******GARGANTUA-SIZED SPOILERS!******

In November of 2014, my wife and I took a friend of ours to see director Christopher Nolan’s then-new space opus “Interstellar” in a massive IMAX 65mm presentation. This was not some all-digital ‘faux MAX’ screening you see in multiplexes today; this was honest-to-goodness, several freaking stories-high IMAX 65 mm film. I could tell the movie was being sourced from actual film stock too, as I saw scratches and other filmic artifacts as it was projected onto that massive screen. “Interstellar” was a truly stunning moviegoing experience.

Well, that was a decade ago.  Since then, we’ve had a terrible pandemic which made me a lot more skittish about which movies I bother to see theatrically these days. I’ve also been fairly disappointed with most big-budget releases I’ve seen theatrically, too (I’m looking at you, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”).  I also own “Interstellar” on a fine-looking Blu-Ray, so rather than waste the gas and trouble to see it again theatrically for this retrospective, I decided to watch it at home on my 7 ft/ 2 meter rollout screen via my HD digital projector.  The Blu-Ray I own still widens the aspect ratio whenever an IMAX scene appears, so it’s a decent (if not overwhelming) approximation of the experience I had ten years ago.  

This time around, I was also more interested in viewing “Interstellar” as a human-sized movie, not a massive IMAX experience. Rather than giving a detailed synopsis of the (very complex) story, I’m going to caption key moments of the film, and offer my own notes along the way, followed by my usual ‘Summing It Up’ section. Let’s take a deep dive into…

“Interstellar” (2014)

Note: The movie opens in 2067 in a dying US Midwestern farm town (shot in rural Canada), as blight and climate change wreak havoc with the world’s food supply. Intercut with documentary footage of actress Ellen Burstyn (“The Exorcist”) describing endless dust storms, we see actual interviews of real-life Dust Bowl survivors from the 1930s, taken from the Ken Burns documentary “Dust Bowl” (2012).  When I first saw “Interstellar”, I immediately recognized actress Ellen Burstyn, of course, but I had no idea she was playing an older version of Murphy Cooper; the daughter of Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). More on that later…

Note: We’re introduced to Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) during a nightmare as he remembers a failed test flight in a prototype NASA spacecraft that never left the stratosphere. We also meet Cooper’s kids; son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy). Tom is content to follow in his grandfather Donald’s (John Lithgow) farming career, while Murphy has her father’s knack for mathematics and engineering. Cooper’s NASA test-piloting career was cut short as a worldwide food shortage forced the US government to reprioritize everything for emergency food production. There were military cuts as well, as the US can no longer standing armies; which were replaced with robotic soldiers. We also hear of massive cuts to education, as more students are geared towards occupations in agriculture. As climate change escalates, this bleak future might be a lot closer than the filmmakers imagined ten years ago.

Note: We learn more of this movie’s world during the parent-teacher conference between widowed father Cooper and his kids’ schoolteacher and principal (Collette Wolf, David Oyelowo, respectively). Murphy is in trouble for her insistence that human beings actually landed on the moon during the Apollo program; something now dismissed as faked propaganda in this alternate near-future.  Sadly, as science denial becomes increasingly prevalent in our own reality (the dismissal of vaccinations, the rise of flat-Earthers, etc), I could all-too easily imagine this scenario as well. In fact, I’ve already encountered a number of ill-informed folks online who adamantly insist that the Apollo missions were somehow staged (with no evidence, of course).

Note: John Lithgow plays Cooper’s aged father-in-law Donald, who helps out with the kids as much as possible, following the death of Cooper’s wife and his daughter—whose cancer went undiagnosed due to a lack of MRI machines in this scientifically retrograde near-future.  Lithgow first came onto my radar with his performance in as ‘Roberta’ in “The World According to Garp” (1982). He followed that with career-building roles in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983) and “2010: The Year We Make Contact” (1984).  More recently he played the dementia-suffering father of scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011).

Note: Talented child actor Mackenzie Foy plays young Murphy Cooper, and is the first of three actresses to play Murphy within the film; easily holding her own with Oscar-winners Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn, who each play Murphy at different stages of her life. Playing the younger version of Murphy’s brother Tom is Timothée Chalamet, who would later play Paul Atreides in the recent “Dune” (2021/2024).  Adult Tom is played by Casey Affleck; the kid brother of actor Ben Affleck.

Note: Tracing the mysterious gravity waves in Murphy’s bedroom to their source, Cooper and Murphy come across a NASA facility deep underground; both literally and figuratively, as they don’t want a potentially panicked public to know NASA is funding a desperate plan to search for new worlds. Given the increasing use of private spacecraft in US space endeavors (SpaceX, Blue Origin, et al), it’s not a stretch to imagine the once-pioneering space agency taking a more regulatory role someday, like the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), as private usurpers begin doing more of the heavy lifting. Given the past glory days of the agency, that would indeed be a shame.

Note: After Cooper accepts the mission offer by Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), the following scene is downright painful to watch as the test pilot is forced to leave his children behind for the sake of the human race’s survival. Mackenzie Foy breaks your heart in this scene, and it’s no wonder the young actress (who was only 12 or so when the film was shot) found herself nominated for a number of awards for her performance, including a Saturn Award win.

Note: The movie’s science advisor is Professor Kip Thorne; the Nobel Prize-winning Caltech physicist who led his field in the study of gravitational waves and black holes. With this kind of scientific clout behind the movie, the space scenes are predictably realistic; we hear no sound in space (beyond Hans Zimmer’s gorgeous musical score, of course), and the wormhole (a theoretical phenomenon) is correctly depicted in the film as spherical; as opposed to the ‘cosmic whirlpools’ seen in older sci-fi films and TV shows (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”).  Prof. Thorne is also credited as a coproducer on the film, along with Emma Thomas, the wife of director/cowriter Christopher Nolan, and sister-in-law of cowriter Jonathan Nolan; the director’s younger brother.  Upon exiting the wormhole, we see the black hole Gargantua (a very real phenomenon), which is also accurately depicted as spherical, with accretion disks around its equator and poles; again ditching the inaccurate whirlpool configuration seen in the 1979 Disney fantasy “The Black Hole.”

Note: Exiting the wormhole, the Endurance spacecraft crew; Cooper, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Professor Romilly (David Gyasi), have to decide on which of three planets orbiting Gargantua to spend their precious fuel visiting.  They decide to start with the closest; the inner planet dubbed Miller’s World, named after the first human to land there.  Unfortunately, being so close to a black hole, Einstein’s time dilation comes into play; an hour on the surface of Miller’s World equals roughly seven years back on the mothership Endurance.  Cooper, Brand and Doyle will pilot a lander to the surface while Romilly remains aboard.  This is one of the few major Hollywood sci-fi movies since “Planet of the Apes” (1968) to smartly incorporate Einstein’s all too real time dilation into its story.  So many space fantasies see their heroes piloting ships near or beyond the speed of light with no relativistic effects whatsoever.

Note: We met the robot TARS (voice and puppeteering by actor Bill Irwin) earlier in the film during his interrogation of Cooper following his trespass into the hidden NASA facility. TARS is a former US Marine robot who’s been repurposed for the Lazarus Project, along with fellow robot CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart). These two robots were largely practical effects, with digital manipulations. Breaking away from illogically humanoid-shaped robots (a staple in sci-fi movies since 1927’s “Metropolis”), the robots of “Interstellar” are designed smartly; with form following function for a change. There are no distinct ‘heads,’ ‘eyes’ or ‘faces,’ yet the voices of actors Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart give the robots very distinct personalities. 

Note: Miller’s Planet is a water world with a higher-than-normal gravity, and violent tidal waves that—despite the abundant water—no doubt disrupted the planet’s stability just enough to prevent life from evolving there. The next planet, Mann’s Planet, has frozen clouds and no surface. The final planet of the three, Edmund’s Planet, is the most Earth-like. This is an interesting, straight-faced sci-fi variation of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; the first bowl of porridge is too hot, the second is too cold, and the third is juuust right.

Note: Despite their warning that an hour on Miller’s Planet equals seven years aboard the Endurance, the expedition goes south; Doyle is dead, and Cooper and Brand return well past their ETA to find their shipmate Professor Romilly is now a slower, graying older man. The reunited crew now have to decide where to go next; Mann’s Planet or Edmunds’ Planet. This is where Brand chooses to confess a past relationship with Dr. Edmund, freely admitting that her vote might be biased. The scene also saddles Anne Hathaway with some unfortunately clunky dialogue, as she uses love as her justification for choosing Edmund’s Planet. She is overruled, of course, and they pick Mann’s Planet, because as Brand told them earlier, “Mann is the best of us” (get it? Mann? The best of mankind? Yeah, it really doesn’t work).  Anne Hathaway is forced to deliver this too-ironic line, as we later learn Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) is a raging sociopath. One of my few nits with this otherwise excellent film is that Hathaway’s Amelia Brand (possibly named after Amelia Earhart, the aviation pioneer?) is not one of Nolan’s better female characters.

Note: The scene of Cooper watching the past 23 years of personal video messages is one of the best in the film, as we see Matthew McConaughey’s heart-wrenching reactions to the lost years of his children; as they grow into adulthood, and even parenthood, right before his eyes in a matter of minutes.  His son Tom (Casey Affleck) is now a father. His clever daughter Murphy (Jessica Chastain) is now following in Professor Brand’s footsteps as a NASA scientist. His father-in-law Donald has passed away.  And Cooper has missed all of it.  Life has gone on without him.  It’s almost as if someone who’s died could somehow see their family grieving for them. I don’t think anyone would really want that experience, even if it were possible. 

Note: After recording videos to her father—whom she still bitterly resents for leaving—the adult Murphy resumes her work with Professor Brand (Michael Caine) on solving the gravitational equation necessary for “Plan A,” which involves the mass evacuation of Earth’s population to the new solar system using the wormhole. Despite the movie’s overall scientific literacy, the exact specifics of Brand’s ‘unsolvable’ equation are vague enough for it not to matter; all we need to know is that it involves gravity and that it’s largely a smokescreen for Murphy to waste her time on while the Endurance team quietly preps for Plan B; the only viable plan, in Brand’s eyes.  Brand used Plan A only as bait to lure dedicated family man Cooper onto the Lazarus Project.

Note: Years pass on Earth, and Prof. Brand makes a deathbed confession to Murphy about Plan A; it never existed.  He passes away, but not before quoting the Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” one more time. Yes, it’s a very fitting poem, but the movie quotes it a few times too many (twice would’ve been more than enough).  Brand’s passing leaves Murphy in the unenviable position of passing the bad news up to Amelia Brand on the Endurance; and with letting the Endurance crew know that Plan A was a lie. It’s left a bit ambiguous (at least to me) whether Amelia was in on the Plan A hoax with her father, or if she’s simply feigning deniability to cool Cooper’s justifiable anger. Given her earlier reluctance to reveal her relationship with Dr. Edmunds, I think it’s at least possible.

Note: During her tense visits to her former family home, Murphy brings along her current beau, Getty (Topher Grace), who gets punched just for suggesting that Tom take his wife and kids elsewhere for their health.  At this point, Murphy is still working up the courage to visit her old bedroom, as her resentment of her father still runs deep at this point.  We also see that the only crop still able to grow now on the Cooper family farm is corn. So, the family dinner consists of corn on the cob, corn soufflé and cornbread.  When I first saw the film, I wondered what’d happen to someone who was allergic to, or otherwise unable to eat corn…?

Note: Strike two for the Endurance crew, as Mann’s Planet turns out to be an ammoniated world covered by massive frozen-solid clouds instead of land masses.  Mann, the “best of us,” has falsified his reports in order to gain passage off his planet. Clearly Mann didn’t think his plan through very well, since he never bothered to wonder if the wasted fuel of a diverted rescue mission might sacrifice his own plans to reach Edmunds’ Planet, or even Earth (?). Damon’s sociopathic state is also a bit too telegraphed here and there (I suspected something was seriously wrong with him shortly after he was awakened from his cryo-pod), but that minor nit doesn’t really detract from the overall experience of the film. The following year, Matt Damon would costar with “Interstellar” castmate Jessica Chastain in Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” (another favorite book and movie of mine from the past decade).

Note: Part of Mann’s plan involved boobytrapping one of his service robots when Romilly tries to access information from it that would blow his cover story.  Unfortunately, Romilly is killed in the ensuing explosion. It’s bad enough the only significant character of color in the film has to lose 23 years of his life waiting for his shipmates to return, but he’s later killed for accessing Mann’s boobytrapped robot.  Actor David Gyasi (“Annihilation”) is very effective in playing Professor Romilly’s older age in very subtle ways; slightly slower speech, more careful movements, etc.  It’s a shame the character wasn’t better developed, so that his his loss could be more impactful. There’s not even a brief pause for his memory after Cooper and Brand successfully return to the Endurance later on.

Note: The scene of Cooper trying to manually dock with the rapidly spiraling Endurance (with a little help from TARS) is a genuine nail-biter, and one of the most exciting sequences of the film.  Docking with a moving target was first demonstrated in the United States space program during the Gemini program (the program before Apollo successfully took humans to the moon). The two-man crew of Gemini 8, astronauts Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong, were nearly killed when they were forced to un-dock with their malfunctioning Agena Target Vehicle, which began spinning out of control shortly after docking, due to a malfunctioning thruster; a situation not too dissimilar to Cooper’s dilemma in the film. The act of matching roll angles during docking was also seen in “2001: A Space Odyssey” as the Pan Am spaceplane carefully matched its roll angle with the hub of Hilton space station, which spun itself to generate artificial gravity, via centrifugal force. The biggest difference between “2001” and “Interstellar” is that the Hilton space station wasn’t dangerously spiraling into Earth’s upper atmosphere at the time…

Note: After successfully docking with the damaged Endurance, Brand and Cooper are faced with a new problem; the emergency docking ate up significant fuel, and they can no longer reach Edmunds’ planet—the last candidate world for settlement within the Gargantua system. Cooper’s plan involves lightening their overall mass by flying himself and TARS across Gargantua’s impenetrable face to acquire the late Professor Brand’s (and Murphy’s) vital quantum data from the black hole; this also allows Amelia Brand to reach Edmunds’ Planet. How quantum data from a black hole would enable a mass exodus from Earth is never made clear, and I’m sure that if it were explained to me by Kip Thorne himself it would still go over my head.  But as a story point?  It works well enough. The hero, Cooper, agrees to sacrifice himself for the greater good; just as Spock sacrificed himself by apparently stirring an exposed matter/antimatter reaction with his hands in order to restart the Enterprise’s warp drive in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”; it’s enough for me to know that whatever the hell Spock did, it simply worked.  Moving on…

Note: The sequence inside the five-dimensional tesseract is where the movie truly enters “2001: A Space Odyssey” territory. In fact, I remember talking with my wife and our friend over dinner the night after we first saw the film in 2014, and I said something like, “the tesseract scene was a modern version of Dave Bowman’s light trip in ‘2001.’” However, instead of ending up in a surreal hotel room where he ages, dies, and is reborn as a star-baby, Cooper winds up inside a protracted version of Murphy’s old bookshelf, where he manipulates gravity to communicate, and becomes his daughter’s ‘ghost.’  Another difference between Bowman’s light-trip and Cooper’s tesseract is the emotional connection between father and daughter.  It’s devastating for Cooper to see his younger self making the same mistake of walking out on a heartbroken Murphy, as he begs himself to “Stay!” Once again, this scene reminded me of what an actual ghost might feel if it haunted its old home, only to relive its tragic past over and over again.  To this day, I’m grateful not to believe in ghosts…

Note: After TARS successfully transmits the quantum data from the naked Gargantua singularity, ghost-Cooper successfully relays that data to the adult Murphy, who happened to be visiting her childhood bedroom at that moment, with impeccable timing. The extremely fortunate Cooper then awakens in the hospital of a classic O’Neill-style space colony (named after Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill). It’s a bit of deus ex machina timing, but sure, why not? I loved the bit where Cooper assumes the colony was named after himself, only to learn it was named for his brilliant daughter instead (hehe).  I also liked Cooper’s visit to the recreated farmhouse museum, which reminded me of H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) taking a spare pair of eyeglasses from his old dresser drawer at a museum exhibit in 1979’s time-travel fantasy “Time After Time.”

Note: Another scene effectively illustrating the high cost of Einstein’s special relativity, as a still forty-something Cooper visits his dying, ninety-something daughter (!), who’s surrounded by her loving descendants. He fulfills his promise, however belatedly, to return to his daughter, only to discover Murphy has a thriving, loving family of her own. Interestingly, Ellen Burstyn would go on to play the aged daughter of the immortal, still youthful looking Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) in 2015’s romantic fantasy “The Age of Adaline.”  Ellen Burstyn playing the elderly daughter of a youthful parent twice in two years (!).  What are the odds…?

Note: I enjoyed the movie’s bittersweet ending, as we see a lonely Amelia Brand, grieving over the crushed cryo-pod of her late lover; the unseen Dr. Wolf Edmunds—unaware that Cooper is en route to join her, per his dying daughter’s final wish.  While the exact cause of Edmunds’ death isn’t explicit, one can infer his cryo-pod might’ve been damaged in an earthquake or some other natural calamity.  The image of Anne Hathaway’s Amelia, stranded on an otherwise habitable desert world also reminded me of costar Matt Damon’s predicament in the aforementioned “The Martian.”  While Hathaway’s character is somewhat poorly served in the film, it’s nice to see that her preferred choice of Edmunds’ Planet—admittedly a biased choice on her part—was the correct one, nevertheless. Perhaps love (and the intuition it brings) really is as tangible a factor in decision-making as the movie insists…?

The End.

Summing It Up

“Interstellar” is massive and almost overwhelming in its scale. The film’s awesome planetary vistas leave a viewer feeling fully immersed. The exotic Icelandic and rustic Canadian locales fill the screen beautifully; you don’t just see the environments of the movie—you feel them.  This movie is truly deserving of the word epic. But “Interstellar” is more than just a sweeping space saga; it’s a powerful family saga, as well. 

The Coopers are a family torn apart by both a dying ecosphere and Einstein’s special relativity. Matthew McConaughey’s Joseph Cooper is the (ahem) gravitational center of the movie, with many high profile costars (Michael Caine, John Lithgow, et al) giving him excellent support. Nicely cast by three very strong actresses at several stages of her life, daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn) is the source of her father’s greatest pride and anguish.  Despite Murphy’s resentment of her departed dad, she grows up to be very much like him in her intelligence and ingenuity. 

Anne Hathaway’s Dr. Amelia Brand is set up as the cooler counterbalance to the more emotional Cooper’s impulsivity, yet she has her own vulnerabilities and blind spots, too. Unfortunately, the Oscar-winning actress is given some of the movie’s weakest dialogue. The rest of this equally strong cast really give it their all, including an underrated (and unseen) Bill Irwin providing the voice and practical puppeteering of faithful robotic sidekick TARS, while Josh Stewart provides the voice of the less loquacious robot, CASE.

There are occasional lines of dialogue interweaving love and spacetime that sound a bit clunky and New Agey when spoken aloud, and the fitting Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” is quoted a bit too often. However, these are minor nits to an otherwise intelligent screenplay by Christopher & Jonathan Nolan; an intriguing and ambitious hybridization of Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” with John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”  

The movie’s scientific ambitions are ably-supported by science advisor (and credited coproducer) Kip Thorne; the noted theoretical physicist who broke new ground in blackholes and gravitational waves. With only a bit of deus ex machina hand-waving, the science of “Interstellar” is surprisingly sound for a big-budget Hollywood movie.  Composer Hans Zimmer’s score reflects the elegance of our universe with its almost metronomic quality; this is easily my favorite of Zimmer’s soundtracks. 

Humanity’s exodus from Earth, as seen in the final moments of “Interstellar,” reminds me of that quote from Russian space science pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but humanity cannot remain in the cradle forever.” 

Despite a few issues here and there, “Interstellar” feels slated to become a future sci-fi classic. 

Must Read

Written by Mark Cotta Vaz, with a forward by Christopher Nolan and introduction by Kip Thorne, “Interstellar, Beyond Time and Space” is a nice glossy coffee table hardback detailing the making of the movie with production artwork, behind-the-scenes photos, and fascinating insights into the practical effects wizardry that seamlessly blended with the film’s CGI. Though the book was published in 2014, you might still be able to find a copy on eBay or Amazon for a decent price (original cover price was $45 US dollars; $54 Canadian). Good hunting!

Where to Watch

“Interstellar” is currently enjoying a brief rerelease in select theaters, but it’s also available to stream on Paramount+, Peacock, AMC+, Philo, YouTube Primetime and others.  It’s also available to own on physical media (DVD/Blu-Ray) from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.