Interstellar
RELEASED: 2014 DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan CAST: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain
The search for an alternative home for humanity has been the basis of many a sci-fi story, but few have been as evocative – or as grounded in theoretical physics – as Christopher Nolan’s quantum melodrama Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey stars as Joe Cooper, a melancholy former astronaut who is scratching out a living as a farmer on a near-future Earth rapidly turning into an arid dust bowl. His retirement is brought to an end as he’s recruited for an experimental deep-space mission to locate new habitable planets through a wormhole.
Though much of what it depicts is purely theoretical, such as the mind-bending finale built around the time-warping effects of wormholes, Nolan went out of his way to make sure that he was at least working from real scientific theories. For the film’s visually disorientating representations of what it would look like to travel past the event horizon of a wormhole, Nolan turned to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne, who put together equations that the computer effects team then used to generate their dizzying space-time distortions. Until we find a way to actually travel past light speed, we’re not going to know how accurate those effects really were, but by using cutting-edge astrophysics as his basis, rather than just what looked cool, Nolan was already ahead of the scifi curve.
The time dilation inherent in Einstein’s theory of relativity not only advances the plot, but underscores the painful human drama. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, McConaughey breaks down in tears as he watches decades of saved video messages from his son, knowing that although he is only months away from Earth from his perspective, his child has grown old and will die long before he can return home. This is a potent and moving illustration of the sacrifices that deepspace travel will involve.