If you’re a fan of science fiction films, you’ve almost certainly seen the hit 2014 movie Interstellar. The film, which was written and directed by auteur filmmaker Christopher Nolan, offers some of the most mind-bending scientific set-pieces ever committed to the big screen. Real life scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye have praised the movie for its fairly accurate representation of theoretical physics, while audiences worldwide have attributed a deeper fascination with space travel to the epic adventure. Despite the mostly straightforward narrative of Interstellar, the movie’s ending is highly complex, and has continued to leave some audiences scratching their heads even a decade later. So, now seems like as good a time as any to explain exactly what happens at the end of Interstellar, walk through the film’s themes and ideas, and unpack the artistic vision of Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus.
As always, the following write-up will include major spoilers for the film, so be sure to bookmark this page and return later if you haven’t watched it yet. Luckily, Interstellar isn’t the kind of movie that is completely reliant on shocking twists and turns to remain relevant, so you’ll probably find plenty to enjoy about the film even if you go in knowing the ending. Even if you’ve seen this spectacular sci-fi outing numerous times, you may find yourself in desperate need of a rewatch after reading this quick refresher, as the material in the film can be quite dense. We’ll recap the full plot of Interstellar before really digging into the ending, so don’t shy away if your memory of the 10-year-old movie is a bit rusty. Without any further preamble, let’s rev up our thrusters and blast off into a full explanation of Interstellar‘s stunning conclusion.
What Happens In Interstellar?
Interstellar centers on a former NASA pilot named Joseph Cooper, who lives with his children and his father-in-law on a farm in the year 2067. Despite the farm’s massive acreage, the Coopers have fallen on hard times when the film kicks off, as a global dust bowl has begun overtaking the Earth. The film’s inciting incident comes when Cooper’s daughter, Murph, alerts him to an intriguing particle pattern that she has discovered during the latest dust storm. Following Murph’s lead, Cooper tracks down the source of this pattern, uncovering a nearby NASA facility operating in secret. After touring the facility and connecting with Dr. John Brand, who runs the operation, Cooper agrees to embark upon an interstellar journey to try to save the human race.
As Dr. Brand explains, his poorly-funded division of NASA has uncovered a wormhole near the orbit of Saturn, which could support the possibility of space travel to a distant galaxy with habitable planets for humans to colonize. Recognizing the blight brought upon Earth by the human race through factors such as man-made climate change and corporate greed, Brand feels that the only way to secure a continued future for humanity is to send Cooper and a team of engineers into the wormhole on the Endurance spacecraft. Despite his daughter’s objections, Cooper recognizes the importance of the mission, and agrees to depart Earth, promising that he’ll return once the mission is complete.
Cooper’s team, which consists of NASA scientists Amelia, Doyle, Romilly, and two robots called TARS and CASE, set out to probe three far away worlds that are suspected to be suitable for human life. Their initial trip to Saturn takes several years to complete, and their inaugural trip through a wormhole sends them further from Earth than any human being has ever gone before.
Did Cooper Lie To Murph?
As Murph, and the audience, come to learn later in Interstellar, the Endurance was never slated to return from its mission through the wormhole. As the young woman grows up, she continues to work alongside Dr. Brand to develop a gravity equation that will help to expedite human space travel with the assistance of black holes, though Brand can never quite crack the code. After decades of working on the equation to no avail, Brand reveals to Murph that he knew from the beginning they would never succeed, and that the true mission was always to send frozen fertilized human eggs into space with the Endurance crew as a repopulation effort. Needless to say, this leaves Murph incensed, as she comes to believe that her father knowingly abandoned his family on a suicide mission.
Meanwhile, Cooper and company seek out the first planet on their list, which is positioned in the orbit of a black hole’s gravity well, making it completely inhospitable. Still, the team descends on the planet to conduct further research, only to learn that the surface is impacted by severe time dilation. When the team return to the ship, they learn that the 3 hour time period they spent on the planet’s surface was equal to 23 years on Earth.
Cooper swells with tears as he catches up on 23 years of missed call logs, including a final message from Murph where she laments that he lied about the nature of the mission. This information stuns Cooper and Amelia, who both earnestly believed that they would eventually return home thanks to the lies of Dr. Brand. Despite his devastation, Cooper is never able to articulate the truth to his daughter, and she spends the rest of her life believing that he left her on Earth to die.
Are Any Of The Planets Hospitable?
Carrying on with their mission, Cooper and the crew locate the second planet on their list, which is a frigid tundra unfit for human populations. Once they land, the Endurance crew awaken a NASA scout who was sent to survey the planet before their arrival, and he admits that he falsified data about the wasteland planet so that the crew would come to save him. The scout, played in a surprise cameo from Matt Damon, attempts to hijack the Endurance and escape, but ultimately fails to dock the lander, causing an explosion which kills him and irreparably damages the ship. As the final surviving humans on board, Cooper and Amelia just barely manage to make it back onto the vessel, and enlist the assistance of the massive black hole’s gravitational pull to propel them toward the third and final planet on their list.
In order to ensure that Amelia can make it to the final planet, Cooper dislocates his portion of the ship, which propels the damaged Endurance vessel enough to escape from the black hole’s gravitational pull. This sends Amelia drifting toward the final destination, where it is later revealed that she lands safely. The final moments of the film see her removing her helmet and taking in a breath of fresh air on the surface of the third world, seemingly confirming that the fertilized eggs can be thawed and prepped for colonization.
How Does The Black Hole Work In Interstellar?
Unlike most Hollywood movies, most of the physics represented in Interstellar are as scientifically accurate as we can glean at this time. Christopher Nolan worked very closely with theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne to ensure that all of his math and science were up to snuff, and even followed Thorne’s stringent guidelines against violating established physical laws. One of the only scenes where that philosophy falls by the wayside is Cooper’s ejection into the black hole, simply because there’s no possible way for human beings to understand what would actually happen in this situation, even on a theoretical level.
Some scientists have argued that a human being sucked into a black hole would cause them to undergo spaghettification, while others believe that such a human would be compacted into a single atom by the sheer weight of the black hole’s mass.
In the film, Cooper’s ejection into the black hole transfers him into a four-dimensional tesseract, allowing him to see into the distant past, and partially communicate with his past self. In fact, Cooper falls into a strange liminal space behind Murph’s childhood bookshelf, wherein he manipulates dust particles to provide her with coordinates to the NASA facility. Here, Cooper engages in a temporal contradiction known as the bootstrap paradox, wherein the events that led him to this very moment were set in motion by his future self.
To compound on this paradox, Cooper theorizes that the black hole, the tesseract, and the wormhole near Saturn are all man-made objects, placed in their space-time positions by a future civilization to save humanity. The whole thing is very cerebral, and even leaves TARS the robot in a deep state of confusion, but makes for spectacularly compelling cinema.
How Does Interstellar End?
Cooper’s trip through the black hole winds up being the final piece of the puzzle needed to solve Dr. Brand’s equation, effectively closing the loop on Murph’s life’s work. While peering through the temporal book shelf, Cooper manages to transmit data to Murph via morse code, which allows her to save humanity from extinction, and kickstart an initiative to build O’Neill Cylinder colonies in outer space as the Earth becomes fully uninhabitable. As the tesseract closes, Cooper and TARS are sent into the vacuum of space, where they are miraculously rescued by human travelers.
In the final scenes of Interstellar, Cooper makes true on his promise by reuniting with his daughter, though she has aged to be decades older than him due to his time dilution experiences. Cooper manages to say goodbye to Murph as she lays in her deathbed, before setting out to rescue Amelia on the hospitable third planet. Despite all the hardship faced by Interstellar‘s cast of characters, the film ends on an overwhelmingly positive note, with both Murph and Cooper succeeding at saving humanity in their own way.
Ending Explained And Unpacked
Clearly, Interstellar is Christopher Nolan’s meditation on the state of humanity as we face increasing difficulty with issues like man-made climate change and global extinction. Some heads of the space-faring industry, such as Elon Musk, have begun to express interest in colonizing Mars in the coming years to curtail these problems, though the logistics of such a move are functionally impossible at this time. Interstellar is also a love letter to classic science fiction films, as Nolan has cited 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, Wall-E, and others as major sources of inspiration, both visually and thematically.
Some critics have lambasted the conclusion of Interstellar as being too tidy, too happy, and too unrealistic, but the truth is, this is one of the only elements of the film that takes significant artistic liberties in the face of real science. If you prefer, you can imagine everything after Cooper is ejected into the black hole as being part of his imagination as he is pulled into strands of cosmic spaghetti, though Nolan has never given any indication that this is the case. The final parting thesis of Interstellar‘s ending suggests that love is powerful enough to extend beyond all dimensions, past our understanding of time and space, past generations of distance, and past our suspension of disbelief. Today, Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ and Amazon Prime Video, for anyone who needs to rewatch the modern classic at home.
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