“What does research tell us is the last
thing
you're going to see before you die?
Your children.”
Interstellar is a precise scientific film...
where love saves the day.
“My connection with Murph,
it is quantifiable.
It's the key!”
That might sound paradoxical,
since our society tends to frame
science and sentiment as an either/or.
But Christopher Nolan’s film argues that
--
to safeguard the future of our species --
we need both hard logic
and warm emotion working together.
“Love is the one thing
we're capable of perceiving
that transcends dimensions
of time and space...
Maybe we should trust that,
even if we can't understand it yet.”
After failing to find a new home
for the dwindling population of earth,
Cooper seems doomed to die in a black hole
when something... supernatural happens --
Cooper seems to be behind the wall
of his daughter Murph’s childhood room.
He reaches out to her
through a doorway in time.
“I'm gonna find a way to tell Murph,
just like I found this moment.”
“How, Cooper?”
“Love, TARS, love”
This love between a father and daughter is
the key to saving humankind from extinction
--
and it’s also the key to understanding
Interstellar’s deeper meaning.
So let’s take a look at the movie’s ending
to understand what happened and what it all
meant.
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The earth has been devastated
by dust storms and blight.
Humanity is an endangered species.
"We didn't run out of
television screens and planes.
We ran out of food."
A mysterious wormhole appears,
allowing Cooper and his team
to travel far beyond the solar system
to search for a planet suitable for life.
"One system with three potential worlds?
No long shot."
As they head toward the third
and final planet on their list,
only Cooper, Amelia Brand and the robot TARS
remain of the original crew.
Cooper decides TARS must detach
to reduce the weight on the spacecraft.
"We have to shed the weight
to escape the gravity."
Once TARS is sucked into
the nearby black hole,
there the robot can collect the quantum data
needed to figure out how to control gravity,
in order to lift the remaining people
off Earth into space and save them.
“It's our only chance
to save people on Earth.
If I can find a way to transmit
the quantum data I'll find in there,
they might still make it.”
Early in the film we hear
that Amelia Brand’s father, Dr. Brand,
has been trying to figure out
how to do this without success.
“Suddenly we knew
that harnessing gravity was real.
So I started working on a theory
and we started building this station.”
“But you haven't solved it yet.”
Cooper also detaches his lander
from the spacecraft
to increase Brand’s odds
of reaching the last planet.
“Newton's third law.
You got to leave something behind.”
He hurtles into a black hole
before winding up in a place
that looks like Murph’s bedroom.
This strange, M.C.
Escher-eque reality is
actually a tesseract --
a construct that gives him access
to the fifth dimension.
“They constructed this three-dimensional
space
inside their five-dimensional reality
to allow you to understand it.”
"Yeah, that ain't working."
Here every moment in time exists at once.
“All of this is one little girl's bedroom.
Every moment.
It's infinitely complex”
Cooper uses Murph’s books
to send a message in Morse code.
Earlier in the film, we saw
that Murph believes this message
comes from a ghost.
“I figured out the message.
One word.
Know what it is?
‘Stay.’”
In fact, it’s Cooper’s desperate attempt
to stop his past self from leaving,
since at this moment he has every reason
to regret giving up his life with his family
only to end up stranded in space.
"Don't let me leave, Murph!"
But, back on Earth,
adult Murph puts two and two together.
“You were my ghost.”
With the help of TARS,
Cooper realizes what he has to do.
“You have worked out that you can exert
a force across space-time.”
“Gravity -- to send a message.”
“Affirmative.”
He uses dust to communicate
the coordinates of the NASA base,
which again gives us
a full-circle moment,
since we saw him and Murph
read these coordinates
and visit the base earlier
in the film.
By passing on the coordinates,
Cooper is setting his past self
on track to go on the interstellar mission.
Finally he uses the watch he gave Murph
“We code the data into
the movement of the second hand.”
to send her the quantum data
she needs to save humankind.
“Eureka!”
Once Cooper has passed on these messages,
the tesseract collapses,
hurling Cooper into space.
He wakes up on a space station
named after his daughter.
“Where am I?”
“Cooper Station.
Currently orbiting Saturn.”
Murph’s mission was successful.
When Cooper and his now-elderly daughter reunite,
she urges him to find Brand.
"Go."
In the film’s last scene, we see
that Brand did reach the last planet --
humankind’s next home.
Interstellar’s ending leaves us
with a few lingering questions.
Like... number one:
who are “the bulk beings”
that TARS refers to
near the end of the movie?
"The bulk beings are
closing the tesseract."
Cooper theorizes that the tesseract
was built by future humans.
“Cooper, people couldn't build this.”
“No.
No, not yet.
But one day.
Not you and me.
But people.
A civilization that's evolved past
the four dimensions we know.”
It replicates for Cooper
how they perceive time.
“You see time here is
represented as a physical dimension.”
This recalls something
Brand says earlier in the film:
“To them, time may be just
another physical dimension.
To them, the past might be a canyon
they can climb into
and the future a mountain
they can climb up.
But to us it’s not.”
Nobel Prize winning physicist Kip Thorne,
who collaborated on the film,
has argued that we wouldn’t see a bulk being
if they passed through our environment.
But, we would see and feel a warping of space,
like in the handshake scene.
Brand thinks she’s making contact
with the bulk beings --
who are referred to throughout the movie
as simply “they” or “them.”
“What is that?”
“I think it's them.”
“Distorting space-time.”
Later we see this is actually Cooper
reaching out to Brand as the tesseract collapses.
Cooper isn’t a bulk being,
but in this moment he gets to experience
the way that they can manipulate space time.
And this leads us to another question:
Number two: If the bulk beings have
so much control over time and space,
why do they need Cooper at all?
Here’s Cooper’s own answer:
“They have access to infinite time and space,
but they're not bound by anything!
They can't find a specific place in time.
They can't communicate.
That's why I'm here.”
Even though this future civilization
has powers we can’t imagine,
Cooper’s human limitations
provide something essential --
he can connect to specific moments in time,
and he’s bound to another human being.
First-time viewers may think
that Cooper is traveling backwards in time
--
how else could he be the “ghost”
leaving messages in the past?
In fact, Cooper is outside linear time --
so he’s not rewinding;
he’s just able to access
all moments in time at once.
This may connect to the movie’s
biggest unanswered question, which is:
Number three: How do
the future human beings exist at all,
since Cooper needs the tesseract
they built in order to save humankind,
but the future humans can’t exist
until he’s saved the people on Earth.
Some viewers consider this a plot hole --
but if these bulk beings really
view time as a flat circle,
then causality, befores and afters
wouldn’t matter for them in the way they
bind us.
Question four: Is Interstellar
scientifically accurate?
“There were occasional moments with Kip
where I would sort of say, look --
we really have to find a way
to make, you know, this happen.
And he would go away and do calculations
and find ways that could accommodate
both the demands of the story
and also real physics.”
Thorne writes in his book,
The Science of Interstellar,
that he had two ground rules
when he signed onto the film --
quote, “1.
Nothing in the film will
violate firmly established laws of physics,
or our firmly established
knowledge of the universe.
2.
Speculations (often wild) about
ill-understood physical laws and the universe
will spring from real science,
from ideas that at least
some ‘respectable’ scientists
regard as possible.”
Of course, a lot of this movie
is speculative --
but it’s also not impossible.
Thorne said that time travel
is the one element of Interstellar
that doesn’t rest on proven science,
and was, quote,
“much less constrained
by the laws of physics
because we don’t understand
the laws of physics in that domain yet!”
"Time is relative, okay?
I-I-It can stretch, it can squeeze,
but, it can't run backwards.
It just can't."
Many of Nolan’s films have
the set-up of a protagonist
who is separated from his loved ones --
usually by death or the burdens of responsibility.
“How long would I be gone?”
“Hard to know.
Years?”
“I've got kids, professor.”
“Get out there and save them.”
Nolan uses this premise
to investigate unfulfilled love.
This love endures even when its continued
existence
is completely illogical.
“We love people who have died.
Where's the social utility in that?”
“None.”
In Interstellar, the characters
who love each other
but can’t be together
are Cooper and Murph.
"I need to fix this
before I go."
"Then I'll keep it broken
so you have to stay."
But here Nolan is doing something
a little different than in his other movies
--
he’s not just looking at how connections
between individuals last against all odds,
but how all of humanity finds a way.
The film pushes us to care
about Cooper and Murph’s bond
in order to broaden our view --
as a link to make us invest
in faceless future generations.
“The last people to starve
will be the first to suffocate.
And your daughter's generation
will be the last to survive on Earth.”
Consider Dr. Brand’s great lie.
He admits that he deceived
Cooper and the other astronauts
into going on the Interstellar mission.
He never had a plan to save
the remaining people on Earth;
“There was no need for him...
to come back.
There is no way to help us.”
his only true mission was
to use fertilized eggs
to restart human civilization
on a new planet.
"Why keep building those stations?"
“He knew how hard it would be
to get people to work together
to save the species instead of themselves.
Or their children.”
“Bullshit.”
“You never would've come here
unless you believed you were gonna save them.”
Dr. Brand’s lie is unethical,
but on some level the movie itself
is trying to get us to
think big picture as he does.
“We must reach far
beyond our own lifespans.
We must think not as individuals
but as a species.”
All of this might remind us of
the current conversation about climate change.
It’s natural to care more
about the people in our lives today
than about future people
we’ll never know.
“We can care deeply,
selflessly about those we know,
but that empathy rarely extends
beyond our line of sight.”
Some -- maybe most -- of us are
more like Matt Damon’s character, Dr. Mann.
He’s focused on the immediate future:
his own survival.
“I knew that if I just pressed that button,
then somebody would come and save me.”
In contrast, Dr. Brand’s
logical solution to the problem
may strike us as a little
too heartless and impersonal --
"That monstrous lie?"
"Unforgivable.
And he knew that."
instinctively we feel that saving our species
is more than just passing on our genes;
it should also involve protecting
the people that already live.
The movie tells us that,
if we want real solutions
to combat global problems
like climate change,
we need more people like Cooper,
who integrates Dr. Mann’s personal emotion
and Dr. Brand’s impersonal logic.
Cooper’s deeply felt love guides him
to make logical choices
for the good of all people --
"Mankind was born on earth,
it was never meant to die here."
he makes a personal sacrifice for humanity,
ensuring that Brand has a chance
to find our species a new home.
"Don't."
"Detach."
One clever way that Interstellar trains us
to work our empathy muscles is
through the way it uses the word, “they.”
“‘They’” are beings
of five dimensions.”
The characters call the future human civilization
by this pronoun.
“They saved us.”
“Yeah?
Who the hell is ‘they’?
And just why would they want to help us, huh?”
“They” placed the wormhole,
allowing the astronauts
to get to the other planets
in the first place.
“Someone placed it there.”
“‘They?’”
“And whoever they are,
they appear to be looking out for us.”
And of course,
they built the tesseract.
So the “they” here are
not abstract strangers --
they’re descendants
of the present humans,
who are helping and looking out
for their ancestors.
"They put potentially habitable worlds
right within our reach."
While it can be easy to dismiss
future people as anonymous,
the movie reminds viewers
that these future generations are us --
the offspring of our children’s children.
“Don't you get it yet, TARS?
They're not ‘beings.’
They're us.”
Seeing elderly Murph surrounded
by her family at the end of her life
helps us make this empathy leap --
from loving our own immediate families,
to loving our ancestors and descendants,
to loving all people.
Ultimately, what is humankind
but a collection of distant siblings,
parents, and children, anyway?
Young Murph is haunted by
a “ghost” who turns out to be Cooper.
But after all, an ancestor is a ghost:
someone whose presence is felt
after they leave this world.
“I called it a ghost
because it felt... like a person.”
This connection between generations
is supernatural,
surpassing both logic and time --
it’s about continuing to love someone,
even when you can’t see them
or they can’t see you.
“I love you forever.
You hear me?
I love you forever.”
Interstellar tells us
that science and emotion overlap --
and that rather than embracing
one over the other,
we should let the head
and the heart work in tandem.
Near the beginning of the film,
we get this exchange:
“We learned these coordinates from an anomaly.”
“What sort of anomaly?
“I hesitate to term it supernatural,
but it definitely wasn't scientific.”
We also hear:
“It’s not a ghost,
it’s gravity.”
These anomalies do come from gravity,
but they also come from something
so far beyond our imagination
that they seem almost magical.
In many ways, the supernatural,
the unexplained and the illogical
are what drive scientific study.
"Love isn't something we invented, it's...
observable, powerful.
It has to mean something."
One of the most logical decisions
we see in the movie backfires spectacularly.
Brand doesn’t want to leave the ocean planet
without Miller’s data --
“We’re not leaving without her data.”
and her stalling costs
the mission 23 years.
"What's this gonna cost us, Brand?"
"A lot.
Decades."
On the other hand,
she makes the illogical case
for traveling to the planet
of Wolf Edmunds, the man she loves.
"I'm drawn across the universe
to someone I haven't seen in a decade,
who I know is probably dead."
But this emotional instinct proves correct
--
Edmunds did find the only habitable world.
"And that makes me want to follow my heart."
At the movie’s climax, science brings
Cooper into the black hole,
but love enables him to reach Murph.
And Cooper’s plan of
passing her the quantum data
depends on his faith that she will come back
for the watch that he gave her.
“How do you know?”
“Because I gave it to her.”
Like her dad, Murph believes
in the power of love.
“But I knew you'd come back.”
“How?”
“Because my dad promised me.”
These two are driven equally
by logic and emotion --
and this reflects Nolan’s larger views
of truth and storytelling.
“It sort of feels to me like
for something to be true,
there ought to be an element
of feeling and intuition,
it shouldn’t just be hard math.”
Space movies often confront themes
of fear, the unknown, and isolation from society
--
but Interstellar is
rare in its genre
because it leaves us
with a deeply positive message.
It encourages us to be curious
about the greater universe --
“We used to look up in the sky
and wonder at our place in the stars.”
and to broaden our view of humanity.
This film wants us to know
that what really defines us is love.
“Love is that fifth dimension.
Love is that thing that travels through time,
forward, backward, up and down.”
Love is what we humans
add to the universe.
“Maybe it's some evidence, some...
artifact of a higher dimension
that we can't consciously perceive.”
And recognizing how small we are
in the grand scheme of things
doesn’t render that love unimportant --
on the contrary, it just might save the world.
“But they didn't choose me,
they chose her.”
“For what, Cooper?”
“To save the world.”
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