This film will make you cry, contemplate life, and then draw you back in for a crescendo of a final act.

Interstellar, 2014 sci-fi adventure directed by Christopher Nolan, depicts a world in which drought, dust, and failed crops define the earth’s climate. Dust storms plague the landscape as precious crops die of disease year after year. When Cooper, a former pilot turned farmer, (played by Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter uncover a secret NASA outpost, Cooper is urged to join the mission to seek out habitable planets and to save the human race from a suffocating extinction. The film, which totals a whopping 2 hours and 49 minutes, is a deep dive into not only the human condition and the ideas of love and sacrifice but also into speculative physics and black hole theories. It is both wildly imaginative and deeply thought-provoking, all while providing stunning visuals and a moving score composed by Hans Zimmer. Interstellar also raises the bar in its portrayal of strong, confident women who refuse to give in— and who inevitably save us all with their quick wit and brilliant minds. 

This 169-minute movie, starring well-known actors and actresses such as Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, is one of the most popular sci-fi space movies to date. It is based on the book, The Science of Interstellar, which explains the ideas viewers come across in the movie, such as the “fifth dimension.” This movie stands in the ranks among movies along the likes of Star Wars and Avatar due to the fact that its storyline goes deeper than you would think to imagine. Not only that, but people’s interest in living in space and on other planets has increased, due to the fact that humanity is slowly, but surely making the Earth uninhabitable for future generations. Released in theaters in October 2014 all over the world, Interstellar grossed $677 million with an estimated budget of $165 million. The director of the movie, Christopher Nolan, has also directed other successful movies, such as The Dark Knight trilogy. Five years later, Interstellar is still one of the talks of our time giving viewers the notion that maybe there is more to life than what we know.

The apocalypse doesn’t just start out of nowhere. Although it may seem like it to the average day-to-day person who is glued to their screens and could care less about the politics that are running Earth into the ground, but there is always more beneath the surface, or in Interstellar’s case, outside of the ozone layer. The events that happen during the first few moments in the movie when we realize that Earth will soon be unsustainable, have been ongoing for quite some time. Although sustainability is the main driving force of the plot, the action of sacrifice is pivotal when trying to save humankind. Every character in the movie makes a sacrifice, whether it be goal-driven or accidental. When the Lazarus pilots are faced with a wormhole, they all decide to venture through – – even though they are well aware that they are all going to die before anyone will be able to find them. Even when Dr. Brand was stranded on Miller’s planet, looking off into the vast empty plain she still continued to do what she had been working towards, because she could have either given up or pushed through for the greater goal she set out for. This is very similar to Kate in Sam Sisivath’s The Purge of Babylon. She decided and took a chance, sacrificing herself and was turned into a ghoul for the sake of her sanity. Her mentality here was “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Kate realized she wasn’t actually living, just surviving, which ultimately lead to her despair. This is common in the PA narrative for a character to hit a wall, this is an ongoing otiose of sacrifice in the PA genre, with the options of going down with the ship or aborting it altogether.

Love has escaped the minds of scientists for years, and in this film, Nolan tackles this elusive conundrum in a deeply poetic way. As professor Brand points out, perhaps love is even more powerful than we give it credit for. Whether it be Brand’s pull towards her lover’s planet, or Cooper unspooling the mystery of “them” and how they connect to his relationship with his daughter, Interstellar digs into the notion that love may be behind reality itself. A dizzying notion, yet one that lingers in the back of our minds after the credits roll. With many Apocalyptic tales, we witness stories of continued love and desire after the world holds no resemblance to what it was. For example, with Purge of Babylon, there are multiple budding love interests within a state of constant danger. Is this perhaps due to the fundamental nature of love to our universe?

Another significant theme throughout the movie is the concept of isolation. This tests the characters’ abilities to process the isolation rather from a survivalist standpoint but an ethical one instead, they create a series of rules and principles of conduct to maintain order.  Some characters, Dr. Mann for instance, abandon everything they have known and worked for to stay alive while others revert back to instinctual needs on how to survive. An example is when Cooper listens to the sound of rainfall to reimagine what Earth was like. The communities they form, the farming community to find vegetation, that are put together also allow characters like Cooper to feel alone. As he was once a NASA pilot and is not a farmer like the others. He has a hard time conforming without recognizing the crushing sense of loneliness around him. This relates to Robert Neville in each variation of I am Legend, they do not understand the other people around them, they are skeptical at first before beginning to trust them fully and join the community.  Interstellar shows us that whether or not we can withstand the solitary confinement that we are given is only defines us on how we as humans deal with it. As humans, we are unable to maintain solitude before essentially going mad. No one truly knows their limits until they have been subjected to it.