Cooper steers the Ranger through the planet’s atmosphere, using the vehicle’s aerodynamics to avoid engaging the counter-thrusters, which would waste fuel and slow their entry. CASE and the others are wary, but Cooper is determined. They fly below the cloud line and see water in all directions below them. They lock on to Miller’s signal beacon and spiral down toward its location, descending faster and lower until Cooper suddenly engages the thrusters and lands the Ranger in what amounts to a few feet of water stretching as far as the eye can see. He urges the others out, reminding them that Earth experiences 7 years for every hour they do. A clock begins ticking gently within the scene’s music.
Brand, Doyle, and CASE step out into the knee-high water and head for Miller’s beacon about 200 meters away. Cooper watches from the Ranger. They notice that gravity is 130% that of Earth’s. Brand and Doyle can’t find Miller or her beacon. CASE extends two mechanical arms and retrieves the beacon from the water. It’s in pieces, and Miller is nowhere to be found. Brand takes off looking for the rest of her wreckage in the direction of the far-off mountains. Cooper, however, realizes suddenly that what they see in the distance aren’t mountains at all: they’re colossal, kilometer-high waves. The ones toward which Brand is moving are heading away from them, but Cooper sees out the back of the Ranger that another wave towers over them, inconceivably high and minutes from obliterating them. He orders everyone back to the Ranger, but Brand refuses to leave without the data. She finds it in the wreckage of Miller’s ship, but slips and gets stuck underneath it as she attempts to lift it. Doyle sends CASE to save her. CASE shifts into a wheel-like structure and rolls after her. Brand shouts for them to leave her behind, but CASE reaches her, lifts the wreckage from her body, and carries her back to the Ranger. Doyle lets Brand and CASE get in first, but as he’s about to board as well, he’s overtaken by water and washed away. Brand screams as Cooper seals the outer door. Water rushes into the Ranger, flooding the engines. The wave picks them up and slowly drags them upward toward its peak. They then tumble over the edge and fly down the other side. When they land in shallow water again, Cooper extends the Ranger’s legs and tries to start the engines, but CASE reports that they’re water logged and need to drain for 45-60 minutes. Cooper screams in anger.
Brand begins shouting that Cooper and the others should’ve left her behind. He retorts that she should’ve listened and left Miller’s data. She says she was thinking about the mission while he was just thinking about getting home. Judging by the wreckage, Miller’s ship was likely hit by a wave not long after she arrived, which given the time slippage means that she arrived only a little over an hour ago and probably died only minutes ago. The data they received from her was just her initial signal echoing endlessly—a false hope. Cooper vents about the years they’ll lose back on Earth and asks if there’s any way to go back in time to regain them, perhaps via a black hole. Brand says that time can speed up and slow down, but not run backward. The only thing that can move back across time is gravity. The “they” that gave them the wormhole may be using gravity to communicate from the future, but that’s because they’re unique beings of a higher dimension.
CASE notifies Cooper and Brand that another wave is approaching. He reports that the engines need another minute to drain, but Cooper blows the air out of the cabin through the main thrusters to clear them and get the Ranger moving. They fly along the side of the wave and clear its crest just in time.
They return to the Endurance, where they’re greeted by a much older Romilly, looking fragile and time-worn. CASE reports that they’ve been gone for the equivalent of 23 years, 4 months, and 8 days. Brand asks Romilly why he didn’t hibernate. He says that he did, several times, but that once he stopped believing that they were coming back, he decided not to sleep his life away. He learned much about gravity from Gargantua, but was unable to get anything through to Professor Brand. Brand asks if her father is still alive. Romilly says he is.
Meanwhile, Cooper goes into another compartment and retrieves the years of logged video messages from his family. He plays them from the beginning. Tom comes onscreen and reports finishing second in school, and that he met a girl he likes named Lois. Next, an adult Tom shows Cooper a newborn baby boy named Jesse. Lois comes onscreen and takes him from Tom. In the third message, a more mature, bearded Tom reports that Donald died and that they buried him out back next to the graves of both Tom’s mother and, heartbreakingly, Jesse. Cooper sobs continuously as he watches. Tom wonders if any of his messages are even getting through. Lois has suggested that he let Cooper go, so he says he will and wishes his dad peace. The screen goes blank. Cooper is dumbstruck. Then a woman appears, an adult Murph. She says that she was too angry to send messages when Cooper was still responding and saw no point once he “went dark,” but that today is her birthday and she’s now the age that Cooper was when he left home. She begins to cry and shuts off the camera.
We switch to the room where the same adult Murph is recording the message. She turns to see a now ancient, wheelchair-bound Professor Brand apologize for intruding, saying he’s never seen her recording a message for her dad before. She wheels him into his office, where he worries that if the astronauts ever do return, they’ll see that they’ve failed to solve gravity. Murph suggests that they succeed, then. Afterward, they talk together as they watch the construction teams continue working on the space station. Professor Brand says that he’s not afraid of death, but time.
Murph studies the blackboards and realizes that they’ve been failing to change certain variables, creating a nonsensical loop in their calculations. She asks Professor Brand why he’s been working this way, with both arms metaphorically tied behind his back, but he shuts down the conversation to go record a message for his daughter. We hear his recorded voice say that humanity must “confront the reality of interstellar travel” and think as a collective species. He then begins reading from “Do Not Go Gentle” again. We return to the Endurance, where Brand watches this message.
Cooper, Brand, and Romilly next discuss their options. The extended trip depleted their fuel such that they can only visit either Mann or Edmunds’ planet now, not both. Brand says they have no reason to doubt Edmunds’ just because his transmissions have stopped. She recommends they try his. Cooper presses her on why, and she cites Gargantua as the issue with Dr. Mann’s planet, saying that Murphy’s Law is upset by a black hole that sucks in asteroids and other natural events that would otherwise affect the planet. Cooper argues that they’ve been lauding Dr. Mann from the start and shouldn’t ignore his promising signal now. Romilly suggests a vote, at which point Cooper reveals the elephant in the room: Brand is in love with Edmunds. Brand argues that they shouldn’t disregard that, since love is a powerful force that can transcend time and space, like gravity. She concedes that she wants to see Edmunds again but that it doesn’t mean she’s wrong about his planet. Cooper says it might, and has TARS chart a course for Dr. Mann’s planet instead. Brand leaves the room in tears.
On Earth, Tom and Murph burn a large section of corn. Tom says next year he’ll work part of his neighbor Nelson’s farm, too, since Nelson died. Next, Murph eats with Tom, Lois, and their second son, Coop. Lois invites Murph to stay the night in her old room, but she declines, saying there are too many memories. Coop begins coughing violently, blaming the dust. Murph suggests to Lois that a friend of hers look at Coop’s lungs. Lois appears conflicted and doesn’t answer. We see a shot of a dust storm approaching from behind the house.
Cooper apologizes to Brand for choosing Mann’s planet, saying it wasn’t personal. She says that his current plan factors in the fuel needed to return home, but that if he’s wrong about Mann’s planet and it isn’t viable, he’ll need to make a crucial decision about whether or not to use the last of their fuel to go to Edmunds’ planet and proceed with Plan B. She hopes he’ll be objective about that, as well—though it will mean never seeing his family again.
Murph rushes into a hospital ward, where Professor Brand’s health is failing fast. Dr. James Getty, a friend of Murph’s, shows her to his room, where she kneels by his bedside. He worries about letting everyone down, but she says she’ll finish what he started. He begs her forgiveness, saying he lied about there being a need for Cooper and the others to come back, as there was never a way to make Plan A work. Murph is incredulous. She asks about the equations, and he shakes his head. She asks if her father knew that he was leaving everyone behind to die, but he can only begin to recit, “Do not go gentle…” and then dies. We cut to Murph recording a message for Dr. Brand letting her know that her father died peacefully and without pain. She is about to cut off the recording when she pauses to ask if Dr. Brand knew that Plan A was always a lie, that there was no goal to save the humans left on Earth from suffocation and starvation.
Section 4 Analysis
Interstellar has been lauded by film critics and scientists alike for its painstaking attempts at scientific accuracy, particularly with regard to Gargantua’s effects on Miller’s planet. Famed astrophysicist and TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson has praised the film for being among the first to accurately depict how the black hole’s intense gravitational pull would cause time to move more slowly as one got closer to it, such that on Miller’s planet, which exists very near to the event horizon, one hour is equal to 7 years back on Earth. During pre-production, Christopher Nolan consulted executive producer Kip Thorne on the ability of a planet to exist near enough to a black hole such that this time discrepancy would occur, while also being capable of harboring life. Thorne was initially convinced that it wasn’t possible, but when Nolan implored him to check the math again, Thorne was surprised to find that it was. Thus, a planet such as Miller’s, while made up for the film, isn’t necessarily an impossibility.
The stark contrast between Cooper and Brand’s reactions once they realize the danger of being hit by the massive tidal waves speaks to their individual motivations, which they themselves bring up once they’re safely aboard the Ranger again: Brand, Doyle, and Romilly have left Earth understanding that they are likely never going to return to it. Thus, they are able to act with less concern for time because their goals don’t exist within the window of opportunity to see their loved ones again. Cooper, on the other hand, still hopes to reunite with his family and so is massively concerned for the time lost on Miller’s planet. When he realizes the slim odds of retrieving Miller’s data before being hit by the wave, he chooses to abort the mission and get everyone to safety, because once the mission is a lost cause, it becomes nothing more than a waste of his precious time. In contrast, Brand’s insistence that they try to get Miller’s data shows her prioritization of the mission’s objectives over preserving time.
Nolan uses several plot elements to dramatize the passage of time and tug at the audience’s hearts. The first of these is Romilly’s decision to stay aboard the Endurance. Had all four astronauts visited Miller’s planet together, they might’ve returned more or less inconsequentially (save for Doyle), having had the same experience with time. However, because Romilly stays behind, we see how the rest of the crew's brief mishap on the planet forces him to experience decades of torturous loneliness and isolation. The damage of wasted time is made that much more massive by separating him from the other crew members, and is immediately evident in his fragile demeanor, graying hair, and timid movements when they return to him.
Nolan’s second choice for dramatizing the time passage is the backlog of video messages from Cooper’s family, which show us in quick succession how Tom has aged, the fact that Tom’s first son, as well as Donald, have died, and that Murph refused to forgive her father and send him any messages for 23 years. Her single message is then used to great effect as a transitionary shot back to Earth.
Earlier in the film, Cooper talked with Donald about how Earth’s farmers always say, “Next year… next year things will be better,” denying the futility of their efforts to save the planet from starvation. Now, as an adult, we see Tom carry on this tragic tradition, saying he’ll farm part of his late neighbor’s farm next year, refusing to acknowledge that his efforts are in vain. The dangers of this denial increase as the film progresses: Tom later refuses medical help for his wife and son, choosing to stay where they are and keep farming rather than try to flee the blight-ridden town like everyone else. He becomes a foil character against his sister, who remains hopeful about solving their problems but realistic about how to act until they do.
Dylan Thomas’ iconic poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is a recurring point of inspiration for Professor Brand, one that he uses as narration more than once in Interstellar. The poem talks of fighting hard against the pull of death, to refuse to give in no matter what. Such themes apply broadly to the plot of the film, in which humanity is “raging” against the dying of their own species by seeking survival among the cosmos. The desperation and potential insanity of this endeavor speaks to their refusal to give up and accept their fate. The irony of Professor Brand’s use of the poem is that he, in fact, has given up on everyone still left on Earth; his revelation that Plan A was a lie means that only the astronauts who left the planet ever had a chance to “rage” against the dying of the light, while those who didn’t have none. The revelation is doubly ironic, however, because it will become the catalyst for Murph’s increased rage, which motivates her to solve the problem of gravity and give humanity a way to refuse to go gentle into that good night after all.
