Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar (2014)

In co-writer/director Christopher Nolan's lengthy, gripping, ambitious and dazzling sci-fi family drama - the epic film was set in a future dystopic time period in the year 2067, when massive crop failures and incessant dust and sandstorms on the scorched Earth (a veritable Dust Bowl) threatened humanity's existence with worldwide famines. The dust storm sequence was inspired and/or based upon the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl (2012).

The tagline of the big-budget, 'save-the-world' film was about how mankind was facing extinction: ("The end of Earth will not be the end of us."). It was an audacious, gripping tale about finding a new habitable planet via interstellar travel, surviving in outer space, and efforts to colonize a new world, with a corresponding personal and sentimental family story. The film was authentically-researched to bring together art and science, using the advice of CalTech astrophysicists, among others. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who wrote the tie-in book The Science of Interstellar, also served as the film's executive producer and scientific consultant.

From its five Academy Award nominations (Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Production Design), it received one Oscar for Best Visual Effects. With a huge budget of 165ドル million, the film achieved revenues of 203ドル.2 million (domestic) and 758ドル.5 million (worldwide).

• in the film's opening prologue set in the year 2067, an elderly "Murph" (Ellen Burstyn) and others briefly described - with flashbacks - how the Earth was challenged by massive dust-storms that devastated crop land and threatened food supplies; every year that a crop was decimated due to blight (pathogenic plant diseases), Earth's inhabitants were further threatened with worldwide starvation and the reduction of oxygen levels

• widowed engineer and former NASA pilot Joseph ("Cooper" or "Coop") Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), now a farmer/homesteader in the Midwest, lived with his two young children: 15 year-old teenaged son Tom (Timothee Chalamet), and his 10 year-old daughter Murphy or "Murph" (Mackenzie Foy as young girl), care for the children was shared with Cooper's elderly father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), the father of Cooper's deceased wife; ex-pilot Cooper resorted to a reclusive life of farming when NASA cut the government funds that supported his employment
• on the way to a local farm-school parent-teacher conference, Cooper and his two kids experienced a flat tire in their truck, but were able to delicately down a lost Indian Air Force surveillance drone (in the skies for 10 years) that was possibly looking for a signal; Coop removed its solar power pack to help power up his farm or drive his combine; at the school, Coop was told by the school principal (David Oyelowo) that his son's test scores didn't qualify him for college, but he would make an excellent farmer; Cooper also squabbled with Murph's teacher Ms. Hanley (Collette Wolfe) about how she supported a new "corrected" federal textbook for the students that promoted the claim that the US' Apollo moon missions had been faked in the 20th century, for propagandistic purposes, to bankrupt the Soviet Union; Cooper felt insulted when Ms. Hanley mentioned rockets and other "useless machines" that had been wastefully designed to leave the planet, and how Murph had entered into a fist-fight with other students to protest what the teacher called "Apollo nonsense"
• a strange phenomenon occurred back at the farm - due to unusual magnetic or gravitational forces, Cooper's harvesting-combine machines (that he had recently reset) went "haywire" and were found sitting in his driveway
• in Murph's bedroom, she hypothesized (by using the scientific method) that a "ghost" might be knocking books off her shelf to communicate with her; she had used Morse Code to try and discover a pattern; Cooper stated a key theory - later proven to be wrong - "I just don't think your bookshelf's trying to talk to you"
• after a major dust-storm that forced the abrupt cancellation of a local baseball game featuring the NY Yankees in town, "Murph" found strange thick-and-thin dust-patterns on her upstairs bedroom floor due to an open window; earlier, she thought that her room was possibly 'haunted' by a supernatural intelligent "ghost" (or poltergeist) throwing books around, but then Cooper theorized that additional gravitational forces had caused the pattern ("It's gravity"), and that the patterns could be translated into binary code to reveal geographical (GPS) coordinates ("It's binary. Thick is one, thin is zero. Coordinates")
• "Coop" (with his curious daughter sneaking a ride under a blanket in the truck) were summoned to the geographical location that was a 6 hours journey away from the farm; at a locked gate where they were approached by an ex-Marine military-security companion robot (named TARS), the two were taken into custody and brought into a secret underground NASA facility-laboratory headed by one of the scientists, Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway); Coop was reunited with Amelia's father - his former supervisor/mentor and NASA scientist - Professor John Brand (Michael Caine); there under the guidance of Professor Brand, a group of astronauts and scientists including Williams (William Devane) were struggling to save the world

• "Coop" was informed by Professor Brand that they were a top-secret offshoot of NASA (Coop's previous employer), supported by secret government funding; they were tackling the problem of how to sustain human life; future blights (and the decimation of the last crop of corn) would eventually lead humans suffering from a lack of oxygen ("The last people to starve will be the first to suffocate"); the current youthful generation would be the last to survive on Earth; they were on a search for other habitable planets through interstellar travel that could sustain human life and save the world; Brand bluntly stated: "We're not meant to save the world. We're meant to leave it"
• Coop learned about previous "Lazarus" missions (with 12 astronauts) sent 10 years earlier that traversed through a wormhole named Gargantua (that had mysteriously appeared or developed 48 years earlier near the rings of Saturn - who put it there?); all of the missions went through Gargantua and entered into another faraway distant galaxy orbiting Gargantua that had 12 potentially-habitable worlds [Note: Who had deliberately created the wormhole to provide a way for the human race to enter into a galaxy with other worlds? Were 'they' benevolent alien intelligences or super-advanced humans from the future who had mastered quantum mechanics?]
• 10 years previously, the objective of each of the 12 solo-mission astronauts in 12 Ranger-launchers was to evaluate one world for possible colonizing; out of the 12 worlds, three returned data that their world was a potentially-habitable planet-world; each one was named after the astronaut-scientist leading the sub-mission: Dr. Laura Miller, Dr. Wolf Edmunds, and Dr. Mann
• Brand described and proposed how a new mission would be launched where the previous missions had searched, to find out whether any of the three missions had discovered a viable planet for human life; once it was determined which world was most suitable for colonization, a massive NASA space-station (or compound) would be launched to enable Earth's exodus - Plan A
• Professor Brand also explained how he was still working on a complicated equation to solve problematic gravity issues involving how to effectively launch heavy objects (fuel and people) with the current rocket power; his basic objective was to manipulate and control gravity, and he promised he would solve it once "Murph" returned; if Plan A (a massive exodus on a space-station) proved to be impossible, he also described an alternative Plan B - a back-up plan to have Endurance loaded with the seeds of new human life (5,000 frozen, fertilized eggs/embryos); 10 initial embryos would be incubated and used, and exponentially would be able to repopulate and create a colony of 100s of humans in just a few decades
• "Coop" faced the difficult decision to be separated from his family for years, and his daughter "Murph" was distraught; he told his father-in-law about his destiny as a chosen one to leave Earth and save humanity: "Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here"; he gave "Murph" a gift of a matching wristwatch, to compare their relative ages at various times; he also mentioned that they might be the same age when he returned due to time-space relativity
• "Coop" agreed to pilot the lengthy mission on the last available in-orbit mother-ship Endurance; Cooper's 2 year-voyage to Saturn for the mission launched with fellow crew members-astronauts, including:
  • Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Professor Brand's strong-willed daughter and biotechnologist
  • Dr. Doyle (Wes Bentley), co-pilot/researcher
  • Dr. Nikolai "Rom" Romilly (David Gyasi), a second science researcher
  • TARS (voice of Bill Irwin) - a wise-cracking, decommissioned militarized security-robot
• accompanying the crew was TARS was a talkative, witty, boxy, monolithic-shaped robot with a voice like HAL (with nods to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)) and a computer screen; the four long 'fingers' or planks of TARS allowed it to walk in different configurations; also along for the journey was CASE (voice of Josh Stewart) - TARS' twin, although more quiet and reserved; it had a two-legged gait, a "crutch walk," a scissors kick, and it could do a full-on four-legged gallop

• as planned, the mission's shuttle docked with the mother ship Endurance, already in orbit; inside, the crew of astronauts placed themselves within "cryo-pods" (cryogenic chambers) for deep sleep during an almost 2-year journey to Saturn (after traveling 8 months to Mars, they performed a slingshot maneuver toward Saturn that would take another 14 months); awakening later near Saturn, Cooper received a video message from Earth from his family members, but there was no message from "Murph"
• the flight mission entered the circle-shaped wormhole or black-hole ("a spherical hole"), and then chose to investigate the closest planet first, where Dr. Laura Miller's mission had searched earlier; due to the planet's close proximity to the wormhole of Gargantua, gravitational forces had caused drastic changes in time - one hour on the planet's surface equaled 7 years back on Earth!; after a difficult landing attempt in the shuttle Ranger (by pilot Coop) on the planet's watery surface, the expedition (Amelia, Doyle and TARS) discovered wreckage of the transmitting beacon and other parts from Miller's failed expedition in the water; due to Gargantua's strong pull, a huge tidal wave struck and killed Doyle, and swamped the shuttle with water; the shuttle had to be drained of water, taking decades and jeopardizing their mission (Coop: "We're stuck here till there won't be anyone left on Earth to save"); Amelia theorized about Miller's fate: "On this planet's time, she just landed hours ago. She probably just died minutes ago"
• once they were back with Endurance, Dr. Romilly told them that 23 years, 4 months and 8 days had passed; years of video messages had been received and stored; by now, Cooper's son Tom had grown up (Casey Affleck as young adult), was married to Lois (Leah Cairns) and was living and working on the farm; in a later message, Tom had lost his son Jesse, and Donald had also died; grown-up daughter "Murph" (Jessica Chastain as young adult) also left her first message; she had become a brilliant Plan A NASA scientist, who was working with the aging Professor Brand, and was now communicating with her lost-in-space father; Brand was continuing to work on a gravity manipulation equation

• low on fuel, the Endurance's mission was only capable of visiting one other planet; the one investigated by Mann (Matt Damon) was still transmitting data (but was sterile and had no organic life); Amelia proposed visiting Edmunds' planet with better and "more promising" data; Cooper suspected her choice was due to the concealed fact that she was in love with Dr. Wolf Edmunds; she delivered a wonderful soliloquy to Cooper about the power of love:
  • "When I say that love isn't something we invented, observable, powerful. It [love] has to mean something... Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. 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"
  Cooper overruled her, however, due to her perceived lack of objectivity, and set the course with CASE toward Mann's planet
• meanwhile on Earth during a rare visit to the farm (that was continuing to lose acreage), Murphy noticed that Tom's and Lois' young son Coop (Liam Dickinson) had a serious respiratory problem; also, the dying Professor Brand had been placed in the ICU, where he admitted to Murph that the idea of Plan A and an "equation" were basically "monstrous lies" and frauds: ("I let you all down...Forgive me, Murph...I lied to you"); he hinted that he lacked the information (the black hole's gravitational singularity data) needed to completely solve the equation; it also crossed Murphy's mind, as she sent a video message to Dr. Amelia Brand about her father's death, that her own father had possibly left Earth knowing about their ultimate fate of starvation and suffocation: ("You left us here to suffocate. To starve. Did my father know too? Dad, I just want to know if you left me here to die. I just have to know")
• with the lander-shuttle, Cooper and his crew landed on the inhospitable and ice-covered surface of Dr. Mann's planet; in Mann's base camp, he was awakened from cryo-stasis, and was overjoyed - he had arrived 10 years earlier; he described the typical day as being 67 long and cold days and the same 67 hours at night; at higher elevations, the air was ammonia-filled, but breathable according to his data probes at surface elevations; while talking to Mann, Amelia received Murphy's video message about her father's death; and then Murphy declared: "This is all a sham" - she also asked if her own father had known about the fraud; the heart-wrenching video was devastating to both of them; Mann admitted that he was aware that Dr. Brand had already known years earlier that he couldn't solve the equation without additional data from the black hole singularity to completely solve the equation; in reality, Dr. Brand had more hope in his alternative Plan B - to populate another planet using frozen embryos
• Dr. Mann went on to explain that without the equation, it would be almost impossible for the Endurance to return through the black hole, and not possible to launch a space station to transport humans to reach the planet due to strong gravitational forces from the black hole; Brand knew that if he had divulged the truth, the human race would panic about their doom and not work together to save others: ("He knew how hard it would be to get people to work together to save the species instead of themselves. Or their children"); Cooper decided that he must find a way to return to Earth, and use TARS on the way as a probe to gather the crucial singularity data from within the black hole
• while alone on the planet with Cooper on a scouting trip, Dr. Mann made an attempt on Cooper's life and damaged his helmet as part of his plan of sabotage; his goal was to prevent Cooper from leaving, and confessed that he had faked data about the uninhabitable planet, so that he could be rescued by the Endurance crew: ("I can't let you leave with that ship. We're gonna need it to complete the mission, once the others realize what this place isn't. We cannot survive here...I knew the day that I arrived here that this place had nothing...if I just pressed that button, then somebody would come and save me"); Cooper was able to alert Amelia to his compromised breathing condition and she saved him, but back at the base, Dr. Romilly died due to a booby-trap placed inside Mann's dismantled robot KIPP (to prevent the discovery of his falsified data); at the same time, Mann stole the lander-shuttle and attempted to hijack the Endurance and maroon Brand and Cooper; he died in a crash-explosion while attempting an unauthorized docking of the lander with the Endurance; in a second shuttle, Amelia and Cooper used up precious fuel as they chased after their damaged, spinning mother-ship but were able to synchronize and dock with it, although they realized they were now heading directly into the black hole's gravitational pull
• after the various catastrophes, subterfuge, failures, double-crosses, deaths and challenges during the space adventure, it was impossible to make it back to Earth; the only remaining viable plan (for survivors Amelia, Cooper, and the two robots TARS and CASE) was to attempt to land on the final and 3rd planet named Edmunds; the plan was to slingshot on a gravity-assisted path around the black hole of Gargantua to save fuel, but they consumed another 51 years during the maneuver; without warning Amelia, Cooper sacrificed himself by ejecting his heavy, auxiliary Ranger 2 space-shuttle from Endurance, to allow Amelia (and CASE) to reach their destination; he flew in his shuttle directly into the black hole of Gargantua, at the same time that TARS also disengaged and flew into the wormhole, to function as a probe in order to glimpse the singularity and relay the quantum data to NASA on Earth

• in the point-of-no-return 'event horizon' (the surrounding boundary of the wormhole) of Gargantua, Cooper lost control of his shuttle, ejected from the shuttle, and was sucked into light beams; both Cooper and TARS fell into a 3-D "tesseract"; Cooper viewed an infinite number of copies of Murph's childhood bedroom (and bookshelves) and was able to see inside; he was able to view Murph (both young and old), and even himself, as he communicated the word "STAY"; he was begging for them to keep him there and prevent him from abandoning them and his family ("Make him stay, Murph. Don't let me leave, Murph!"), but they didn't understand the word's meaning
• while Murphy was visiting the family home, she realized that Cooper was cleverly sending messages to her via books falling off the shelf; the older Murph also sensed that her father had been the "ghost" in her room when she was a child ("You were my ghost") - but now they were on different planes of time and space; he was the one who had sent the NASA facility's coordinates (translated into binary) to himself, through dust pattern-markings on the floor

• still in the tesseract, Cooper reestablished communications with TARS, who explained that they were in a 5th dimension, created by alien beings: "They constructed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it...time is represented here as a physical dimension"; Cooper deduced that the earlier suspected alien beings in the room were actually ultra-advanced, intelligent humans (like himself) in the far future, not 5-D beings; he also realized that gravity would allow him, in the constructed "tesseract" space, to enable communications with Earthlings: ("Gravity can cross the dimensions, including time"); the older Murph then understood: "It's not a ghost, it's gravity"; Cooper also experienced a breakthrough revelation: "I brought myself here! We're here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We're the bridge! I thought they chose me. But they didn't choose me, they chose her...to save the world"
• during TARS' presence inside the wormhole, the robot probe had captured and obtained the crucial quantum data on the black hole's gravitational singularity; Cobb sent the data to Murph in a Morse Coded message that moved the second hand on his wristwatch gift lovingly given to her before he left; "Coop" was able to communicate with the older Murph, who sensed he was possibly trying to save her; she rushed outside and told her brother: "He came back! It was him all the time! I didn't know. it was him! Dad's gonna save us"
• the data enabled Murph to solve the equation and manipulate gravity; this would allow for the space station to successfully launch and evacuate people from Earth, enabling the survival of humanity through a mass exodus. After Coop's completion of his successful communications, the "tesseract" collapsed and ejected him and TARS from the black hole back into Saturn's orbit; Cooper again reiterated: "They're not 'Beings.' They're us. What I've been doing for Murph, they're doing for me. For all of us"
• in the film's conclusion, "Coop" and TARS had been rescued in the year 2156 by humans; he was inside a massive O'Neill tube-shaped cylinder - the Cooper Space Station orbiting around Saturn that had been named after Murph; it was the first colony-settlement; "Coop" awakened in a hospital room and was told that he was 124 years old, but still middle-aged due to the warped time-space continuum in Gargantua
• a few weeks later, Coop was shown a restored reconstruction of his old farmhouse, now functioning as a museum; he was also reunited with a disabled TARS and spent time rebuilding his partner-robot; after his now-elderly daughter "Murph" was brought out of 2 years of cryo, they spent a few moments together when she assured him: "I knew you'd come back....because my Dad promised me"; she was on her deathbed, but urged him to continue on to go and find Amelia Brand on Edmunds' planet: ("She's out there setting up camp. Alone in a strange galaxy")

• in the film's final moments, "Coop" and the rehabilitated TARS set out on another (unauthorized) mission on a spacecraft to search for Amelia and CASE; she had landed on Edmunds' third habitable (arid and dry) planet (Edmunds was found dead and buried under a pile of rocks), and had set up a viable base-camp; she was about to initiate the alternative Plan B - to prepare the planet's colony for repopulation and human settlement with the embryos