Set in a future Earth troubled by environmental degradation, where the dream of space exploration has been abandoned for more urgent pursuits, Interstellar follows Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former pilot and space enthusiast who, embittered because the new world has seems to have no place for him, survives in a mediocre farming life. One day Cooper and his beloved 10 years old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy) find a secret government outpost and discover that NASA isn’t dead, but frantically working underground against the clock to prepare the exodus of humankind from dying Earth.
Cooper leaves Murphy behind to lead a scouting crew to a distant star, via a wormhole that has been found near Saturn, probably left by an alien civilization — a homage to the immortal 2001 of Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur C. Clarke, to which Interstellar has been compared. The wormhole leads to the black hole Gargantua, around which previous scouting missions have found inhabitable planets. But the gravity well of the black hole accelerates time — years over years will pass for Murphy on Earth, and Cooper won’t be able to see her again. Of course, intrigue and deception make things even more desperate.
The grown up Murphy (Ellen Burstyn) participates in the NASA project on Earth, where the impending doom becomes closer. Meanwhile on Gargantua, Cooper is rescued by benevolent aliens and placed in a hyper-dimensional device where he finds ways to communicate with Murphy across space and time — his messages to the 10 years old Murphy initiate the chain of events that brought him to Gargantua, and he tells the adult scientist Murphy the answers that will permit transporting humanity to the stars, a happy end against impossible odds .
Despite the “magic” technologies featured in the film, Interstellar is based on very solid science. Renowned astrophysicist Kip Thorne, co-author of one of the standard textbook’s on Einstein’s general relativity, designed the supercomputer programs for the award-winning special effects showing what an observer traversing a wormhole would see. Thorne’s book The Science of Interstellar – a must-read complement to the film – tells the scientific background in detail, from established science to speculative theories.
“I helped Nolan and others weave real science into the film’s fabric,” says Thorne in the preface. “Much of Interstellar’s science is at or just beyond today’s frontiers of human understanding.”
As it often happens, Interstellar has been criticized for its wildly imaginative scientific optimism, which prompts sad reflections today’s politically-correct, often dull cultural climate. In particular, an article on io9 exhorts science fiction writers and filmmakers to “Stop Putting New Age Pseudoscience in Our Science Fiction.” But Thorne’s book shows that even the wildest aspects of Interstellar are based on real scientific speculations, some of which are supported by top scientists and could be verified and exploited by future science.
