What is this movie is about?/Elevator Pitch: The forces that both make us, bind us, and give life meaning such as gravity, survival instinct, and, most importantly, love.
Plot Summary: In a future Earth where humans are finding the planet more uninhabitable due to "the blight" that is causing mass famine as it kills many major crops and regular massive dust storms, Joseph "Coop" Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) volunteers for a mission to find three previous space explorers who had been sent to find a new home planet for mankind. However, as "Coop" and his teammate, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) become exposed to the relativity of a black hole near the galaxy they are exploring, time slows down for them, and they are forced to view everyone they cared for on from Earth live decades without them including "Coop's" two children, Murphy "Murph" Cooper (Jessica Chastain) and Tom (Casey Affleck), who have to live their lives without him wondering if he will ever succeed in his mission and find his way back.
Cast:
Christopher Nolan, Director/Writer
Jonathan Nolan, Co-Writer
Hans Zimmer, Composer
Hoyte van Hoytema, Cinematographer
Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper
Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand
Jessica Chastain as Murphy "Murph" Cooper
Mackenzie Foy as young Murph
Ellen Burstyn as elderly Murph
John Lithgow as Donald
Michael Caine as Professor John Brand
David Gyasi as Romilly
Wes Bentley as Doyle
Casey Affleck as Tom Cooper
Timothée Chalamet as young Tom
Matt Damon as Dr. Mann
Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry)
Josh Stewart as CASE (voice)
Topher Grace as Getty
Leah Cairns as Lois
David Oyelowo as School Principal
Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley
William Devane as Williams
*Recognition:
Interstellar released on November 5, 2014.
It currently holds a 73% among critics on RT, a score of 74 on Metacritic, and a 4.2/5 on Letterboxd.
The film grossed $188 million in the US and Canada, and $489.4 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $677.4 million against a production budget of $165 million.
Interstellar received five Oscar nominations including Best Original Score, Production Design, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing; the film won for Best Visual Effects.
Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a full four stars and wrote, "This is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen—in terms of its visuals, and its overriding message about the powerful forces of the one thing we all know but can't measure in scientific terms. Love."
Author George R. R. Martin called Interstellar "the most ambitious and challenging science fiction film since Kubrick's 2001."
In 2020, Empire magazine ranked it as one of the best films of the 21st century.
Did You Know:
In an early version of the film, Steven Spielberg, was attached to direct this movie in 2006, and hired Jonathan Nolan to write the screenplay, but ultimately chose other projects instead. In 2012, after Spielberg's departure, Jonathan Nolan suggested the project to his brother Christopher Nolan.
Early in pre-production, Dr. Kip Thorne laid down two guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the wild speculations would spring from science, and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Writer, Producer, and Director Christopher Nolan accepted these terms, as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster than light.
To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
According to Dr. Kip Thorne, the largest degree of creative license in this movie is the clouds of the ice planet, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength which ice would be able to support.
The Wormhole was placed near Saturn as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), because Stanley Kubrick originally planned for part of that movie to take place at Saturn. Unfortunately, as visual effects technology wasn't able to make Saturn's rings at that time, he changed it to Jupiter.
The majority of shots of the robot TARS were not computer generated. Rather, TARS was a practical puppet controlled and voiced on-set by Bill Irwin, who was then digitally erased from the movie. Irwin also puppeteered the robot CASE, but in that instance, had his voice dubbed over by Josh Stewart.
Dr. Kip Thorne won a scientific bet against Stephen Hawking upon the astrophysics theory that underlies this movie. As a consequence, Hawking had to subscribe to Penthouse Magazine for a year. This famous bet was depicted in The Theory of Everything (2014).
Best Performance: Matthew McConaughey (Coop)/Christopher Nolan (Director/Writer)
Best Secondary Performance: Matthew McConaughey (Coop)/Christopher Nolan (Director/Writer)/Timothee Chalamet (Young Tom)
Most Charismatic Award: Mackenzie Foy (Young Murph)/Michael Caine (Dr. Brand)/Bill Irwin (TARS)
Best Scene:
Murph Gets in Trouble at School
The Ghost gives directions to NASA
The First Planet
Coop watches his Children grow up on Video
Dr. Mann or Dr. Edmunds
Dr. Mann's Deceit
Leaving Something Behind
Coop finds the Singularity
Coop reunites with Murph
Favorite Scene: Dr. Mann's Deceit/Coop finds the Singularity
Most Indelible Moment: Coop finds the Singularity/The First Planet
In Memorium:
Roger E. Mosley, 83, American Actor (Magnum P.I., TV Character Actor)
Gene LeBell, 89, American martial artist and stunt performer (Darkman, L.A. Confidential, Total Recall).
Clu Gulager, 93, American actor (The Return of the Living Dead, The Tall Man, The Last Picture Show).
David McCullough, 89, American Writer (Truman and John Adams (non-fiction books), The Civil War (documentary series), Seabiscuit (movie), American Experience (TV-PBS))
Olivia Newton John, 73, Australian Singer and Actress (Grease, Xanadu, Two of a Kind (Movies), Physical (#1 Song)
Best Lines/Funniest Lines:
Cooper: We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.
Dr. Brand: Lazarus came back from the dead.
Cooper: Sure, but he had to die in the first place.
Dr. Brand: Do not go gentle into that good night; Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dr. Brand: You're Telling Me It Takes Two Numbers To Measure Your Own Ass But Only One To Measure My Son's Future?
Cooper: Newton's Third Law: you have to leave something behind.
Cooper: Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
Cooper: You told them I like farming?!
Dr. Mann: We have attachments. But even without a family, I can promise you that, that yearning to be with other people is powerful. That emotion is the foundation, of what makes us human.
Cooper: We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, that our destiny lies above us.
Donald: When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some, gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas.
Cooper: You're a scientist, Brand.
Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing...
Brand: We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that?
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artefact 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. All right Cooper. Yes. The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Cooper: Honestly, Amelia... it might.
Young Tom: What about the flat tire?
Cooper: ...I got you suspended.
Donald: Wanna clean that up when you're finished praying to it?
Cooper: I'll turn you into an overqualified vacuum cleaner.
Cooper: [Covers Murph's ears] Yeah. Like that we're getting out of here. And I don't mean in the trunk of some car.
The Stanley Rubric:
Legacy: 6.33
Impact/Significance: 6.83
Novelty: 8.67
Classic-ness: 9
Rewatchability: 7.83
Audience Score: 8.95 (93% Google, 86% RT)
Total: 47.61
Remaining Questions:
Why wouldn't "The Blight" end up in the Space Station Cooper?
Why doesn't Coop ask about Tom at the end or try to meet any of his grandchildren?
What happened to Tom's family?
Why didn't CASE save the date on the Ocean Planet?
If 60% are knock-knock jokes, what is below that?
Could you go on this journey?
Does Coop find Brand? and Does everyone on Space Station Cooper join them?
Was Dr. Edmunds still alive on the last planet?