Interstellar Literary Elements

Christopher Nolan

Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain

Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Wes Bentley, David Gyasi, Mackenzie Foy, Timothy Chalamet

Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi

English

Won Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects / Academy Award Nominations for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures Original Score, Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, Best Achievement in Sound Editing, Best Achievement in Production Design

2014

Christopher Nolan, Lynda Obst, Emma Thomas

In the beginning, the film is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the world's food supply is running out. Later, it takes place in outer space and on multiple potentially new, life-sustaining planets.

There is no one point of view from which Interstellar is told. Primarily, we experience the story as either Cooper or Murph does, but there are many instances in which we experience scenes without them, as when Donald talks with Professor Brand outside the farmhouse, when Romilly investigates KIPP, or when Dr. Getty watches nervously as Tom fights the fires in the distance.

The film features many temporary narrators, including the older Murph, Professor Brand, and Dr. Mann, the words of each of whom turn to narration as the screen fades to a new scene.

The tone of Interstellar is primarily serious and dramatic, at times even somber. Only rarely do we experience gleeful scenes, as when Cooper and his kids chase the Indian drone through a cornfield.

Protagonists: Cooper and Murph; Antagonists: the blight and famine plaguing the Earth, and, for a time, Dr. Mann.

With the world's food supply running out and crops going extinct, humanity is on the brink of extinction and must look to interstellar travel to save their species.

Cooper sacrifices himself by launching himself into the black hole to aid Dr. Brand's journey to the final planetary candidate. He lands inside a tesseract, a 3-dimensional version of a 5-dimensional world that allows him to experience time as a place. He uses gravity to manipulate the watch in Murph's bedroom to spell out the answer to her gravity equation, effectively saving humanity by allowing them to escape the dying Earth.

There are many instances of foreshadowing in Interstellar. Cooper's bitter monologue on the porch with Donald about the futility of the farmers' efforts and the denial that lets them keep trying foreshadows Tom's attitude toward farming as an adult: despite the clear evidence that the situation is hopeless, he perseveres in vain. Cooper also ironically foreshadows his own presence behind Murph's bookshelf when she tells him about the message she found in the books and he says, "I don't think your bookshelf is talking to you, Murph." Not only is she right that it is, but he is in fact the one doing the talking.

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Christopher Nolan dove into almost ludicrous new territory when he chose to strap an IMAX camera to the nose of a Learjet craft to film some of Interstellar's scenes that feature air travel from the perspective of the ship's onboard cameras. The act stunned the public when a crew member tweeted and then quickly deleted a photo of the camera on the jet in 2013.

Interstellar was also a chance for scientists to use the incredible budget of a high-profile Hollywood film to render images of scientific phenomena not previously possible with lower budgets. In particular, the film's visual depiction of a black hole was so strikingly accurate and detailed that it allowed scientists to study black holes in a way they never had before, resulting in the eventual publications of two scientific papers in journals.

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Cooper's journey to the tesseract is what's known as a temporal causal loop; he's motivated to find NASA by the coordinates spelled out in the dust in Murph's bedroom, which leads him to the space mission that brings him to the tesseract, through which he leaves the coordinates for himself to find to begin the journey. This violates the rules of cause and effect because his leaving the coordinates is both an effect and a cause of his journey. Because the events have no beginning or ending, but instead loop endlessly, it creates a paradox.

The film contains many early scenes of Murph believing that her bookshelf is communicating with her. Nolan later parallels these scenes when Cooper falls into the tesseract and experiences them all over again, now as the one behind the bookshelf sending her the messages.