Interstellar (movie) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Interstellar |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Christopher Nolan |
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| Music by | Hans Zimmer |
| Cinematography | Hoyte van Hoytema |
| Editing by | Lee Smith |
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| Release date(s) | October 26, 2014 (TCL Chinese Theatre) November 5, 2014 (United States) November 7, 2014 (United Kingdom) |
| Running time | 169 minutes |
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| Language | English |
| Budget | $165 million |
| Money made | $675.1 million |
Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.
Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014, in Los Angeles. In the United States. It had a worldwide gross of over $675 million, making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014, and received praise for its science fiction themes, visual effects, score and performances. At the 87th Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Production Design.
Plot
In the mid-21st century, crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity's survival. Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA pilot, runs a farm with his father-in-law, son Tom, and daughter Murphy. Living in a post-truth society (Cooper is reprimanded for telling Murphy that the Apollo missions were not fake), Cooper encourages Murphy to carefully observe and record what she sees. They discover that dust patterns, which Murphy first attributes to a ghost, result from gravity variations and translate into geographic coordinates. These lead them to a secret NASA facility headed by Cooper's former supervisor, Prof. John Brand.
Brand explains that 48 years earlier a wormhole appeared near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable planets located near a black hole named Gargantua. Volunteers have previously traveled through the wormhole to evaluate the planets, with Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reporting back desirable results. Plan A attempts to develop a new gravitational propulsion theory, allowing a mass exodus from Earth. Plan B is a conventional launch of the Endurance spacecraft with 5,000 frozen embryos to colonize a habitable planet and ensure humanity's survival. Cooper is recruited to pilot the Endurance and accepts against Murphy's wishes. When she refuses to see him off, he leaves her his wristwatch to compare their relative time when he returns.
The crew consists of Cooper, the robots TARS and CASE, and the scientists Dr. Amelia Brand (Prof. Brand's daughter), Romilly, and Doyle. After traversing the wormhole, Cooper, Doyle, and Brand use a lander to investigate Miller's planet, where time is severely dilated. After landing in knee-high water and finding only wreckage from Miller's expedition, a gigantic tidal wave kills Doyle and waterlogs the lander's engines. By the time the lander's engines restart, they discover that 23 years have elapsed on the Endurance. Having enough fuel only for one of the other two planets, they vote to go to Mann's, as he is still broadcasting. En route, they receive messages from Earth. Murphy Cooper is now a scientist working on Plan A. On his deathbed, Prof. Brand revealed to her that Plan B was his only real plan, knowing that Plan A was not feasible without observations of gravitational singularities from within a black hole.
At Mann's planet, they revive him from cryostasis. He assures them colonization is possible despite an extreme environment. On an excursion, Mann attempts to kill Cooper and reveals that he falsified the data in the hope of being rescued. He steals Cooper's lander and heads for the Endurance. While a booby trap set by Mann kills Romilly, Brand rescues Cooper with the other lander and they race to the Endurance. Mann is killed in a failed manual docking operation, severely damaging the Endurance. Through a difficult docking maneuver, Cooper regains control.
With insufficient fuel, they resort to a slingshot around Gargantua. In the process, Cooper and TARS must jettison their landers to allow Brand and CASE to reach Edmunds' planet. Falling into the event horizon of Gargantua, they eject from their craft and find themselves in a tesseract, possibly constructed by humans in the far future. Cooper can see through the bookcases of Murphy's room on Earth, across time, and weakly interact with its gravity. He realizes that he is now (and was) Murphy's "ghost". He uses Morse code to manipulate the second hand of the wristwatch he gave her before he left, giving Murphy the quantum data that TARS collected, which she needs to solve Brand's gravitational equations.
The tesseract, its purpose completed, collapses and ejects Cooper and TARS. Cooper wakes on a huge station, which's namesake is his daughter, orbiting Saturn. He reunites with his daughter, now an old woman nearing death, who was able to develop the gravitational propulsion theory. Murphy reminds Cooper that Amelia Brand is out there alone. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Brand and CASE, who are setting up a human colony on Edmunds' habitable planet.
Production design
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Interstellar features three spacecraft: the Ranger, the Endurance, and the Lander. The Ranger's function is similar to the Space Shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. The Endurance, the crew's mother ship, has a circular structure formed by 12 capsules: four with planetary colonization equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said the Endurance was based on the International Space Station Lastly, the Lander transports the capsules with colonization equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter".
The film also features two robots, CASE and TARS (as well as a dismantled third robot, KIPP). Nolan wanted to avoid making the robots anthropomorphic and chose a five-foot (1.5 m) quadrilateral design. The director said: "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics. You've got four main blocks and they can be joined in three ways. So you have three combinations you follow. But then within that, it subdivides into a further three joints. And all the places we see lines—those can subdivide further. The human space habitats resemble O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical space colony model proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.
Scientific accuracy
Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. "For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole," he said, "we discussed how to go about it, and then I worked on the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations."
Images for kids
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Miller's planet orbiting Gargantua
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The first image of the event horizon of a black hole, obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope. The asymmetric brightness of the accretion disk is well visible here.
See also
In Spanish: Interstellar para niños
