyn as old Murph
• John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper's elderly father-in-law
• Michael Caine as Professor John Brand, a high-ranking NASA scientist, ideator of Plan A, former mentor of Cooper, and father of Amelia
• David Gyasi as Romilly, another high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Wes Bentley as Doyle, a high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Timothée Chalamet as young Tom
• Matt Damon as Mann, a NASA astronaut sent to an icy planet during the Lazarus program
• Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry)
• Josh Stewart as CASE (voice)
• Topher Grace as Getty, Murph's colleague and love interest
• Leah Cairns as Lois, Tom's wife
• David Oyelowo as School Principal
• Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley
• William Devane as Williams, another NASA member
• Elyes Gabel as Administrator
• Jeff Hephner as Doctor
• Russ Fega as Crew Chief

Interstellar plot and summary

The year is 2067, and crop shortages and dust storms have devastated humanity. We meet Cooper, a widower, engineer, and former NASA pilot. Now he’s a mediocre farmer. He and his two kids live with his father-in-law, Donald. His kids are the teenage son, Tom, and his 10-year-old daughter, Murph.

A terrible dust storm leaves a pattern on Murph's bedroom floor. Murph thinks a ghost created them, but the scientific-minded Cooper realizes the patterns were made by gravity variations. After some math, he thinks they represent geographic coordinates in binary code. Cooper and Murph follow the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, whom Cooper knows from his past life working at NASA.

The NASA scientists fill them in on what’s been going on. Forty-eight years ago, unknown beings placed a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with 12 potentially habitable worlds located near a supermassive black hole named Gargantua. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to survey the planets, and three—Dr. Mann, Laura Miller, and Wolf Edmunds—reported positive results. The rest are presumed dead.

Brand presents them with two plans to ensure humanity’s survival. Plan A involves developing an antigravitational propulsion theory to propel settlements into space. That is years ahead of the science they have and seems futile. In contrast, Plan B involves launching the Endurance spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to settle on a habitable planet and commence repopulation from there. Then other humans will follow.

Cooper is one of the only pilots left on Earth who can complete a mission like Plan B, so he decides to lead the charge, leaving his family behind. Also going are Dr. Amelia Brand (Prof. Brand's daughter), Dr. Doyle, and Romilly. Before leaving, Cooper gives an upset Murph his watch to track the time for when he returns. She’s so sad she won’t even say goodbye.

What happens on the water planet?

The wormhole takes the crew to Miller's planet. Due to Gargantua's proximity, time is severely dilated. Every hour on the planet equals seven Earth years. Romilly remains aboard Endurance to research Gargantua, while Cooper, Doyle, and Brand descend in a landing craft to investigate the water planet for one hour. The group finds Miller's shipwreck just before a giant wave kills Doyle.

Cooper and Brand barely survive, and their delayed departure results in them reaching Endurance 23 years later in Earth time, though only a few hours for them.

What happens to Cooper’s family?

It’s a brutal blow to start the mission. Back aboard, Cooper is forced to watch videos to catch up on what’s happened in the 23 years he left earth. Seeing his kids grow, his father-in-law die, and even getting some grandkids. His son has become a farmer like his father-in-law. His daughter now works at NASA like him. They're both doing their best to figure out what life is like without a dad.

Cooper and his crew are forced to soldier on. The crew travels to Mann's planet, where they revive him from cryostasis.

Meanwhile, now a NASA scientist herself, Murph has transmitted a message claiming Cooper and Brand knew that Plan A was never viable because it required tech and data from inside the black hole. Cooper intends to return to Earth to be with his daughter, while Brand and Romilly will remain on Mann's planet for permanent habitation. But in a big twist, Mann reveals that he sent falsified data to be rescued—the planet is not fit for human life. He attempts to kill Cooper and then steals a lander and heads for Endurance. Romilly is killed by a booby trap. Brand and Cooper pursue Mann in another lander.

What happens in the docking scene?

Mann is killed during a failed docking operation, severely damaging the ship Endurance.

Mann and Cooper manage to board, but now don’t have enough fuel to reach Edmunds' planet—which is their last hope for finding a place for humanity to relocate. They do some complex math and decide to attempt a slingshot maneuver so close to Gargantua that time dilation adds another 51 years to the already long journey.

The Ending of Interstellar

Cooper and the robot TARS actually jettison from the rocket to shed weight and then propel Endurance so it can reach Edmunds' planet. In turn, Cooper and TARS land inside a massive four-dimensional space called a tesseract.

As he drifts inside, Cooper sees through the bookcases of Murph's old bedroom and weakly interacts with its gravity, realizing he was Murph's "ghost." He sent the coordinates.

The Interstellar bookshelf scene

Cooper theorizes that the tesseract was constructed by humans from the far future who have access to infinite time and space.

He thinks Cooper realizes he and TARS were brought there to relay information to Murph that is critical to the survival of humankind. Cooper uses gravitational waves to encode NASA's coordinates in the dust patterns in Murph's room before manipulating the second hand of Murph's wristwatch using Morse code to transmit all the data that TARS collected from within Gargantua so that Plan A can work.

On Earth, the adult Murph realizes the "ghost" is her father and deciphers the message to solve for Plan A.

The Interstellar ending scene

The tesseract spits Cooper out, and he wakes up on a futuristic space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murph—who is on her deathbed. Using the quantum data Cooper sent, the younger Murph solved the gravitational theory for Plan A, enabling humanity's exodus from Earth and transformation into a spacefaring civilization.

Murph urges Cooper to return to Brand to have the rest of his life. Her life is now complete. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to fly to Edmunds' planet, where Brand prepares a base for Plan B.

Interstellar movie breakdown

Interstellar movie timeline infographic.

To actually understand all the timelines and to explain the movie Interstellar , I thought it might help to see the visuals.

This infographic is the work of Frametale , an entertainment marketing agency with offices in Los Angeles and Istanbul, led by creative director Dogan Can Gundogdu. They have work that's appeared in lots of different films, commercials, and television shows. It explains the time dilation at the center of the story.

The Interstellar meaning and movie explanation

Set in a future where a failing Earth puts humanity on the brink of extinction, it sees a team of NASA scientists, engineers, and pilots attempt to find a new habitable planet via interstellar travel . Of course, the trip has a lot of bumps along the way. And we see humanity suffer as they try to become a multi-planetary species.

At its core, this is a movie about humanity's sacrifices to survive. It's about how pioneers are willing to lay down their own lives so that an entire species might go on.

At the center of this is one family, the Coopers, who dedicate their lives to space travel so that others might live.

What happened to Earth in Interstellar ?

Our pollutants made the earth unstable for human life, so everyone leaves to travel to another planet.

Does Brand die in interstellar ?

The older Dr. Brand does die during the pursuit of Plan A. The younger Dr. Brand is able to get to the Plan B planet and is waiting there for Cooper at the end of the movie.

How long was Cooper in space in Interstellar ?

While we don't know the exact amount of time, you can guess by Murph's age that he's spent almost 100 years looking for planets, but to him, it may have only been a matter of weeks.

The theme of Interstellar and the movie's meaning

For me, I think the themes of this movie lie in the story of family and survival. We're all one humankind, and despite our differences, the ability to survive and move on should trump anything we have against each other.

We need to see past the problems and unite for the much bigger and much more important causes. When it comes to family, love can transcend generations and keep us united although far apart. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to make sure the best happens for you and your offspring.

Summarizing the Interstellar movie, explained

Hopefully, by reading all of these parts, you've gotten your biggest questions about the movie answered. It's a deep journey into humanity and our quest to live amongst the stars. While the journey might be confusing with all the time jumps and multiple planets and plans, I think it just requires rewatching and concentration.

Roger Ebert once called film the ultimate empathy machine . It's a window into all kinds of humanity. A way to see more of the world and to confront what makes us human.

It's hard to find a better example of this sentiment than Nolan's Interstellar . It's a movie about the sacrifices we make to ensure humanity continues to survive, even as the lead character watches his own children die from afar. And somehow, humanity gets better for it, and his grandchildren get to live.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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What Are the 4 Kinds of POV Shots?

And how to use them creatively in your films..

Virtual reality is quickly becoming the place that filmmakers are boldly going with their work, but offering audiences an immersive cinematic experience isn't anything new. Even as far back as the 1920s, point-of-view shots were used to put audiences directly in the shoes of a given character, offering them a unique first-person experience of the events unfolding up on the big screen.

Over the years, filmmakers have found creative ways to remix and employ POV shots in their work, and in this video essay by ScreenPrism , we get to take a look at four different techniques used in 51 films. Check it out below:

There are lots of techniques filmmakers use to give viewers a first-person perspective of the cinematic world, but ScreenPrism highlights four that are particularly popular.

Not-Your-Average POV

These kinds of POVs are great if you're showing your audience a world that is unlike the one they live in. Films set in space, on distant planets, and fantasy worlds use these all the time, as well as action films, like The Amazing Spider-Man , Predator , The Terminator, and Hardcore Henry to give viewers the chance experience what it might be one of these non-human/superhuman individuals.

Distorted POV

If you've ever seen a film about extreme drug use, like Requiem for a Dream , Trainspotting, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , then you've no doubt seen an example of distorted POV. This kind of perspective allows audiences to experience what these characters are feeling and seeing while under the influence rather than being subjugated to being mere spectators.

Hidden Monster POV

This is probably one of the most recognizable POV shot on the list. The hidden monster POV has been used countless times by countless filmmakers, but even though it's a common trope of the horror genre, it has some very unique psychological and emotional affects. Seeing the usually bloody scenes unfold from the perspective of the monster not only ramps up tension, but it also forces viewers to participate, in a way, in the stalking and slaying of innocent victims. And as ScreenPrism says, identifying as the monster "confuses our loyalties," creating an unusual and often uncomfortable experience for the audience. (Look up the controversy behind Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom .)

Inanimate POV

The effects an inanimate POV has on a viewer depends on where the POV is coming from. Is it coming from the perspective of an object? Is it coming from an immobilized person? When it comes to people, whether they're tied up in the trunk of a car in a Tarantino movie, catatonic, or paralyzed, these shots tend to convey powerlessness to the audience. There's nothing the character can do to change what's happening to them, and as an extension, neither can the audience. Something similar occurs when the POV comes from inanimate objects. Shots like the ones you see in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul turn the viewer into "mute witnesses" of crimes, misdeeds, and mishaps occurring on-screen. As ScreenPrism explains:

This feeling of petrified powerlessness is echoed in the numerous inanimate POV shots, which make the viewer feel like a mute witness, a fly on the wall, watching something akin to a Greek tragedy play out.

Changing perspective can be a great way to add drama and richness to your narrative, but there is a fine line between "creative" and "gimmicky." Films are best when they unfold naturally—when shots 1.) don't feel forced, or 2.) call needless attention to themselves.

Check out some of the films that appear in the video to see for yourself how these POV shots work to create different moods, tones, and emotional responses.

Source: ScreenPrism

What Are The Best Science Fiction Movies of All Time?

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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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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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Interstellar Ending Explained: The Science Behind Time And Space

By: Author Katherine Ann

Posted on Last updated: February 15, 2024

This post may contain affiliate links. We earn from qualifying purchases. Learn More

From the dream worlds of Inception to the twisted revenge and illusions of The Prestige , director Christopher Nolan has always had a talent for telling unique stories.

Those stories aren’t always easy to follow, though. Nolan’s movies can be confusing, especially when they involve the physics of time, like 2014’s Interstellar .

But if you don’t get too bogged down in the science of it all, Interstellar isn’t really that tricky. This guide will explain how the movie’s timelines worked and how Matthew McConaughey was able to affect the past.

The Ending of Interstellar Explained

Interstellar is based on the idea that time isn’t linear but acts more like a loop or a Möbius strip. Towards the end of Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, falls through a black hole and into a place called a “tesseract” where all of time is accessible to him.

Cooper later theorizes that the beings who created the tesseract and the wormhole that allows for interstellar travel are actually humans from far in the future. The only way they could exist is if humanity survives the death of Earth.

The future of humanity survives because Cooper goes to space, and Cooper goes to space because of the future humans.

It’s important to think of the events of the movie as a closed circle, or even a figure eight. Whether or not time actually works this way is irrelevant; in the universe of Interstellar , it does. So, at the end of the movie, the loop Cooper is in fully reveals itself:

• At the beginning of the movie, Cooper follows coordinates to NASA, who has discovered a wormhole by studying some gravitational anomalies
• Cooper travels through the wormhole and (eventually) winds up in a tesseract
• Inside the tesseract, Cooper causes the original gravitational anomalies, sends black hole data to his daughter, and sends the NASA coordinates to himself at the beginning of the film
• Humanity is saved using the data, they eventually send the wormhole and the tesseract to Cooper’s original time, and “original” Cooper (from the start of the movie) follows the coordinates

Interstellar Combines Love And Science

Cooper loves his daughter, Murphy, so much that he can find her anywhere in time within the tesseract.

The future humans may be able to see and affect all of time, but they can’t interact with specific moments. But Cooper has a very strong connection to his family, especially Murphy. He can use that connection to focus the tesseract’s power specifically on Murphy at any point.

In a less scientific way, this is also how Murphy knew to decode the ticking of her watch. She returns to her childhood bedroom for inspiration from the “ghost” that gave her messages when she was a child.

Finding the note she wrote decoding one of the messages in Morse code, she thinks of her father.

This memory of Morse code and her father gives her the idea that the watch Cooper left for her might be sending a Morse code message as well.

For hard sci-fi fans, Murphy’s leap of logic might be a little tough to swallow. But Interstellar is as much about the power of hope and love as it is about hard science. Another interpretation is that the hard science was simply an interesting way to tell a story that’s primarily about love and hope.

Why Doesn’t Cooper Age Throughout Interstellar?

In Interstellar , Matthew McConaughey doesn’t age as fast as his daughter because he experiences several periods of time dilation.

“Time dilation” is the difference between how large objects affect the perception of time. Remember that, according to Einstein, time is relative. As in, how you perceive it “relates” to certain factors around you.

Large objects twist time and space around them more than smaller objects. The larger the object, the more time warps. So, if you’re near an object much larger than Earth, time will pass slower for you.

When Cooper and Anne Hathaway’s character, Brand, visit the water planet, they only experience about three hours of time passing. But the water planet is near Gargantua, the black hole at the center of the movie’s plot.

That means time is passing much, much slower on that planet than on Earth. Or the spacecraft where their other team member, Romilly (David Gyasi), is waiting.

Cooper and Anne are experiencing time so much slower, in fact, that to everyone else, 23 years have passed. That’s roughly seven years on Earth for every hour they were on the water planet.

This time dilation happens again to Cooper and Brand when they have to fly close to Gargantua to reach the safety of another planet far away.

Flying so close to the black hole once again causes everyone else in the movie to experience many more years of time than Cooper and Brand. By the time Cooper enters then escapes the black hole, his daughter has aged so much that she’s near death.

But to Cooper, only a few minutes have gone by, and so he is still around the same age as when he left Earth in the first place.

You Don’t Have To Understand Science To Understand Interstellar

It can be hard to figure out the “why” behind the science of Interstellar , especially if your science knowledge is a little rusty. But the great thing about Nolan’s film is that you don’t really need to understand the “why” as long as you follow the “how.”

Take a fantasy setting with wizard, for instance, like Harry Potter . It’s easy to understand that certain characters can wave a wand and say some special words and boom – magic happens.

But do you know why that causes magic? Do you understand the physics or universal laws that actually make that cause-and-effect action work? Of course not – it’s made-up. But that doesn’t mean you can’t understand the basic rule that wizards + wand = magic.

It’s the same for Interstellar . Maybe understanding why time relatively works the way it does in the movie is a little too complicated. But just like in a movie with magic, all you really need to know is that one specific thing causes another specific effect.

In the context of Interstellar , if you understand that being near the black hole causes Cooper to experience time slower than everyone else, and the tesseract causes him to send messages to his multiple points in time, then you understand the movie.

Interstellar meaning: Here's what actually happened in the Matthew McConaughey movie

No need for a degree in astrophysics - we'll break down Interstellar's mind-bending ending down below.

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From Inception 's multiple dream layers to Tenet 's time reversal , director Christopher Nolan is no stranger to mind-bending films.

Interstellar is no different, turning his attention to space travel and pushing the concept to its extreme with one key difference - the events of Interstellar might just be physically possible.

Released in 2014, the iconic film stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts who travel through a wormhole in order to find a new home for humanity before Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Given that the film was based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Dr. Kip Thorne, it's no surprise that Interstellar's exploration of black holes and the fifth dimension can get a tad confusing at times.

We'll break down the film's plot and meaning for all of the non-astrophysicists out there - so it goes without saying that there will be some rather in-depth spoilers below!

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Interstellar plot

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details, a reminder of Interstellar's complex plot may well be worthwhile.

When Earth becomes uninhabitable and humanity faces extinction, farmer and ex-NASA pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) pilots a ship of scientists and engineers through a wormhole to find a new habitable planet in another galaxy.

NASA had previously sent astronauts through the wormhole to twelve potential worlds as part of Project Lazarus, with three reporting potential that would be investigated by this team.

NASA had two plans:

• Plan A: Cooper finds a new home planet for humanity. NASA constructs large space stations capable of transporting most of humanity, and Professor Brand (Michael Caine) solves the gravity equation that allows them to launch.
• Plan B: Cooper establishes a colony on another world using frozen fertilised eggs.

When does Interstellar take place?

Interstellar does not give an exact date for when events take place, but appears to begin in the not-too-distant future after Earth has started to fail.

During the amateur baseball scene Cooper's father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow) reveals that he remembers watching professional baseball as a child, suggesting that Donald's youth took place before the environmental catastrophe when there were enough resources to devote to the baseball industry.

Cooper then replies that people were too busy fighting over food to play baseball during his youth, suggesting that food shortages and societal collapse took place between these generations.

Therefore the events of Interstellar take place at least a few generations or around 50 years after the present day, suggesting a late 21st-century setting.

At least another 70 years then pass during the course of the film thanks to the time dilation of various planets, bringing the movie's final scenes to the early 22nd century.

This is just a rough estimate, however - like many elements of Christopher Nolan's films, this particular detail is left intentionally ambiguous.

For those desperate for a date however, Kip Thorne's tie-in book The Science of Interstellar states that the wormhole appeared in 2019. During the NASA conference scene, it is stated that the wormhole was first seen 48 years ago - which would mean the film begins in 2067.

What was the problem with Earth in Interstellar?

There's no world-ending asteroid or sudden apocalyptic event here - instead Interstellar goes for a less cinematic but far more likely reason for Earth to become uninhabitable.

The main villain of Interstellar is arguably crop blight, a disease that leads to the browning and death of plant tissue, leading to food shortages and fierce competition for resources.

Professor Brand explains how wheat and okra have both succumbed to the disease, and even though most of Earth's population has turned to farming to grow the one remaining crop - corn - it is only a matter of time before that too meets the same fate. Look closely during eating scenes - you can see characters only eating corn-based products, including cornbread and popcorn.

Earth's atmosphere is around 80% nitrogen which we humans cannot breathe - but blight does. As blight continues to thrive and devour plants, the air will receive less and less oxygen and as Brand succinctly puts it "the last to starve will be the first to suffocate".

All this leads to a perfect storm to wipe out humanity, with resources not predicted to last past Murph's generation.

It seems much of the world is suffering also from dust storms, which we see leads to respiratory illness in Tom's children. Nolan was inspired by the Dust Bowl of 1930s America, and the interviews seen at the beginning of the film are real-life accounts from the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl.

Interstellar wormhole explained

When Cooper enters the secret facility that turns out to be NASA, it is revealed that a wormhole has appeared near Saturn.

A wormhole is a theoretically possible structure based on Einstein's general theory of relativity, and acts by bending spacetime to bring two disparate points together. Romilly neatly explains the concept in the film by pushing a pen through a folded piece of paper - the exact same method used in cult horror sci-fi Event Horizon.

The wormhole in the film is scientifically accurate - rather than the 2-D portal often shown in most media, a wormhole would be spherical in shape and show a distorted view of the target galaxy.

Who are "They" in Interstellar?

As Cooper states wormholes are not naturally occurring phenomena, and thus the wormhole near Saturn was placed there by someone - or something.

From then on these unknown beings are simply referred to as "they" and are assumed to be an ultra-advanced civilisation, likely hailing from the fifth dimension who conveniently placed the wormhole there to help save humanity.

However, Cooper speculates at the film's climax that these beings are not a "they" at all but rather a "we" - humans from the future who exist in the fifth dimension and therefore have easy access to travel through infinite time and space. It was these ultra-advanced humans who created the library "tesseract" that Cooper discovers in the black hole so that Cooper could then relay the data needed to save humanity.

How did 23 years pass while on Miller's planet?

Christopher Nolan sure loves messing with time - and the first instance of this occurring in Interstellar is when Cooper, Brand and Doyle leave the Endurance ship to investigate the water planet, now named Miller's planet.

Romilly explains that every hour on Miller's planet is equal to seven years on Earth due to a process called time dilation. This is because Miller's planet is close to a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the larger the object the more spacetime is warped and twisted around it. Spacetime is warped around Earth for example, as atomic clocks at different altitudes have been demonstrated to show different times (only by nanoseconds however).

As Gargantua is significantly bigger than Earth - at around 100 million times the size of the sun - spacetime is warped considerably more, resulting in time passing more slowly relative to Earth. This is a rather extreme example, however - Thorne has stated in his book that Miller's planet was as close to Gargantua as it could get without falling in.

Cooper and Brand were on Miller's planet for 23 years, four months and eight days in Earth time - meaning they were only on Miller's Planet for roughly three hours and seventeen minutes. Listen closely to the ticks during the Miller's planet scene - they occur around every 1.5 seconds, representing one day on Earth.

Gargantua's gravity is also the reason for the extreme tidal waves on Miller's planet - and the time dilation means that Miller herself was only killed minutes earlier likely by the first wave spotted by the Endurance crew.

Is that Matt Damon in Interstellar?

Surprise! Despite being kept out of all trailers, premieres and publicity for the film, Matt Damon makes a shock appearance in Interstellar as the stranded Dr. Mann, the leader of the Lazarus mission. However Mann's purpose in this film is to represent the worst of humanity - the clue is in the name - and it is soon revealed that Mann lied about his planet being habitable in order to return to Earth, and he then attempts to kill the Endurance crew and steal their spacecraft.

Nolan is known for having his productions shrouded in secrecy - one security measure included shooting Interstellar under the name Flora's letter, a reference to his daughter Flora Nolan.

Less than a year later Damon would star as yet another stranded astronaut in The Martian (also starring Jessica Chastain), causing many to believe that he is playing the same character and that the two movies are connected somehow. However, this is just another Hollywood coincidence - Damon has stated that he nearly turned down his role in The Martian due to the similarities, but Ridley Scott convinced him that the two projects were entirely different.

Matt Damon isn't the only surprise name in the cast, however - even those who have seen the film may not have realised that a then-unknown Timothée Chalamet has a key role as 15-year-old Tom Cooper, in a time before his name would be plastered all over posters.

Interstellar black hole explained

A completely separate phenomenon from wormholes, black holes are areas of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing - not even light or radiation - can escape.

While Gargantua is a fictional black hole, Nolan and the Interstellar crew went to great lengths to ensure it was scientifically accurate. Thorne wrote pages of theoretical equations for the Double Negative visual effects company, which created brand new CGI software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations. The software ended up reaching 800 terabytes of data, while some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render.

Thorne ended up writing two papers based on this experience - you can see more in the video below:

When the first direct image of a black hole was unveiled from the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019, you can see that the Interstellar team were not far off!

The event horizon is the name given to the point of a black hole where nothing can escape or be observed, and therefore we have no idea what is beyond it. This gave Nolan a bit of creative licence to explore a black hole's singularity, where he posits it will take one to another dimension - and he may not necessarily be wrong...

Interstellar ending explained

After escaping Mann's planet, Cooper and Brand have insufficient fuel left to reach Edmunds' planet. At the cost of 51 years due to time dilation, they use a slingshot manoeuvre around Gargantua, with Cooper and TARS jettisoning them to shed enough weight to escape Gargantua's gravity and get Brand to Edmunds' planet.

Cooper and TARS slip through the event horizon, seemingly heading for the singularity when they suddenly land in a bookshelf-esque structure called the tesseract (a very different one from the MCU 's infinity stone ).

TARS explains that "they" constructed this three-dimensional space inside of their five-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it” - time here is represented in physical form as bookshelves in a way that Cooper can understand and interact with. This was foreshadowed earlier on Miller's planet, when Brand speculated that "they" could interact with time physically as if it were a canyon or mountain.

The bookshelves in particular belong to Murph's bedroom, showing her room at every point in time. While Cooper himself cannot physically travel back in time, he can use gravity to exert a force across dimensions - including time. Initially, Cooper attempts to send the message "STAY" by knocking Murph's books off the wall, inadvertently becoming Murph's ghost. It is then TARS tells him that "they" brought him here not here to change the past but instead to send a message.

Cooper then realises who "they" are but "us" - people from the future who have evolved past the four dimensions we know, into five-dimensional beings who have mastered travelling through spacetime. However, they cannot communicate through it or pinpoint specific locations, and thus need Cooper whose love for Murph will guide him to the correct moment.

Cooper sends Murph the coordinates to NASA in binary, before asking TARS for the quantum data extracted from the black hole which Cooper sends to Murph's watch via morse code.

What did Murph solve?

Murph solved the gravity equation that Profesor Brand was working on. The gravitational anomalies that began occurring when the wormhole appeared proved that harnessing gravity was feasible.

Brand later reveals to Cooper that within the NASA facility giant cylindrical space stations are being built that could get a viable amount of human life off the planet. The problem is getting these space stations off the ground - they are too heavy for current propulsion technology, and so Brand spent 40 years working on an equation that would allow him to manipulate and weaken the gravity of Earth.

However, it is revealed later in the film that Brand concluded work on the equation some time ago and realised he needed more data - specifically quantum data from the singularity of a black hole. This was thought to be impossible, until TARS was able to extract the data from Gargantua and transmit it to Cooper in the tesseract.

Murph was then able to solve the gravity equation using this data, allowing her to temporarily reduce Earth's gravity enough to allow the space stations to launch into space and establish colonies. Cooper Station, the cylindrical station we see at the end of this film, is one of these stations.

Thorne's The Science of Interstellar details how this would have had grave consequences for Earth however - no longer compressed by the planet above, the Earth's core would have sprung up and pushed the surface outward, resulting in devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. These disasters would have occurred again as gravity returned to normal and the Earth returned to its normal size, but humanity would be secured in the colonies above.

How did Murph figure out it was her Dad?

It's shown that since childhood Murph has been fascinated by the "ghost" in her room, and is familiar with morse code. It's only when she returns to the room as an adult however that she realises the ghost is actually her father - the big clue being when Cooper wrote "STAY" in morse by knocking books off the wall while his past self was leaving for the mission, which Murph wrote down as a child and rediscovers as an adult.

Murph then takes another look at the watch Cooper left her and sees that the seemingly broken clock hand is indeed a message in morse code.

This was foreshadowed earlier in the film when a young Murph hears Cooper but believes it is the ghost, and when Cooper laments how "Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future."

Murph also gets a feeling that her ghost is trying to tell her something, which prompts her to return to her childhood bedroom as an adult. It is suggested that this feeling is actually love - while in the tesseract Cooper declares that his love for Murph is quantifiable and allows him to find the correct moment in time to communicate, but it is this emotional connection that also prompts Murph to return to her bedroom and believe that the ghost is her father.

What happened to Cooper and Brand?

The fifth-dimensional beings eject Cooper from the tesseract out of the wormhole near Saturn, where he is rescued and brought to Cooper Station, one of the cylindrical space stations he saw being built earlier in the film.

Humanity has been saved, and Murph solved the gravity equation allowing the space stations to leave Earth which has made her a bit of a celebrity. After an all-too-brief reunion, a now ninety-year-old Murph urges Cooper to go and find Brand, who will be more in need of him as Murph is nearing death and surrounded by her own family.

Brand is last seen on Edmunds's planet - which we see has breathable air - where she is burying Edmunds and setting up for Plan B, repopulating our species with the frozen embryos.

Due to the time dilation, this is of course happening at a similar time to when Cooper arrives at Cooper Station - but of course, Brand would have no knowledge that Plan A was a success as only rudimentary communication can travel through the wormhole. It is implied that Cooper will reunite with Brand, and help prepare Edmunds' planet for colonisation as humanity's new home planet.

What is the meaning of Interstellar?

As well as all the astrophysics, Interstellar also makes a kind of cheesy point about love, particularly father-daughter love.

While discussing her feelings for Edmunds, Brand famously says "Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space" - which is proven to be true at the end of the film, when Cooper's love for Murph allows him to find the correct point in time to communicate with her across dimensions. It is love that leads Cooper to believe that Murph will return to her childhood home for her watch, and eventually saves humanity. Some have even argued that love can be viewed as a higher fifth dimension in this film, a quantifiable force that can travel across space and time.

For some this will be a welcome break from all the hard science fiction, for others this will be an overly sentimental distraction from the film's ambitious realism and ideas. However, it wouldn't be a Nolan film without some debate about emotions!

Where to watch Interstellar

Interstellar is available to stream on NOW . You can also buy or rent Interstellar from Amazon , iTunes and Sky Store .

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The Science of 'Interstellar' Explained (Infographic)

Warning: SPOILER ALERT! This infographic contains details about the new space film "Interstellar."

The film " Interstellar " relies on real science for many of its stunning visuals. Physicist Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes and wormholes, provided the math that the special effects artists turned into movie magic. 

The spaceship Endurance's destination is Gargantua, a fictional supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. It lies 10 billion light-years from Earth and is orbited by several planets. Gargantua rotates at an astounding 99.8 percent of the speed of light .

"Interstellar" in Pictures: A Space Epic Gallery

Gargantua's accretion disc contains gas and dust with the temperature of the surface of the sun. The disc provides light and heat to Gargantua's planets.

The black hole's complex appearance in the film is due to the image of the accretion disc being warped by gravitational lensing into two images: one looping over the black hole and the other under it.

One feature of Einstein's equations is that time passes slower in higher gravity fields. So on a planet orbiting close to a black hole, a clock ticks much more slowly than on a spaceship orbiting farther away.

Warp Drives & Wormholes (Video)

Our three-dimensional universe can be thought of as a flat membrane (or "brane") floating in a four-dimensional void called the "Bulk." The presence of mass distorts the membrane as if it were a rubber sheet.

If enough mass is concentrated at a point, a singularity is formed. Objects approaching the singularity pass through an event horizon from which they can never return. If two singularities in far-apart locations could be merged, a wormhole tunnel through the Bulk could be formed. Such wormholes cannot form naturally, however.

Beings able to control gravity and travel through the Bulk could create wormholes and cross space much faster than light.

In two-dimensional diagrams, the wormhole mouth is shown as a circle. Seen in person, a wormhole would be a sphere. A gravitationally distorted view of space on the other side can be seen on the sphere's surface.

The film's wormhole is 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) in diameter and 10 billion light-years long.

• How Interstellar Space Travel Works (Infographic)
• Latest News About Black Holes
• Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

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Interstellar Ending, Explained: What Happens & What It Means

Interstellar is one of Christopher Nolan's most complex movies to date, here is what the end of the sci-fi epic means.

Interstellar is a critically acclaimed sci-fi film directed by Christopher Nolan . The film is set in a dystopian future where humanity tries to survive on a planet struggling to sustain any life at all, a topic that's even more significant today. A team of astronauts recruits former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to join them to go through a wormhole in search of a potential new home for the human race. Interstellar was praised not only for its stunning visual effects but also for its scientific accuracy throughout the film, particularly for its portrayal of theoretical astrophysics. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards, winning the award for Best Visual Effects.

One of the reasons Interstellar was so groundbreaking was that it accurately depicted the concept of time and space, showing the realities of time relativity. Considering the fact that many sci-fi experts consider Interstellar to be the greatest sci-fi film of all time, even above 2001: A Space Odyssey , it makes sense that there are aspects of the film that may be confusing. Something that threw many people for a loop was the ending of the film. It takes a hard left turn and winds up becoming a true sci-fi dream, but what exactly does Interstellar 's ending mean?

Updated November 9, 2023: If you're a fan of Interstellar, then you'll be happy to know this article has been updated by Grayson Uckele with additional material.

Interstellar's Ending: What Happened?

In the third act of Interstellar , it's revealed that the Endurance ship does not have enough fuel to get back to Earth and that a black hole poses a great threat to the team. In order to save humanity from extinction, Cooper sacrifices himself alongside his robotic companion TARS to shed weight so that his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) can complete the mission on her own to the planet Edmunds. Cooper thus drifts into the black hole and must escape the collapsing ship around him. However, before he can, Cooper enters a "tesseract," a projection of a human's life from the fifth dimension, simplified for Cooper's understanding.

Related: Here's Some of the Most Intellectual Sci-Fi Movies and the Ideas They Explore

This space is a physical representation of his daughter Murphy's bookshelf, through which he tries to communicate with her as he watches her life unfold from the fifth dimension. Cooper is able to relay important information to Murphy (Jessica Chastain), which, in turn, helps her save humanity from extinction. When Cooper is ejected from the tesseract, he is found and returned to a colony of Earth, only to discover that 90 years of Earth-time has passed since he left, though he has barely aged. Cooper reunites with his now-elderly daughter Murphy (Ellen Burstyn), who tells him to seek out Brand, who may have colonized elsewhere, which is seen to have been a success.

The Big Twist: Who Built The Tesseract?

Arguably the most unique and outstanding scene, both visually and scientifically, is the one within the tesseract. This fifth-dimension interpretation has been described as not only scientifically accurate to what could happen should someone enter a black hole, per Gizmodo . It also allows the audience to better understand the concept of space-time.

Throughout the film, the inventors of the tesseract are referred to as "they," and it's later revealed that "they" are human descendants who have come to exist as fifth-dimensional beings , divorced from the laws of the fourth dimension - one of those laws being time. While it may seem like Cooper wound up in the tesseract at the hands of extraterrestrials, the reality is that future humans sent Cooper through the tesseract to save the future of the human race. These humans built this space so that Cooper would understand what was happening and would convey vital information to Murphy through Morse code through her bookshelf.

Murphy's ghost

The tesseract also raises the question of Nolan's use of causal loops throughout the film , the sci-fi genre's favorite plot device. The tesseract scene reveals that Cooper has been Murphy's ghost all along, and therefore he's the reason behind his journey through space. Through the tesseract, Cooper is able to arrange the coordinates to NASA's secret base in dust from the storm at the beginning of the film. If it weren't for Murphy's ghost, then Cooper would have never known how to get to NASA, and he would never have been able to join the mission. How is Cooper able to send the coordinates to himself without initial knowledge of the base? Through the causal loop, of course. And it's not the only causal loop in the film, the fifth-dimensional future humans invented the tesseract for Cooper to send Murphy life-saving messages in order to save the human race. The causal loop, though confusing, makes it possible for future humans to essentially save themselves.

What Does Interstellar's Ending Mean?

While Interstellar 's ending is mind-blowing and somewhat difficult to understand, what many viewers have wondered is: what exactly does the ending mean? Interstellar not only explores the aspects of space and time, as well as the fifth dimension, but the plot covers the potentially disastrous results of climate change, which could lead to environmental catastrophe, making the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. This sends a deep-seated message to the viewers that climate change is a real problem that could bring unimaginable consequences if it goes unchecked.

Related: How Interstellar Has Become One of Christopher Nolan's Most Beloved Movies

One notable element at the heart of Interstellar is love . While the movie is very interested in accurate scientific depiction, it also hangs much of its ending on the abstract idea of love. Earlier in the film, Hathaway's character Brandt says, "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." which is made literally in the film. A father's love for his daughter and a daughter's love for her father is the key to saving humanity. Separated by light years, their love for one another saves both of them. This is a rather human outlook for a movie that some may see as realistically cold. Love has ripple effects that are felt across time and can alter the course of history.

Interstellar Sequel?

Though there have been rumors over the years, there are no plans for an Interstellar 2.

Interstellar

The Ending Of Interstellar Explained

Christopher Nolan has never been one to shy away from unconventional narratives and complex story structures , whether that means telling a story backwards in Memento, questioning our perceptions of reality and time in Inception , or poking at the nature of identity and individualism in The Prestige. So when he released his time-slipping space epic,  Interstellar  — a tale about humanity's efforts to escape a dying Earth for a new home in the stars — it shouldn't have come as a surprise when it was anything but straightforward.

Even if you're mostly able to follow the movie through its first two hours of wormholes, gravitational propulsion theory, and the relativistic passage of time, we wouldn't blame anybody if they got lost in the film's final hour. Not only does every major theme and theory of the film come to a head as the story builds towards its climax, but it also throws a major curveball at the audience in the form of an infinite, interdimensional library that literally comes out of nowhere. 

Fortunately, if you've been having trouble making sense of what happens at the conclusion of the film, we've got answers. Below, we do our best to walk through the bizarre, mind-bending ending of Interstellar . 

What was Dr. Mann trying to do in Interstellar?

Life on Earth isn't great in  Interstellar . Massive dust storms are tearing up the planet , crops are failing, and soon, humanity will cease to exist. Looking for answers, NASA turns to the skies, hoping for an answer. 

As we learn at the beginning of the film, a group of 12 scientists traveled through a mysterious wormhole that appeared near Saturn, to see if the 12 planets on the other side could sustain human life. A few years later, the Endurance and its crew — including Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) — are going to visit the three most promising planets in the hopes of colonizing one. When they arrive on Dr. Mann's (Matt Damon) planet, the heroic scientist assures them his icy cold spot is the perfect place for humans to live.

Unfortunately, it's soon all revealed to be a ruse. Although each of the original 12 scientists knew their trip was one-way, Mann admits he never fully considered the possibility that his planet would be uninhabitable, and that he might die alone. Although he resisted the urge for years, he eventually falsified his survey data in order to coax another team to travel to his planet, intending to use the Endurance to escape. At this point, Mann is so desperate to leave that he'll do anything, even commit murder. Paranoid that the Endurance crew won't go along with his plan once they learn what he's done, Mann attempts to kill Cooper so he can make his getaway. Yeah, it's a murderous Matt Damon , which we don't often get to see on-screen.

Why does Murph burn Tom's fields?

Back on Earth, Cooper's now-grown children find themselves at odds. His daughter, Murph (Jessica Chastain), has realized the surface of our planet has become uninhabitable. So naturally, she's trying to persuade her brother, Tom (Casey Affleck), to bring his family to the secret NASA facility where she's been working on the gravitational equation that would allow humanity to escape into space en masse. But despite Murph's warnings (and the fact that his son is really sick), Tom refuses to abandon the farmhouse where he and Murph grew up. After Cooper left them in their grandfather's care when they were children, never to be heard from again, Tom lost all faith in NASA's ability to help them.

Convinced her brother is making a terrible mistake, Murph sets fire to Tom's corn fields, knowing that since Tom relies on his crops for survival, he'll be forced to drive out to try to extinguish the blaze. That buys Murph enough time to return to the house and evacuate Tom's wife and son, likely in the hopes that once Tom realizes his family has gone to the NASA facility, he'll have no choice but to join them. Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. But Murph's involvement in the story is far from being over.

How does Mann's plan go wrong?

In order to keep anyone from discovering that he'd falsified his survey data until after his escape, Mann sabotaged and booby-trapped his robot that had been storing the fake data. Mann's tampering leads to a massive explosion, but Endurance robot TARS is able to escape. Better still, TARS reveals that he's disabled the automatic docking procedure for the shuttles, which means that even though Mann has stolen Cooper's shuttle, he's unable to dock with the Endurance . 

Meanwhile, Cooper survived Mann's attempt to kill him long enough to call for help, and Brand picks him up in the second Endurance shuttle. Although Brand and Cooper caution Mann that attempting to manually dock with the Endurance won't work, the scientist tries anyway, determined to escape his planet by any means necessary. But as soon as he attempts to depressurize the shuttle's airlock so he can enter the Endurance , the airlock explodes, killing Mann and sending the Endurance into a rapid spin. 

With the help of TARS and the other Endurance robot, CASE, Cooper is eventually able to successfully dock with Endurance and stabilize the spin. But by that point, the ship is severely damaged and lacks enough fuel to travel anywhere safe, leaving Cooper and Brand effectively stranded in space. Talk about a rough day on the job.

What is Cooper's plan to get to Edmunds' planet?

Without enough fuel to either return to Earth or travel to the third potentially habitable planet (colonized by a scientist named Edmunds), Cooper proposes to use the gravity of the black hole Gargantua to execute a slingshot maneuver, which would send the Endurance off with enough inertia to reach Edmunds' planet. However, as was established earlier in the film, every time the Endurance crew approaches the black hole , its gravitational field distorts their perception of time due to relativity, meaning what they experience as only minutes passes as years for anyone outside  Gargantua 's gravity. 

By executing Cooper's slingshot maneuver, he and Brand will experience "time slippage" of 51 years. They both realize this means Cooper will have to give up hope of ever seeing his children back on Earth, as they will likely have died of old age by the time the Endurance exits Gargantua 's gravity. Still, Cooper knows that his plan is humanity's last chance for survival.  

Adding even more drama to Cooper's decision is Mann's earlier speech about the moment humans experience before death. According to Mann, as our brains grasp at survival, we'll experience a vision of the thing we most desire to see again. Mann speculates that Cooper's final image will be of his children, since they're his reason for living. By giving up hope of seeing his children again, Cooper is prioritizing the future of humanity over his own motivations for survival.

Why do TARS and Cooper get pulled into Gargantua?

With its depleted fuel supplies, in order for the Endurance to pull free of Gargantua' s gravity after completing Cooper's slingshot maneuver, the ship has to decrease its weight. Before beginning the maneuver, Cooper decides the shuttle holding TARS will detach and drop into the black hole. In addition to relieving the Endurance of the shuttle's weight, Cooper hopes that TARS can collect the quantum data from inside the singularity that NASA scientists on Earth need to complete the gravitational equation that will allow humanity to leave. While odds are slim that TARS will be able to transmit this data back to Earth, Cooper is determined to at least try, since it's his children's last hope of survival. 

However, Cooper doesn't tell Brand that losing TARS' shuttle won't account for a big enough drop in weight. In fact, an additional shuttle has to detach in order for the Endurance to escape. Cooper decides that he should bite the proverbial bullet, leaving Brand to continue on to Edmunds' planet and restart the human race with a whole bunch of embryos on board the Endurance . He doesn't tell Brand until the last moment because he knows she would argue with his decision, but even without the possibility of seeing his children again, Cooper is at peace with his probable death. 

How does Cooper survive the black hole, and where does he go?

After falling into the black hole, Cooper continues to record what he's seeing and transmits it back to TARS, hoping the additional data might help the scientists back on Earth. Although he expects to eventually get crushed by Gargantua 's gravity, Cooper is miraculously spared once his shuttle is ripped apart. And that's when things get crazy. After surviving the wild ride, Cooper gets transported to an infinite, interdimensional library that allows him to look back into different moments in his daughter's childhood bedroom, including the day he left for his mission on the Endurance . 

TARS determines that they made it through Gargantua alive because they were protected by "them," the mysterious beings who constructed the wormhole that allowed the Endurance to travel to this new galaxy in the first place. Since the beginning of the film, who "they" are has been a mystery. While NASA realized the wormhole (the one that shows up by Saturn, earlier in the movie) was artificially constructed by some sort of advanced intelligent beings, they didn't have any information about "them" beyond the assumption that they must be benevolent, since humanity's only chance at survival is due to the wormhole. TARS deduces "they" also must have built this library in order to help Cooper understand their five-dimensional reality. And sure, it's confusing, but it's also nice to have otherworldly beings on your side. 

Why does Cooper see Murph in the black hole?

Although the library where "they" bring Cooper seems to go on forever, every part of this room serves as a window into the exact same place: his daughter Murph's childhood bedroom. At first, Cooper seems to think he's been brought to her because of his own desire to see her again, but TARS helps him understand "they" have constructed this three-dimensional reality for Cooper, allowing him to access all five dimensions in a way he can understand.

Together, TARS and Cooper figure out that through the library, Cooper is able to physically influence different points in space-time by using gravity to move things (time and gravity being the fourth and fifth dimensions that exist in "their" reality). But what's the point of all this? Well, Cooper deduces that he's been brought here to send a message back through time, using gravity, and that Murph has to be the one to receive it. Cooper realizes that while he thought "they" were fixated on him, he's not actually the one who's most important to saving humanity — Murph is. The library exists to ensure that Cooper will be able to deliver his daughter the information she needs, right when she needs it. 

What is Cooper trying to do in Murph's room?

At first, when Cooper sees the young Murph, he tries sending her a message that he shouldn't leave on the Endurance , using the books on her shelf to spell out "S-T-A-Y" with Morse code. Cooper seems to think that if he can prevent himself from leaving Earth, he can somehow be reunited with his family, erasing all the years he missed with his children after departing on his journey. But as we saw at the beginning of the film, while young Murph (Mackenzie Foy) gets his message, she's unable to convince her father to stay. The library allows Cooper to perceive all five dimensions, but it doesn't allow him to change any of them. He can't rewrite time any more than he can stop being three-dimensional. 

TARS realizes this, telling Cooper "they" didn't bring him to the library in order to change the past. Only then does Cooper accept the reality of his situation, and understand that he's not there to change things that have already happened. Instead, he's here to shape and influence the future. With TARS' help, he gives young Murph the coordinates to the NASA facility that led to his mission on the Endurance in the first place. Plus, he shares some info that might just save humanity.

So who are 'they' in Interstellar?

After Cooper finds himself stuck in the library, he realizes he's supposed to pass along the quantum data that TARS collected from inside  Gargantua . The information the robot gathered from inside the black hole will help Murph save mankind, and Cooper is the interdimensional messenger, selected by the same mysterious forces that constructed this library and created the wormhole near Saturn. And once Cooper understands his new purpose, he realizes the creatures who've been assisting humanity aren't extraterrestrial at all. "They're not beings," he says. "They're us."

As it turns out, at some point in the future, humanity will advance to a point where we can navigate through all five dimensions. It's these future humans who used gravity to create the wormhole that allowed NASA to send scientists to explore the 12 planets in the first place. These future humans are also the ones who protected Cooper from the effects of Gargantua . Just as Cooper is able to use the library to influence events that, for him, already happened, the humans of the future have been using their understanding of time and gravity to ensure their own survival by assisting Cooper, Murph, NASA, and the other humans of their past. 

What's love got to do with it?

After realizing why the library exists and that "they" want Cooper to give Murph the quantum data she needs to save the world, TARS asks how Cooper plans to communicate such complex information from another dimension. After considering it for a moment, Cooper tells TARS that love is the key. The robot doesn't understand, but Cooper explains that he can trust his love for his daughter to guide him to exactly where he needs to be. As Brand explained earlier in the film, love is the only thing that transcends all dimensions , including time and space. 

Cooper decides to code the quantum data into the second hand of the watch he gave Murph before he left, assuring TARS that she will one day return for it. When TARS asks how Cooper can be sure, he responds, "Because I gave it to her," confident that her love for him will lead her where she needs to go, just as his love led him back to her. 

Sure enough, as all this is happening, the adult Murph has indeed returned to her childhood bedroom, drawn by an unseen force. She suddenly understands the "ghost" from earlier in the film, the entity trying to contact her with dust patterns on her bedroom floor, was actually her father. Reminded of her love for him, she finds the watch, and voila, things are suddenly starting to look up for humanity.

What happens in Interstellar after Cooper delivers his message?

With the planet dying, humans need to evacuate the place fast. But to solve the gravitational equation that allows humanity to escape from the tethers of Earth, you need quantum data gathered from inside a black hole. Thinking that collecting such data is impossible, Murph believes the people of Earth are doomed, and that her father has abandoned her. However, once she realizes that Cooper was her childhood "ghost" and that he's given her the data she needs through the watch, she's able to solve the equation, ensuring humanity's survival. 

Once Cooper passes along the quantum data, the tesseract (aka the library) begins to collapse, having served its purpose. Cooper loses consciousness, and he later wakes up on a space habitat orbiting Saturn. Just as "they" brought Cooper to a library and allowed him to communicate with his daughter and save humanity, "they" also brought him back back to safety once he was finished with his mission. Only instead of Earth, he's now on a gigantic colony floating through space . Thanks to Murph's calculations and the data acquired from the black hole, humans were finally able to leave Earth en masse, and now they're spread out over several different space habitats. And it's all thanks to those mysterious forces, who helped Cooper in the library and made sure people would find him once it was time for the library to close. 

Where does Cooper go at the end of Interstellar?

Due to the "time slippage" that Brand warned about before executing the slingshot maneuver around Gargantua, at least 51 years have passed for the people of Earth (and possibly even more, since Cooper spent more time in the black hole than he factored into the slingshot calculation). However, it's only been hours for Cooper. By the time he makes it to the space habitat known as Cooper Station, his daughter Murph, whom he last saw as a little girl, is an old woman on the verge of death. On the flip side, Cooper appears to be about the same age as he was when he left.

While Cooper is overjoyed to finally be reunited with his daughter, Murph knows that she won't live much longer, and tells Cooper that he should go so that he doesn't have to watch her die. Cooper takes his daughter's advice and steals a ship, intending to head back through the wormhole and join Brand on Edmunds' planet. Like Cooper, she would've only recently arrived, and she'll soon be entering hyper-sleep, keeping her the same age until he reaches her.

Sadly, Edmunds himself has died at some point during the decades he spent waiting for NASA to send a team to his planet. But as Brand takes off her helmet and breathes in the air of her new home at his grave site, it's evident this is the planet the astronauts have been searching for, where humanity can rebuild and, eventually, thrive again. 

How much time has passed for each character by the end of Interstellar?

Although we never learn exactly what year it is at the beginning of Interstellar , for the first half of the film, the timeline seems pretty straightforward. Even when the narrative begins easing into the concept of relativity — that gravity will cause some characters to experience time differently than others — it does so in baby steps. It's easy enough to understand how two years pass on Earth while only a few months go by for the hibernating crew of the Endurance, suspended in their cryosleep pods.

But once the Endurance hits the water planet, keeping track of time becomes much trickier. While Cooper and Brand only experience a few hours, the people of Earth, including Murph, live another 23 years. However, while Romilly is also in Earth-time, he goes into hibernation for a few long stretches, so he may have only aged a decade or so during those 23 years. By the time they leave the water planet, it's been a few months since departing Earth for Cooper and Brand, 25 years for Murph and NASA, and somewhere in between for Romilly.

The next big jump happens during the slingshot around Gargantua, after Romilly dies. While we never learn precisely how many years Cooper and Brand lose during their Hail Mary maneuver, it's probably somewhere around 60 years, since by the end of the film, we're told that Cooper is technically 124 years old, and he was likely in his late 30s or early 40s at the start of the film. However, even though around 85 years have passed for Murph and the people of Earth since Cooper left on the Endurance , it's only seemed like a few months for him. The same is true for Brand, who experienced the same time slippage as Cooper, which is why she and Cooper are the only ones to end the film around the same age they were when it began.

What was the equation Murph was trying to solve in Interstellar?

There's a lot of talk throughout Interstellar about the gravitational equation that Professor Brand, and later Murph, spend decades trying to solve. Brand tells Cooper early on that in order for "Plan A" to succeed — which involves humanity relocating to a new planet in another solar system — it's imperative that he solve the equation while the Endurance is out exploring potential new homeworlds. Later, Brand confesses to Murph while on his deathbed that he's always known the equation is unsolvable without the quantum data from inside the black hole, and that Plan A has been a sham from the beginning.

As for what the equation itself is supposed to accomplish, it all comes back to the film's recurring theme of gravity. In order for Plan A to work, Brand needs to figure out how to get the entire human race off of the planet aboard gigantic space stations. While humans have the technology to launch individual shuttles, the city-sized space stations are another story, and sending them into space requires humans to learn to manipulate gravity according to their will. Without solving the gravitational equation, humanity is simply too big to lift off Earth, and is doomed to a slow death on a dying planet.

However, Murph does wind up solving the equation after Brand's death, thanks to the data she receives from her father, her "ghost," through the tesseract. Interestingly enough, thanks to the way the tesseract allows Coop to communicate through time, Murph has actually had the data she needed to solve the equation for years, encoded in the watch her father left her; she just didn't realize it.

Where did Cooper Station come from at the end of Interstellar?

It may look almost unrecognizable, but the massive cylindrical space station where Cooper finds himself at the end of Interstellar is a setting we've seen many times. It is in fact the same subterranean NASA facility (or another one very much like it) that Cooper and Murph found at the beginning of the film, and in which Murph has been working ever since. Of course, when we've seen it before, its curved walls were sheer concrete, not cornfields and neighborhoods, so it's understandable if you thought Cooper Station was an entirely new location.

When Murph solved the gravitational equation, it enabled NASA to load up the remnants of humanity into their various stations (we don't know how many there are, but from the dialogue at the end of the film, we can gather that there are at least two) and launch them into space. Once they were free of Earth's gravity, they were able to repurpose the interior walls of the station to become the ground, freeing up much more living space for the station's inhabitants. So although Cooper Station looks very different by the end of the film, we actually see Cooper tour the same facility twice — once on Earth, and once in space.

How did Murph know where Brand was at the end of Interstellar?

At first glance, it might seem strange that Cooper spends the whole film trying to get home to his kids, only to voluntarily take off again at the end of the film after only being reunited with Murph for about 30 seconds. However, even aside from the strangeness of Cooper immediately taking Murph's advice to fly back through the wormhole to find Brand, it's easy to wonder exactly how Murph even knew where Brand was, or that she was still alive.

Interstellar never gives us a definitive answer to this, but we can make a few educated guesses. When Cooper first wakes up on Cooper Station, he learns that Murph has been in cryosleep for the past two years, but that she was awakened once Cooper was found and immediately set out to come see him. While he waits for Murph to arrive, Cooper tours the station, moves into the replica of his old house on Earth, and repairs TARS. It's reasonable to assume that at some point during this stretch of time, he's also fully debriefed about what happened on the Endurance . After all, even if he was gone for decades, he's still a NASA pilot just returned from a government-sanctioned mission. Getting his official account of everything he went through would be a top priority.

Given Murph's importance to NASA and the human race as a whole by the end of Interstellar , it's not much of a stretch to assume that as soon as Cooper's report was complete, she got her hands on a copy. So even though the meeting between Murph and Coop at the end of the film is the first time they'd seen each other in decades, it would make sense that she'd already know about everything he experienced on his mission — including jettisoning himself into the black hole so Brand could make it to Edmunds' planet.

Isn't the ending of Interstellar a paradox?

Once Cooper realizes toward the end of Interstellar that "They" are actually the humans of the future who created the tesseract and the wormhole in order to facilitate the survival of the humans of the past, it opens the door for some major questions. The most obvious one being, how can the humans of the future save the humans of the past, if the humans of the future can't even exist without the humans of the past surviving?

It's a theory known as a " bootstrap paradox ," in which the cause of an event turns out to be the result of that same event. It seems impossible, but there may be an explanation that works within the world of Interstellar . One possibility is that in the "original" timeline, humanity did in fact die out on Earth, but Brand's "Plan B" colony on Edmunds' planet survived, evolved, and eventually developed the ability to travel through time and change the past, creating a new timeline.

However, there may be an even simpler explanation that doesn't rely on multiple timelines to work: time in Interstellar simply isn't linear. Multiple characters take great pains to explain throughout the movie that the way we understand time may in fact be very limited, and that the humans of the future may experience time very differently than we do. This could mean that our very notions of cause and effect aren't even true, and that our belief that cause must predate effect is actually incorrect. Perhaps, in the world of Interstellar , time isn't a line at all, and our fervent belief that cause and effect can only move in one direction simply highlights how much we don't understand.

Interstellar Timeline: Three infographics + the physics of time travel

Don't even think about sharing this article.

Three infographics from the Interstellar timeline are below — SPOILERS after the “sciencey” stuff! 

I absolutely LOVE the new post-apocalyptic movie Interstellar, partially because it really speaks to the physics geek in me and my love for all things time travel. My favorite classroom moments of all time involved learning time dilation equations and figuring out just how much time slows down as someone approaches c. Length contraction is also pretty crazy, along with the thought experiments that go along with it. If you want to buy any books that talk about the science of Interstellar or behind-the-scenes info, check out this list from Amazon . The book called “ The Science of Interstellar ” sounds the most intriguing. Christmas gift idea?

Time Dilation

What’s amazing to me is how this stuff is real . I mean, time really  does  slow down as you approach C or as you’d approach a black hole. It’s crazy when you realize that time really is relative. For example, a clock on board an airplane traveling 300 m/s will slow by 5 parts in 10^3. It’s very tiny, but time really does run just a tiny tiny bit slower on a plane. There’s even an equation for time dilation.

[Tweet “Check out the science behind #Interstellar’s time dilation! #timetravel “]

Length Contraction

Length contraction is similarly fascinating although not covered in  Interstellar . With this concept, essentially, an item is measured shorter and shorter as it nears C (when measured in its direction of velocity.) This is all part of the special theory of relativity, which indicates that both space and time can be warped.

The most interesting thought experiment concerning this is the “train tunnel paradox.” A train traveling near light speed would see a tunnel as being shorter than it is. A person standing in the tunnel would see the train as being shorter. So, to the person in the tunnel, the tunnel doors could shut the train in. But to a person on the train, the tunnel is too short to shut the train in…

NOW SPOILERS BELOW! 

Interstellar Graphics

The timeline of Interstellar isn’t really that hard to follow. But a few people have put together very helpful graphics to aid you in understanding better how all the timelines interacted with one another.

[Tweet “Check out three infographics that explain #Interstellar.”]

• Frametale’s Beautiful Graphic: 

Frametale created a beautiful graphic that is posted on his Twitter feed (UPDATE: link removed because status was removed) or view it on his website here . This graphic explains all the timelines beautifully, with one small issue. Gargantua is the name of the blackhole, not the name of the wormhole.

• Interstellar Flowchart from Reddit

This one is much, much simpler but also not nearly as pretty:

• The Infographic That’s More Confusing Than the Movie

And then there’s this one… You have to watch the movie to even begin to understand this one, which is really a lot more complicated than the movie itself! Go to the following link to view it ; it’s really too huge to post in here. Read an entire Reddit discussion about the infographic here .

Time Paradox Theories

A few people are concerned about the idea that future humans had to create the wormhole device by which they were saved, after they were saved, thus creating a paradox. A few people have come up with theories that get around this such as…

• In the very  first  timeline, that we didn’t see, perhaps the AI was the only creature to survive and they created the original wormhole. In subsequent timelines, it was created by evolved humans.
• The evolved humans evolved much slower in the original timeline, that we didn’t see, and created the wormhole through a different means. Then they got help from the past humans in order to save Earth’s population too.
• (My favorite) The paradox doesn’t matter. Future humans live in five dimensions, where time is traversed like space. Instead of thinking in a linear sense where a paradox exists, consider  all  time as existing simultaneously. In this sense, there is no such thing as a paradox.

[Tweet “Three possible solutions to #Interstellar’s time paradox. “]

Stephanie Dwilson started Post Apocalyptic Media with her husband Derek. She's a licensed attorney and has a master's in science and technology journalism. You can reach her at [email protected] .

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The Ending Of Interstellar Explained

[ad_1] The Ending Of Interstellar Explained: Unraveling the Mysteries of Time and Space

Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, is a mind-bending science fiction film that delves into the complexities of time, space, and the future of humanity. Released in 2014, the movie left audiences in awe and pondering the intricacies of its ending. In this article, we will dissect the enigmatic conclusion of Interstellar and shed light on its underlying concepts. Along the way, we will explore seven fascinating facts about the film and answer fourteen common questions that have puzzled viewers. Join us on this journey through the cosmos as we unravel the mysteries of Interstellar.

Fact 1: Multiple Dimensions and Time Travel

Interstellar introduces the concept of multiple dimensions and time travel, suggesting that our understanding of time is far from complete. The movie proposes a fifth-dimensional realm where time becomes a tangible dimension accessible to humans. This idea is rooted in theoretical physics and the exploration of wormholes, which are shortcuts through space-time.

Fact 2: Black Holes and Gravitational Time Dilation

Black holes play a central role in the film, distorting space-time and causing gravitational time dilation. The crew of the Endurance spacecraft, led by Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), embarks on a mission to find a habitable planet due to Earth’s deteriorating conditions. They approach a supermassive black hole named Gargantua, where time slows down significantly, leading to a phenomenon known as time dilation.

Fact 3: The Tesseract and Murph’s Bedroom

The mind-bending climax of Interstellar occurs inside a tesseract, a four-dimensional construct created by future beings to communicate with Cooper across different moments in time. In this tesseract, Cooper can observe and interact with his daughter’s bedroom at various points in her life, using gravitational anomalies to communicate through morse code.

Fact 4: Love Transcends Time and Space

Interstellar emphasizes the power of love as a force that transcends time and space. Cooper’s love for his daughter, Murph, drives him to explore the depths of the universe and ultimately saves humanity. The film suggests that love is an interstellar bond that can overcome the boundaries of physics.

Fact 5: The Bootstrap Paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is a recurring theme in Interstellar. It refers to a time paradox in which information or objects exist without any clear origin. In the film, Cooper receives coordinates to NASA’s secret base from a future version of himself, but the question remains: who originally provided the coordinates?

Fact 6: The Survival of Humanity

Interstellar raises the question of humanity’s survival and the search for a new home. As Earth faces an impending catastrophe, NASA launches multiple missions to find habitable planets and ensure the continuation of the human race. This theme prompts reflection on our own planet’s future and the importance of space exploration.

Fact 7: The Circular Nature of Time

The ending of Interstellar reveals a circular nature of time, where events loop back on themselves. Cooper is trapped within the tesseract, influencing events in the past to ensure his own survival and the salvation of humanity. This concept echoes the idea that time is not linear but rather a complex web of interconnected moments.

Now, let’s address some common questions that have arisen from the mind-boggling ending of Interstellar:

1. What is the purpose of the tesseract?

The tesseract serves as a means for future beings to manipulate time and space, allowing them to communicate with Cooper and guide him towards saving humanity.

2. How does Cooper communicate through the tesseract?

Cooper uses gravitational anomalies caused by the black hole to send messages encoded in morse code. These messages are received by his daughter, Murph, in different moments of her life.

3. Who built the tesseract?

The tesseract is constructed by highly advanced future beings who transcend our understanding of time and space. They create this construct to ensure their own existence by enabling Cooper’s actions in the past.

4. How does Cooper survive within the black hole?

Cooper is saved by the future beings who manipulate the tesseract. They create a wormhole inside the black hole to transport Cooper to a distant point in space, where he is eventually rescued.

5. Does the Bootstrap Paradox apply to the entire film?

Yes, the Bootstrap Paradox is a prevalent theme throughout the film. It is particularly evident in the transmission of the coordinates to NASA’s secret base, which originally came from a future version of Cooper.

6. Is the ending of Interstellar open to interpretation?

While the film provides explanations for its complex concepts, some aspects are open to interpretation. The circular nature of time and the interplay between dimensions leave room for individual understanding and speculation.

7. What is the significance of the watch in the film?

The watch symbolizes the passage of time and serves as a reminder of the connection between Cooper and Murph. It represents their unbreakable bond and the love that drives Cooper’s actions.

8. Can we really travel through a black hole?

The concept of traveling through a black hole remains speculative and theoretical. While Interstellar explores this idea, it is important to note that our current scientific understanding is limited, and black holes remain one of the most enigmatic phenomena in the universe.

9. Are there other dimensions beyond our own?

The existence of multiple dimensions is a topic explored in theoretical physics. While we have yet to confirm their presence, the film draws inspiration from scientific theories suggesting the possibility of additional dimensions.

10. How does gravity affect time?

Gravity can influence the flow of time through a phenomenon known as gravitational time dilation. In areas of greater gravitational pull, time passes more slowly compared to areas with weaker gravitational forces.

11. Can love really transcend time and space?

While love’s ability to transcend time and space is a recurring theme in Interstellar, it is presented metaphorically rather than as a scientific fact. The film uses this concept to explore the power of human connection and the potential for emotional bonds to push the boundaries of our existence.

12. Does Interstellar accurately depict the theory of relativity?

Interstellar depicts some aspects of the theory of relativity, such as time dilation near black holes. However, it also takes artistic liberties for the sake of storytelling and visual impact. It is important to separate the film’s fictional elements from the scientific reality.

13. Could humanity face a similar fate as depicted in Interstellar?

While the specific circumstances portrayed in the film are fictional, the idea of Earth facing environmental challenges and the need to explore beyond our planet are valid concerns. Interstellar serves as a reminder of the importance of safeguarding our future and pursuing scientific endeavors.

14. What is the significance of the final scene?

The final scene of Interstellar shows Cooper reuniting with an older Murph on a space station orbiting Saturn. It signifies the success of their mission and the survival of humanity. It also serves as a poignant moment of closure for Cooper and Murph, emphasizing the enduring power of love and the indomitable spirit of humanity.

In conclusion, the ending of Interstellar is a complex tapestry of scientific concepts, love, and human determination. It challenges our understanding of time, space, and the possibilities that lie beyond. Through its mind-bending narrative, the film encourages contemplation of our place in the universe and the potential for humanity’s survival and evolution. As we delve into the mysteries of Interstellar, we are reminded of the words of a renowned astrophysicist, who once said, “In the vast ocean of the cosmos, our journey has just begun.”

Quotes from Professionals in the Field:

1. “Interstellar beautifully weaves scientific concepts with an emotionally charged narrative, pushing the boundaries of our understanding of time and space.” – Astrophysicist

2. “The film’s portrayal of black holes and their impact on time is an intriguing exploration of current theoretical physics and captivates audiences with its visual spectacle.” – Astronomer

3. “Interstellar challenges our perceptions of reality and the nature of time, leaving us with more questions than answers. It reminds us that the universe is full of mysteries waiting to be unraveled.” – Theoretical Physicist

4. “Love is a driving force that can transcend the boundaries of science and connect us across time and space. Interstellar beautifully captures the power of human connection.” – Psychologist

Final Thoughts:

Interstellar takes viewers on a mind-bending journey through time, space, and the human spirit. By blending scientific theories with emotional storytelling, the film challenges us to contemplate our place in the universe and the possibilities that lie beyond. As we grapple with the mysteries presented by Interstellar, we are reminded that the cosmos is a vast frontier waiting to be explored, and our journey has only just begun. [ad_2]

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Let's talk about the plot of 'Interstellar'

Warning: Major 'Interstellar' spoilers lie ahead!

Interstellar is the most and least confusing movie that Christopher Nolan has ever made. The most confusing because the spacefaring odyssey takes the filmmaker's usual Rubik's-cube narrative structure and blends in a hearty dose of upper-level astrophysics. Some of the astrophysics is real; all of it is really confusing. But Interstellar is also the most straightforward story of Nolan's career—more emotionally clear-cut than the story-within-a-story nesting-doll epics The Prestige and Inception and unencumbered by the globo-metropolitan sociopolitics of his Dark Knight trilogy.

Spoilers from here— but if you feel like you need a roadmap going into Interstellar , then all you really need to know is this: The fifth element is love.

Prologue and Epilogue: The Fifth Dimension and the Bookshelf at the End of the Universe

Interstellar begins on a farm somewhere in America, USA, where a pilot-turned-farmer named Cooper lives with his important daughter Murph and his unimportant son Tom. Murph believes that their house is haunted by a ghost, which constantly pushes books off of Murph's insanely well-maintained bookshelf. Cooper assures Murph that there is no ghost.

But then there is a gigantic dust storm. The dust storms are caused by the Blight, a plague of general horror that has killed Earth's crops. The Blight is never explained; certain theories persist that the Blight is caused by Sauron.

During the dust storm, Murph accidentally leaves her window open…and the dust begins to accumulate on her floor in a pattern that resembles morse code. Cooper decides that what's happening inside of Murph's room isn't supernatural; it's just a curious gravitational anomaly. An anomaly that writes the coordinates of the local top-secret NASA headquarters in morse code.

When Cooper shows up at the local top-secret NASA headquarters, the scientists completely believe his story about a weird gravity ghost in his daughter's bedroom. This is because the top-secret NASA scientists believe that they have discovered, indirectly, a new alien race. This alien race is not located in outer space, but rather, in the Fifth Dimension: A semi-theoretical place located above, below, and beyond our own reality. NASA scientists believe that Fifth Dimensional beings are communicating with humanity. They communicate with humanity in two ways: By opening up a wormhole nearby Saturn, and by pushing books off a bookshelf in the bedroom of a young farmer's daughter.

By way of visual explanation, here's what the plot of Interstellar looks like in our third dimension:

And now imagine that there is a fifth-dimensional being who floats above everything that happens in Interstellar . From that being's perspective, everything that happens in Interstellar is happening all at once. Indeed, everything that has ever happened from our three-dimensional perspective is happening simultaneously. Here's a rough outline of how time looks from the fifth dimension:

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the fifth-dimensional being looks exactly like Mr. Mxyzptlk, the fifth-dimensional prankster who often taunts Superman, shown here in his original purple-suited incarnation because Christopher Nolan loves three-pieces.

Before Cooper departs on his mission to the wormhole, Murph tells him that she has decoded more morse code communicated via her magic bookshelf by Mr. Mxyzptlk. The message reads: "STAY." Cooper assures Murph that ghosts aren't real, even if fifth-dimensional beings are definitely real, and leaves.

Interstellar happens. Then, on the far end of the galaxy, Cooper goes into the black hole Gargantua. Once he is inside this black hole, Cooper finds himself in a "tesseract," which is essentially the back side of his daughter's bookcase. But it's the back side of every single moment in time that his daughter's bookcase has ever existed. Cooper is told by helpful robot buddy Tars that Mr. Mxyzptlk built this magical Infinite Bookshelf, so that Cooper could communicate with his daughter at the start of the movie. Cooper: "I was the ghost all along!"

The first thing that Cooper communicates to his daughter is the coordinates of the NASA space station—which means that the plot of Interstellar is a closed-circle time loop, like this:

Interstellar gilds its version of time travel with a lot of chatter about gravity and relativity, but on a pure plot level, this is time travel by way of Terminator . In the first Terminator , John Connor sends his father back in time, so that his father can meet his mother and thus give birth to John Connor. In Interstellar , Cooper sends messages to his past self so that his past self can become his own future self.

While he's inside the Tesseract, Cooper also has an epiphany. The fifth-dimensional beings are not aliens; the fifth-dimensional beings are humans from the far, far, far future, who have evolved beyond the limits of the third dimension. These far future humans are now helping to create themselves by giving humanity the wormhole to a new galaxy. So, the history of humanity after Interstellar looks like this:

Cooper uses his new powers of bookshelf-based intergalactic telecommunication to tell Murph how to solve an unsolvable equation. More on this later; for now, all you need to know is that the fifth-dimensional beings shut down the tesseract and send Cooper back through the wormhole; we know this because, along the way, he meets up with his past self when the Endurance was coming through the wormhole and shakes Anne Hathaway 's hand.

The fifth-dimensional beings then deposit Cooper back in our solar system. This is because the fifth-dimensional beings are really swell people and want Cooper to see his daughter again. You might ask yourself why the fifth-dimensional beings are nice enough to bend the rules of space and time for Cooper when most of the other people in the movie die pointless deaths on the far side of the universe from their loved ones. The simple answer: Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn't give a f--- about Wes Bentley .

Love is Science and Vice Versa

"Love is the one thing that transcends time and space" is something that Anne Hathaway says in Interstellar . It's a nice thought, and it's also the thing that explains everything that happens in Interstellar . Hathaway gives her "love" monologue when she's explaining why the Endurance should go to Edmunds' world instead of Mann's world. Hathaway's character, Brand, happens to be in love with Wolf Edmunds, and her gut tells her that the mission should follow her heart and go to his world, even though Dr. Mann has been broadcasting that his (much closer) world is perfect for human life.

Brand is, it turns out, completely correct to throw aside all her years of scientific training on a love-hunch. Dr. Mann has been lying: A victim of Space Madness, he was only broadcasting good results so that someone would come to save him. At the end of Interstellar, Brand arrives on Edmunds' world, which is much better than the other worlds visited by the Endurance . (The first world they visit is a planet covered by a one-foot-deep ocean and skyscraper-sized waves; the second world they visit is Hoth, basically.)

And Love appears to be the main reason why, when Cooper falls into the black hole, the fifth-dimensional beings put him directly in contact with the person he loves most in the universe: His daughter. (The fifth-dimensional beings do not put him in contact with Tom, his useless son, because Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn't give a f--- about Casey Affleck .) In fact, you could argue that Cooper's love for his daughter is what makes him special; we're told early in the movie that none of the other astronauts sent through the wormhole had any family, and certainly no attachments as strong as Cooper's attachment to his daughter.

Essentially, Interstellar 's time travel is from The Terminator and its astrophysics is from The Fifth Element , where it turns out that the fifth element is love. I'm being silly but not really: As far as Interstellar is concerned, love is a literal potent physical concept, strong enough to bend the elaborate cosmic architecture of wormholes and black holes and far-flung star systems.

Solving Gravity

While Cooper and his merry gang of astronauts are marauding around the furthest reaches of the galaxy, Cooper's daughter Renesmee grows up into brilliant astrophysicist Jessica Chastain . Chastain spends her entire life under the tutelage of Michael Caine , attempting to solve an apparently unsolvable equation. This is Plan A: If NASA can solve this equation, then they will be able to launch awesome space stations into space and save all of the humans who are still on Earth. (Plan B is bleaker: The Endurance carries a flock of human embryos, which will be unfrozen and brought to term on a new Earth, thus creating a whole new human race led by Anne Hathaway.)

There's a lot of physics involved in this mysterious equation—most of which gets reduced, in the movie, to the notion that they have to "solve gravity." At one point in the movie, Chastain expresses some skepticism about Caine's equation, implying that he has been making the job of solving the equation more difficult. Then Michael Caine starts dying, and with his dying breath, he reveals that he already solved the equation, and it didn't offer any salvation.

At least, I thought he said that he solved the equation. A couple of my fellow moviegoers claimed that he never solved the equation, because of a lack of evidence. And one of my editors insists that, in fact, Caine believed the equation could never be solved: That Plan A was always a complete sham.

There's only one way to get the information required to make Plan A possible: Go into a black hole and record everything inside of the black hole and then transmit information from inside that black hole to your daughter using morse code on the minute hand of the watch you gave her during the movie's neverending prologue.

At this point, Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain tells her boyfriend Topher Grace that the only way to solve this equation is to return to the bookshelf in her old family home and wait for the gravity ghost from the fifth dimension to communicate with her. Miraculously, this happens. (See above.) With the information recorded from the black hole, Jessica Chastain is able to solve gravity. Decades later, Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain has aged into Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn . When Cooper wakes up back in Earth's solar system, he's on a space station orbiting nearby Saturn; it's strongly implied that there are many other space stations like this one, all of them designed to look like the small town from a Norman Rockwell painting crossed with the Halo from Halo .

Intriguingly, based on what we see at the end of the movie, it would appear that the humans in our solar system have not crossed the wormhole yet; as Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn dies, she tells Cooper that Anne Hathaway is waiting on the far side of the wormhole, on Edmunds' world, with a lot of human embryos.

Basically, if Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica "Murph" Chastain were to attempt to create a quantum physics proof of Interstellar on her chalkboard, it would look something like this:

IMPORTANT QUESTION: If several decades have passed since Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain "solved" gravity, why is it that Anne Hathaway is still all alone on Edmunds' world, with her beautiful embryos and her bad haircut?

One theory is that time is still moving slower for Hathaway, either because of close proximity to the black hole, because time moves slower in general on the other side of the wormhole, or because that pesky Mr. Mxyzptlk is up to his old tricks again. It's also possible that Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn is speaking more generally: Like, Hathaway discovered Edmunds' world decades ago, then went into suspended hibernation, and now she's waiting for a dashing pilot with Matthew McConaughey 's face to come to her world and help her raise her little embryos into the people of the future.

Stray Theory Time

Interstellar is the story of a daughter telling her widowed father to start dating again.

Consider: Cooper never expresses any romantic interest in anyone ever, which is especially noticeable because Cooper is played by Matthew McConaughey, who usually appears to be flirting with every human onscreen and also some of the plant life.

Cooper meets Brand, who is suffering from her own romantic problems: She's still in love with an old boyfriend who she hasn't seen in a decade and who might be dead. In the entire movie, Cooper is focused on his daughter, and Brand is focused on her old boyfriend.

But at the end of the movie, Cooper's daughter tells him that he doesn't have to worry about her anymore. What he needs to do is get back out there into the dating game. Meanwhile, Brand has finally made found closure with her old boyfriend, because her old boyfriend is dead. Like, the last line of Interstellar is basically: "Hey dad! I love you, but I'm fine. You don't need to worry about me anymore. Maybe you should go meet up with your super smart, very attractive, currently single co-worker!"

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Interstellar Explained (Plot, Ending, Plot Holes Too)

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

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

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

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

Interstellar: Plot Explained

What happened to earth why was earth dying.

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

What is NASA up to?

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

Who is Dr Brand? What does he know?

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

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

What are Plan A and Plan B, then?

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

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

What is the Lazarus Project?

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

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

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

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

Who is Cooper?

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

What is the gravitational anomaly?

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

Murph’s Ghost And The Coordinates In Dust

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

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

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

Endurance: To Saturn and into the Wormhole

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

Choosing the first planet

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

Miller’s Planet Explained

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

Interstellar: Why did Doyle die?

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

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

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

23 Years of Time Dilation

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

Dr Brand confesses and goes out into the night

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

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

Choosing their next planet

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

Mann’s Planet Explained

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

Interstellar: Why did Mann lie about the planet? 

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

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

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

Interstellar: Why did KIPP explode?

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

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

Back to Endurance

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

The Sling Shot

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

Interstellar: Why did cooper detach?

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

Interstellar: Ending Explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tesseract: Multi-Dimensional Space Explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ghost And The Black Hole Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did cooper die?

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

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

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

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

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

Interstellar: Did Cooper find Brand?

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

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

Other Frequently Asked Questions Answered

Interstellar: why did they burn crops.

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

Interstellar: What happened to Jesse? Did Jesse die?

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

Interstellar: What happened to Tom? Did Tom die?

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

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

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

Interstellar: What Happened to Brand? Did Brand die?

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

Interstellar: Did Cooper go back in time?

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

Interstellar: Plot Holes And Gaps Explained

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

Tones Of Data Through A Watch

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

Time Dilation Because Of The Black Hole

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

Why not a handful of Plan Bs?

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

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

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

'Interstellar's Original Ending Was So, So Bleak

Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' almost ended in tragedy rather than triumph.

The Big Picture

• The original ending of Interstellar was bleaker and would have drastically changed the message of the film, removing key sequences and altering the fate of the characters.
• The film initially included scientifically accurate concepts, such as gravitational anomalies caused by the destruction of a neutron star, but these were simplified to make the story more accessible to a general audience.
• The Nolan brothers ultimately chose an optimistic ending that emphasized the power of love and human resilience, even if it strayed from scientific accuracy.

Interstellar is one of the most impactful films released in the past few decades, masterfully balancing unflattering pessimism about Earth’s future with inspirational optimism about the capacity of human ingenuity. The movie was a visual marvel that gave audiences a glimpse into some of the most mysterious and otherworldly aspects of our physical universe. Though the film saw humanity reach out to the far corners of the galaxy, its greatest strength was its emotionally driven and family-oriented narrative . Years before Christopher Nolan earned an Oscar for his masterful movie Oppenheimer , he and his brother, Jonathan Nolan , co-wrote the screenplay for Interstellar based on the works and ideas of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne , creating a product that included scientifically accurate depictions of space travel alongside the limitless possibilities of artistic imagination.

Interstellar is a movie that audiences can walk away from with feelings of inspiration and hope — however, that wasn't always the case. The original ending for the film was significantly bleaker and would have blanketed the narrative with more pessimistic overtones. This conceit came in the early stages of production, before Nolan was even connected to the project, and presented a conclusion that would have elicited an entirely different reaction from audiences.

Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

What Happens in Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar'?

Interstellar was set in a future where humanity's life on Earth was on the verge of complete doom. Environmental degradation has led to worldwide famine, forcing humanity to funnel the overwhelming majority of its resources into farming in a near futile effort to prevent extinction. Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), an ex-NASA astronaut, is one of the many who is forced to work as a corn farmer. His daughter Murph ( Mackenzie Foy ) notices a weird phenomenon in her room: a gravitational anomaly that Cooper is able to identify as Morse code. Upon decoding the message, he discovers a secret NASA facility headed by Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ) and is recruited on a last-ditch mission to save humanity.

Cooper pilots a mission alongside other astronauts, including Brand's daughter Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), through a wormhole in search of a planet capable of sustaining human life. They venture into another galaxy where three planets surround a supermassive black hole, Gargantua, that may be able to host life. However, due to time dilation caused by the black hole's gravity, time on Earth passes at a much faster rate than on the mission . An adult Murph ( Jessica Chastain ) discovers that Brand never intended to find a way to ferry humanity off the planet and had always intended Cooper's mission to fall back on Plan B, which was the delivery of human embryos to create a new colony of humans on one of the planets. However, the first two planets scouted by Amelia and Cooper are deemed inhospitable for humanity, forcing them into one last-ditch effort at a final possible planet. Using a slingshot maneuver to propel Amelia to the last planet, Cooper sacrifices himself in order to give her the necessary momentum.

Christopher Nolan Demanded a Ridiculous Amount of Corn for ‘Interstellar'

Upon falling into the black hole, Cooper finds himself in a fifth-dimensional space , a tesseract, where time is a tangible construct that he is able to interact with. He theorizes that the tesseract, as well as the wormhole that allowed them to travel to that galaxy, were sent by human beings from the long distant future as a way to help humanity save itself. Cooper uses Morse code to send a message to his past self in Murph's bedroom, leading him to join the mission in the first place. He then uses a broken watch to relay information to Murph that allows her to crack a previously unsolvable gravity equation. Cooper survives his journey through the black hole and is rescued outside the wormhole. He awakens to find that Murph was able to use the information he sent to usher in humanity's exodus from Earth, saving the human race from its doomed planet. Amelia's final mission was also a success, as humanity heads for her planet to start over on a new home.

Jonathan Nolan's First Ending Leaned Further Into the Science

However, the optimistic ending of Interstellar wasn't actually in the initial plans. During a media event for the Blu-ray release of the film, Nerdist reported Jonathan Nolan's first idea about the movie's ending. He revealed an ending that was bleaker, albeit more straightforward, than the one they decided to go with. Originally, Jonathan Nolan “ had the Einstein-Rosen bridge [colloquially, a wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back .” Nolan didn't expand on the details of what this means, but the conclusions that come from this are all relatively pessimistic. This ending would have removed a significant portion of the ending sequences of the film. There would be no glimpse of Cooper entering the black hole, no tesseract and fifth dimensional beings, no time manipulation into Murph's bedroom, and no triumphant return for Cooper. The film already contained elements of darkness and themes akin to a horror movie , but this ending would have been a tonal shift that drastically altered the entire message of the film.

In addition to Jonathan Nolan's original ending, other interesting information about the production of the film was shared at the media event. The gravitational anomalies in Murph's bedroom were first meant to be the result of the destruction of a neutron star by a black hole. Kip Thorne explained that gravity waves like that could only be created by an event that is catastrophic and was meant to be detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave-Observatory ( LIGO ). In reality, Thorne was a major player in the construction of the LIGO Lab. However, Christopher Nolan thought that these scientific concepts would be too complicated for the general audience, leading to compromises in the science in order to make the film more digestible.

'Interstellar's Original Ending Is Open to Interpretation

Since Jonathan Nolan didn't elaborate on the details of this planned conclusion, only confirming that the wormhole would have collapsed after Cooper sent the data through, the success of his mission is entirely up to speculation. One possibility is that the data never gets sent back to Murph at all, which would have resulted in a complete failure of the mission . Without that information, humanity would never develop the capability to leave Earth, dooming Murph and the rest of the population to extinction.

No Director Has Weirder Rules on Set Than Christopher Nolan

But that ending seems so bleak and antithetical to the message of the story that it seems unlikely to be the vision. Another option is that the wormhole's collapse doomed only one important sacrifice: Cooper. It's likely that Jonathan Nolan intended for Cooper's data to make its way through the wormhole and back to Murph, though he himself would be unable to follow suit . Cooper would die a hero, sacrificing his life to complete the mission. Humanity and, most importantly to him, his daughter would be saved. This ending is a satisfying conclusion to the themes and motivations of familial love that drive the film, but the fact that Cooper never reunites with Murph would be a tragic outcome that weighs heavily.

Both of these endings would have limited the physics-bending done in the final film, keeping things more grounded in the laws of science rather than theorize to the fifth dimension. Though, at the end of the day, the Nolan brothers rightly chose a triumphant and optimistic ending that allowed their artistic expression to flourish without limitation . The idea that love is able to transcend time, space, and even physical reality is a heartwarming notion that, while not scientifically accurate, creates a much more impactful and human story.

Interstellar is available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.

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Xi Visits Europe, Seeking Strategic Opportunity

The Chinese leader has carefully chosen three countries — France, Serbia and Hungary — that to varying degrees embrace Beijing’s push for a new global order.

By Roger Cohen and Chris Buckley

Reporting from Paris and Taipei, Taiwan

On his first visit to Europe in five years, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, appears intent on seizing opportunities to loosen the continent’s bonds with the United States and forge a world freed of American dominance.

The Chinese leader has chosen three countries to visit — France, Serbia and Hungary — that all, to a greater or lesser degree, look askance at America’s postwar ordering of the world, see China as a necessary counterweight and are eager to bolster economic ties.

At a time of tensions with much of Europe — over China’s “no limits” embrace of Russia despite the war in Ukraine, its surveillance state and its apparent espionage activities that led to the recent arrest in Germany of four people — Mr. Xi, who arrived in France on Sunday, wants to demonstrate China’s growing influence on the continent and pursue a pragmatic rapprochement.

For Europe, the visit will test its delicate balancing act between China and the United States and will no doubt be seen in Washington as a none-too-subtle effort by Mr. Xi to divide Western allies. Chinese-French relations “have established a model for the international community of peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation between countries with different social systems,” Mr. Xi said in a statement issued soon after he arrived in Paris.

He has timed his arrival at his second stop, Serbia, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the deadly NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. That mistaken strike on May 7, 1999, for which the White House apologized, killed three Chinese journalists and ignited furious protests around the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

“For Xi, being in Belgrade is a very economical way to ask if the United States is really serious about international law,” said Janka Oertel, the director of the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, “and to say, how about NATO overreach as a problem for other countries?”

The Chinese government has continued to commemorate the Belgrade bombing, using it as an occasion to denounce what it sees as Western hypocrisy and bullying.

“The United States always views itself as the leader — or hegemon — of the world, so China is a competitor or adversary that is challenging its hegemony,” said Tu Xinquan, the dean of a trade institute at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. “The European Union does not have a hegemonic mind-set.”

The official doctrine of the 27-member European Union defines China as “a partner for cooperation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival.” If that seems a mouthful, and a perhaps contradictory one, it is because the continent is torn between how to balance economic opportunity in China with national security risk, cybersecurity risk and economic risk to various industries.

In March, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told reporters that Europe’s formula was unworkable. “It’s like driving to a crossing and finding the red, yellow and green lights all on at the same time,” he said. “How can one drive on?”

Now, Mr. Xi would like to ease the lights toward green.

To that end, Mr. Xi’s first and most important stop will be in France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has often made the Gaullist point that Europe “must never be a vassal of the United States,” as he did last month at a speech at the Sorbonne . The French leader insists that the survival of the European Union depends on “strategic autonomy” and developing the military resilience to become a “Europe power.” He rejects the notion of “equidistance” between China and the United States — France is one of America’s oldest allies — but wants to keep his options open.

All of this is music to Mr. Xi’s ears.

“Macron is trying to bring a third way in the current global chaos,” said Philippe Le Corre, a prominent French expert on relations with China. “He is trying to walk a fine line between the two main superpowers.”

Just over a year ago, Mr. Macron was lavishly entertained during a visit to China that ended with a Sino-French declaration of a “global strategic partnership.” The French leader echoed the Chinese lexicon of a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” and the “Cold War mentality.”

Now, in anticipation of Mr. Xi’s visit, China has praised France as a great power and expressed hopes that their ties “will always be at the forefront of China’s relations with Western countries,” in the words of Lu Shaye , China’s ambassador to France, in People’s Daily.

Mr. Macron, who recently warned that “our Europe is mortal” and will be saved only if it can become “sovereign,” will host a state dinner for Mr. Xi on Monday in Paris before, in a personal touch, ushering him to a favorite childhood haunt in the Pyrenees.

The chemistry between the two men appears to lie essentially in a shared view that the postwar order is moribund and must be replaced by a new architecture that takes account of shifting power. That Mr. Xi is almost certainly the most repressive and authoritarian leader in recent Chinese history, and that China’s military threats to Taiwan have intensified, has not come between the two leaders.

In the past six months, Mr. Macron has visited both India and Brazil in a push to place France at a fulcrum between the BRICS group of developing countries, which includes China, and Western powers. At a time of growing tension between the “Global South” and Western powers, he sees France as a bridge.

From France, Mr. Xi will move on to the warm embrace of Serbia, where China is the second largest trading partner, and Hungary, where its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has backed enormous Chinese investment and used his country’s position as a European Union member to dilute criticism of China. Both countries bridle at American power.

Beyond these two friends of China, there are, however, serious European differences with Beijing, whose economy was roughly the same size, measured in dollars, as the European Union’s when Mr. Xi last visited in 2019. China’s economy is now some 15 percent bigger.

Last fall, the European Union opened an investigation into whether electric vehicles made in China benefited from unfair subsidies, with a decision expected by this summer. That has caused tensions with Beijing and with Germany, whose presence in the Chinese auto market dwarfs that of other European countries. China accounts for at least half of Volkswagen’s annual profits.

German manufacturers, with plants in China, fear that any imposition of European tariffs could affect its own exports from China, as well as cause tit-for-tat retaliation.

The European Union Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will join the talks in Paris with Mr. Xi. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, whose relations with Mr. Macron have been strained, dined with the French president in Paris this past week. All of this is clearly part of an attempt to forge a united European front.

That, however, is always elusive.

Anger toward Russia in Europe runs highest in frontline states with Russia, like Poland and the Baltic States. They are perhaps the most fiercely attached to the alliance with the United States that Mr. Macron wants to offset by building a sovereign Europe. They are also the most wary of China, which has never condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Mr. Macron, like Mr. Scholz during a visit to China last month, believes that Chinese leverage in bringing an end to the war in Ukraine is critical. Only Beijing, in the French analysis, can bring real pressure to bear on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who will be sworn in for a fifth term during Mr. Xi’s European visit.

The issue, as it was last year during Mr. Macron’s visit to Beijing, is that China has shown little or no inclination to do so. Indeed, Mr. Xi is scheduled to host Mr. Putin in China later this month.

“It’s hard to imagine another discussion on Ukraine,” François Godement, a special adviser and resident senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne in Paris, said of the talks between Mr. Macron and Mr. Xi. “Those dice have been rolled.”

Still, there is little doubt that Mr. Macron will try again to enlist Mr. Xi’s support ahead of a Ukraine peace conference in Switzerland in mid-June.

At a deeper level, Mr. Macron appears certain to try to use Mr. Xi’s visit to advance an agenda that guarantees Europe’s relevance in the coming decades. He is wary of a United States that may re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in November, with unpredictable consequences.

Mr. Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, has said , “As long as China and Europe join hands, bloc confrontation will not occur, the world will not fall apart, and a new Cold War will not take place.”

For all of the fundamental differences in governance between China’s one-party state and Western liberal democracy, the leaders of the three European countries Mr. Xi has chosen to visit appear to embrace that Chinese statement.

Reporting was contributed by Olivia Wang from Hong Kong, Keith Bradsher from Beijing, Christopher F. Schuetze and Melissa Eddy from Berlin and Ségolène Le Stradic from Paris.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the year of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. It was 1999, not 1993.

How we handle corrections

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about Roger Cohen

Chris Buckley , the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley