Outside their house, Cooper loads up the truck and hugs Tom goodbye, saying he’ll have NASA bring the truck back for him. He asks Donald to look after his kids. As he drives away, he briefly checks the blanket in the shotgun seat to make sure Murph isn’t hiding underneath it again, but this time she isn’t. As we watch him go, we hear a voice begin to count down a launch. Suddenly, Murph runs out of the house, calling after her father as the voice counts down from 10. Donald holds Murph back from chasing the truck. She holds onto his arm and cries, yelling for her dad.
We watch Cooper’s haunted face as the countdown reaches 0, and then we see the blast from rocket boosters and switch to Cooper in a space suit inside the cockpit as his craft launches. The countdown voice is revealed to be TARS, situated between Cooper and Doyle at the front of the ship. The rocket separates from its initial blasters as TARS jokes that he’s going to use Cooper and the others to begin his human slave colony. Doyle says this joke is the result of TARS’ humor setting. Cooper tells TARS to bring the setting from 100% down to 75%. They separate from the second section of the rocket and all goes quiet as they now float in space.
Cooper begins talking to Brand, who says she’d rather not chat. TARS says that his honesty setting is 90%, since absolute honesty isn’t always smart, so Cooper agrees that he and Brand will similarly be 90% honest with one another. In the distance, Doyle sees the Endurance, the space station they’ll be using for their mission, to which their current ship, the Ranger, will attach. Doyle very carefully brings the Ranger’s dock up to the Endurance’s and attaches it, and they all exit and board the station. It’s comprised of 12 large compartments attached in a ring. Brand takes a moment to take in the Earth outside, while TARS finds and activates a robot like itself on board called CASE. They activate the Endurance’s spin boosters, which rotate the vessel to simulate Earth’s gravity onboard.
We watch the Endurance spin from the silence of space. (Indeed, all moments in Interstellar in which we observe the scenes from space occur without sound, except for the non-diegetic music.) Inside, Professor Brand speaks to his daughter and the others via video chat. He projects that they’ll reach Saturn in about 2 years. Cooper asks the professor to look out for his family. Professor Brand says they’ll be waiting for them when they get back, and begins reading Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” His words narrate as we watch the four astronauts strap in and initiate the Endurance’s flight to Saturn. The organ-heavy music crescendoes as Professor Brand reads and the Endurance flies away from Earth until it’s just a blue and white marble in the distance.
The four astronauts dress in sleeping garments that resemble nurse’s scrubs. Brand gives Cooper his pills for sleep as Doyle helps Romilly into his hibernation chamber. The chamber, which resembles a metal coffin, seals the occupant in an air-tight plastic sleeve and submerges them in water to ensure long-term survival. Brand tells Cooper about the Lazarus mission scientists who went to the three worlds they’ll be exploring: Dr. Laura Miller, a biologist, Dr. Wolf Edmunds, a particle physicist, and Dr. Mann, who inspired the other 11 people to follow him on what Brand calls “the loneliest journey in human history.” She explains loving the idea that though they face death and peril where they’re headed, there won’t be any evil. Nature, she says, can be frightening, but not evil. Cooper remarks that that’s what they’re taking with them out into the universe. Brand leaves and climbs into her own chamber. When she and the other two are under, Cooper asks TARS if Brand and Edmunds were “close,” to which he says he has a discretion setting. Cooper takes a moment to record a video message for his family, saying that he can’t see the dust on Earth from where he is.
His message turns to narration as Donald and Murph watch Professor Brand pull up to the house in Cooper’s truck. Murph momentarily thinks it might be her father. The professor greets them and says he wanted to bring the truck back for Tom, and that he has a message from Cooper. Murph goes angrily back inside. Professor Brand gives the message to Donald and suggests that he fan the flames of Murph’s scientific curiosity. Donald likes the idea. They look up at the vast blue sky and Donald asks where the astronauts are. Professor Brand says that they’re approaching Mars and that when they awaken, they’ll be near Saturn.
We next see an establishing shot of Saturn in the foreground with the sun a tiny pebble in the distance. We zoom in and see the Endurance floating by, no bigger than a glimmering grain of sand against the planet’s massive backdrop. Inside the ship, a damp Cooper sits with a towel around his shoulders, watching a video message from Tom recorded while he was asleep. Tom reports starting an advanced agriculture class a year early. Donald comes onscreen and apologizes that Murph refused to say hi. He says they’ll try again next time.
Cooper finds Romilly sitting alone. Romilly frets about being separated from outer space by only a few inches of steel. Cooper says that some of the world’s finest yachtsmen can’t swim. He hands him a tape player and some headphones, and Romilly listens to recorded sounds of rainfall and crickets chirping. A clap of thunder echoes over a shot of the Endurance as seen through the space between Saturn and its rings.
Cooper and Doyle hear Brand announce via intercom that they’re 3 hours away from the wormhole. Romilly has Cooper stop the Endurance’s spinning as it comes into view. The former explains using a piece of paper that a wormhole bends space such that one can pass through a higher dimension to reach a point that would be much too far away by conventional navigational means. The wormhole ahead of them looks like a sphere with the galaxy to which it leads distorted inside it.
The four sit ready in their spacesuits. The Endurance approaches and the wormhole’s body grows larger, looking like a massive doorknob with the universe reflecting off of it. Cooper leans forward on the controls and the ship is sucked suddenly into the hole. Various alarms begin beeping aboard the ship as we hear a roar from outside it. We watch as the Endurance flies through a vast cosmic chute of light and distorted images. Cooper attempts to steer, but Doyle says that they’re passing through “the bulk,” the area beyond the perceivable three dimensions, and that they can only record and observe, so Cooper lets go of the controls. The ship continues through the massive, star-lined hallway with fissures of light shining through from below. The crew notices a slight distortion of space-time to their right inside the cockpit. Brand thinks its “them” and reaches out to grab at it. Her hand distorts for a moment, and then the Endurance reaches the other end of the wormhole and a new section of the universe unfolds in front of them, as seamlessly as the previous one was sucked away. Brand jokes shakily that she just experienced the first handshake with “them.”
The crew now sit around in normal clothing. Doyle explains that Miller and Mann are still signaling the “thumbs up” from their planets, but that Edmunds’ has gone dark, although he was also giving the thumbs up until it did. They theorize that he may have experienced a transmission failure. They focus their attention on Miller’s planet, which orbits a massive black hole called Gargantua, as does Dr. Mann’s. Miller’s planet’s close proximity to the black hole’s event horizon—the point past which nothing can escape it—causes time to move much more slowly there than back on Earth, with 1 hour on Miller’s planet equaling 7 years on Earth. Cooper points out the danger of wasting time by visiting it: if they allow decades to pass on Earth while they land there, the remaining human population may die before they can figure out a way to execute Plan A. Doyle is adamant that they take that risk, but Brand agrees with Cooper that they must treat time as a precious resource. Doyle reminds them that Mann’s planet is months away, and Edmunds’ even farther, and that Miller’s data is promising, as it indicates the presence of liquid water and organic materials.
Cooper proposes a plan to keep the Endurance out of range of the time slippage and take the Ranger, the small hovercraft they used to board the Endurance, down to Miller’s planet instead. He suggests that they visit only briefly, gather what they need, and leave again to avoid losing too much time. They can then analyze Miller’s data aboard the Endurance. Romilly and Brand endorse this plan. Romilly and TARS plan to stay aboard the Endurance and study Gargantua’s gravity for the several years’ worth of time it’ll take the others to go down and back, which may help Professor Brand solve the gravity equation back on Earth.
The Ranger detaches from the Endurance with Cooper, Doyle, Dr. Brand, and CASE aboard. Out the window, they observe Gargantua, a massive black circle surrounded by light and with an accretion disc—a bright ring of diffused material similar to Saturn’s rings—around its middle. Romilly, speaking through their shared headset transmitters, wishes they could see the collapsed star at Gargantua’s center, also called the singularity, as it would help them solve the gravity equation. Romilly says goodbye to the Ranger and the screen fades to black.
Section 3 Analysis
In Section 3, we ascend with Cooper and his crew into space, marking their official goodbye to Earth for the remainder of the film. A recurring cinematographic motif comes into play here that we briefly experienced during Cooper’s crash scene: Christopher Nolan chooses to show much of the film’s spacecraft action from cameras seemingly positioned on the sides of the ships themselves. These angles mimic the externally mounted cameras on many of NASA’s actual rockets and space shuttles, which allow the viewer to experience the vessel’s journey as if they were on board. In choosing to show us the Ranger’s launch and subsequent flight maneuvers this way, Nolan places the audience in the role of astronaut alongside Cooper and the others.
A recurring aural motif also comes into play in this section: for any shot taken in the void of space, all diegetic sound (sound that exists within the world of the film) is removed, as it would be in real life. This helps ground the audience in reality despite the more fantastic sci-fi elements of the film; when we’re in space, we experience it as silently as real astronauts do. The Endurance’s retro-boosters, the docking of the Ranger with the Endurance, even the explosion Mann causes aboard the station later in the movie: all of these exciting moments happen in silence. The exception to this, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s epic, organ-heavy score, which keeps the audience engaged in the drama and provides some continuity as we switch between silent external shots and sound-heavy ones inside the space crafts.
There are many technological elements in the film that far exceed what is practical or possible by today’s standards, though their purpose is usually a convenience to the plot: longterm cryogenic sleep chambers, for example, are still a thing of the future. Doctors do presently have the technology to cool patients’ body temperatures to 34-36ºC for up to two weeks to slow the onset of acute heart and brain malfunctions, but these instances are often risky, costly, and require extensive monitoring by medical personnel. NASA is actually in the process of developing sleep chambers that will allow astronauts to hibernate for short periods of time, but not nearly as long as the two-year window that Cooper and the others experience, and certainly not without a human passenger remaining conscious to monitor the ship and their sleeping shipmates. Additional technological improbabilities include a spacecraft like the Ranger that can fly like a jet but then slow and hover like a helicopter. As of 2017, such aerodynamic capabilities are not feasible. Finally, a rotating space station like the Endurance that can simulate gravity is actually theoretically possible today, but its present cost far exceeds the funds NASA can afford to devote to it.
Cooper and Brand share an important conversation about mankind’s inherent ability to bring evil into an otherwise indifferent universe. Brand concedes that nature can be formidable and terrifying, but never intentionally malicious, and that by traveling out into space, she and the others are bringing the human capacity for evil with them. This will become a direct foreshadowing to Dr. Mann’s desperate betrayal of his fellow astronauts later in the film. While his planet’s uninhabitability is not personal, but rather merely circumstantial, it nevertheless pushes him to display the worst qualities of man—deceit, aggression, selfishness, etc.—to save his own life.
The Endurance’s fantastic journey through the wormhole is one of the few scenes in the film where Christopher Nolan intentionally strays from scientific accuracy. Nolan worked directly with executive producer Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and longtime friend of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, to ensure that the majority of the film’s scientific elements were at least theoretically possible, including the effects of the black hole Gargantua on time and the tidal waves of Miller’s planet. When Thorne showed him a simulation of what passing through a wormhole would look like in real life, however, Nolan confessed himself unimpressed: it was much like passing silently through a spherical window. One minute you were outside it, the next you’d slipped seamlessly through. Nolan took liberties to make the journey in the film look more visually stunning, inventing a sort of cosmic hallway of distorted light and images for the ship to blast through. Given the film’s eventual theatrical audience of about 100 million people, Thorne went on to concede that a more visually impressive scene was probably appropriate.
