Directed by Christopher Nolan, Interstellar is a fantastic tale of time, space, and love.
But if you got a bit lost in the final act of the film, we wouldn’t blame you.
So let’s do our best to walk through the bizarre, mind-bending ending of Interstellar.
Life on Earth isn't great in Interstellar.
Massive dust storms are tearing up the planet, crops are failing, and soon, humanity will
cease to exist.
Looking for answers, NASA turns to the skies, hoping for some kind of insight.
"Okay.
Now you need to tell me what your plan is to save the world."
As we learn at the beginning of the film, a group of 12 scientists traveled through
a mysterious wormhole that appeared near Saturn, to see if the 12 planets on the other side
could sustain human life.
A few years later, the Endurance and its crew including Matthew McConaughey's Cooper and
Anne Hathaway's Brand are going to visit the three most promising planets in the hopes
of colonizing one.
When they arrive on Dr. Mann's planet, the heroic scientist assures them his icy cold
spot is the perfect place for humans to live.
"Our world is cold, stark, but undeniably beautiful."
Unfortunately, it's soon all revealed to be a ruse.
Although each of the original 12 scientists knew their trip was one-way, Mann admits he
never fully considered the possibility that his planet would be uninhabitable, and that
he might die alone.
Although he resisted the urge for years, he eventually falsified his survey data to coax
another team to travel to his planet, intending to use the Endurance to escape.
At this point, Mann is so desperate to leave that he'll do anything, even kill.
Paranoid that the Endurance crew won't go along with his plan once they learn what he's
done, Mann attempts to kill Cooper so he can make his getaway.
Back on Earth, Cooper's now-grown children find themselves at odds.
His daughter, Murph, played by Jessica Chastain, has realized the surface of our planet has
become uninhabitable.
So naturally, she's trying to persuade her brother, Tom, to bring his family to the secret
NASA facility where she's been working on the gravitational equation that would allow
humanity to escape into space en masse.
But despite Murph's warnings, Tom refuses to abandon the farmhouse where they grew up.
After Cooper left them in their grandfather's care when they were children, never to be
heard from again, Tom lost all faith in NASA's ability to help them.
"Dad didn't raise you to be this dumb, Tom."
"Dad didn't raise me, Grandpa did.
And he's buried out back with Mom and Jesse."
Convinced her brother is making a terrible mistake, Murph sets fire to Tom's corn fields,
knowing that since Tom relies on his crops for survival, he'll be forced to drive out
to try to extinguish the blaze.
That buys Murph enough time to return to the house and evacuate Tom's wife and son, likely
in the hopes that once Tom realizes his family has gone to the NASA facility, he'll have
no choice but to join them.
Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Without enough fuel to either return to Earth or travel to the third potentially habitable
planet,, Cooper proposes to use the gravity of the black hole Gargantua to execute a slingshot
maneuver, which would send the Endurance off with enough inertia to reach the planet Dr.
Edmunds was sent to assess.
However, every time the Endurance crew approaches the black hole, its gravitational field distorts
their perception of time due to relativity, meaning what they experience as only minutes
passes as years for anyone outside Gargantua's gravity.
"Every hour we spend on that planet will be seven years back on Earth."
By executing Cooper's slingshot maneuver, he and Brand will experience "time slippage"
of 51 years.
They both realize this means Cooper will have to give up hope of ever seeing his children
back on Earth, as they will likely have died of old age by the time the Endurance exits
Gargantua's gravity.
Still, Cooper knows that his plan is humanity's last chance for survival.
Adding even more drama to Cooper's decision is Mann's earlier speech about the moment
humans experience before death.
According to Mann, as our brains grasp at survival, we'll experience a vision of the
thing we most desire to see again.
Mann speculates that Cooper's final image will be of his children, since they're his
reason for living.
"At the moment of death, your mind is going to push a little bit harder to survive…
for them."
By giving up hope of seeing his children again, Cooper is prioritizing the future of humanity
over his own motivations for survival.
With its depleted fuel supplies, Endurance must decrease its weight to pull free of Gargantua's
gravity after completing Cooper's slingshot maneuver.
Before beginning the maneuver, Cooper decides the shuttle holding TARS will detach and drop
into the black hole.
In addition to relieving the Endurance of the shuttle's weight, Cooper hopes that TARS
can collect the quantum data from inside the singularity that NASA scientists on Earth
need to complete the gravitational equation that will allow humanity to leave.
While odds are slim that TARS will be able to transmit this data back to Earth, Cooper
is determined to at least try, since it's his children's last hope of survival.
However, Cooper doesn't tell Brand that losing TARS' shuttle won't account for a big enough
drop in weight.
In fact, an additional shuttle has to detach in order for the Endurance to escape.
Cooper decides that he should bite the proverbial bullet, leaving Brand to continue on to Edmunds'
planet and restart the human race.
He doesn't tell Brand until the last moment because he knows she would argue with his
decision, but even without the possibility of seeing his children again, Cooper is at
peace with his probable death.
After falling into the black hole, Cooper continues to record what he's seeing and transmits
it back to TARS, hoping the additional data might help the scientists back on Earth.
Although he expects to eventually get crushed by Gargantua's gravity, Cooper is miraculously
spared once his shuttle is ripped apart.
And that's when things get crazy.
After surviving the wild ride, Cooper gets transported to an infinite, interdimensional
library that allows him to look back into different moments in his daughter's childhood
bedroom, including the day he left for his mission on the Endurance.
"If you're leaving, just go."
"No.
No, don't go, you idiot."
TARS determines that they made it through Gargantua alive because they were protected
by "them," the mysterious beings who constructed the wormhole in the first place.
Since the beginning of the film, who "they" are has been a mystery.
While NASA realized the wormhole was artificially constructed by some sort of advanced, intelligent
beings, they didn't have any information about "them" beyond the assumption that they must
be benevolent.
TARS deduces "they" also must have built this library to help Cooper understand their five-dimensional
reality.
And sure, it's confusing, but it's also nice to have otherworldly beings on your side.
Although the library where "they" bring Cooper seems to go on forever, every part of this
room serves as a window into the exact same place: his daughter Murph's childhood bedroom.
At first, Cooper seems to think he's been brought to her because of his own desire to
see her again, but TARS helps him understand "they" have constructed this three-dimensional
reality for Cooper, allowing him to access all five dimensions in a way he can understand.
And why do they wanna help us, huh?"
"I don't know, but they've constructed this three-dimensional space inside of their five-dimensional
reality to allow you to understand it."
Together, TARS and Cooper figure out that through the library, Cooper is able to physically
influence different points in space-time by using gravity to move things, as time and
gravity are the fourth and fifth dimensions that exist in "their" reality.
But what's the point of all this?
Cooper deduces that he's been brought here to send a message back through time, using
gravity, and that Murph has to be the one to receive it.
Cooper realizes that while he thought "they" were fixated on him, he's not actually the
one who's most important to saving humanity — Murph is.
The library exists to ensure that Cooper will be able to deliver his daughter the information
she needs, right when she needs it.
After Cooper finds himself stuck in the library, he realizes he's supposed to pass along the
quantum data that TARS collected from inside Gargantua.
The information the robot gathered from inside the black hole will help Murph save mankind,
and Cooper is the interdimensional messenger, selected by the same mysterious forces that
constructed this library and created the wormhole near Saturn.
"But something sent you here.
They chose you."
"Well who's they?"
And once Cooper understands his new purpose, he realizes the creatures who've been assisting
humanity aren't extraterrestrial at all.
"They didn't bring us here at all.
We brought ourselves."
As it turns out, at some point in the future, humanity will advance to a place where we
can navigate through all five dimensions.
It's these future humans who used gravity to create the wormhole that allowed NASA to
send scientists to explore the 12 planets in the first place.
These future humans are also the ones who protected Cooper from the effects of Gargantua.
Just as Cooper is able to use the library to influence events that, for him, already
happened, the humans of the future have been using their understanding of time and gravity
to ensure their own survival by assisting Cooper, Murph, NASA, and the other humans
of their past.
After realizing why the library exists and that "they" want Cooper to give Murph the
quantum data she needs to save the world, TARS asks how Cooper plans to communicate
such complex information from another dimension.
"Love, TARS, love.
It's just like Brand said.
My connection with Murph, it's quantifiable.
It's the key."
The robot doesn't understand, but Cooper explains that he can trust his love for his daughter
to guide him to exactly where he needs to be.
As Brand explained earlier in the film, love is the only thing that transcends all dimensions,
including time and space.
Cooper decides to code the quantum data into the second hand of the watch he gave Murph
before he left, assuring TARS that she will one day return for it.
When TARS asks how Cooper can be sure, he responds:
"Because I gave it to her."
He's confident that her love for him will lead her where she needs to go, just as his
love led him back to her.
Sure enough, as all this is happening, the adult Murph has indeed returned to her childhood
bedroom, drawn by an unseen force.
She suddenly understands the "ghost" from earlier in the film, the entity trying to
contact her with dust patterns on her bedroom floor, was actually her father.
Reminded of her love for him, she finds the watch, and voila, things are suddenly starting
to look up for humanity.
With the planet dying, humans have to evacuate the place fast.
But to solve the gravitational equation that allows humanity to escape from the tethers
of Earth, you need quantum data gathered from inside a black hole.
"The equation couldn't reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.
You need more."
"More.
More what?"
"More data.
You need to see into a black hole."
Thinking that collecting such data is impossible, Murph believes the people of Earth are doomed,
and that her father has abandoned her.
However, once she realizes that Cooper was her childhood "ghost" and that he's given
her the data she needs through the watch, she's able to solve the equation, ensuring
humanity's survival.
Once Cooper passes along the quantum data, the library tesseract begins to collapse,
having served its purpose.
Cooper loses consciousness, and he later wakes up on a space habitat orbiting Saturn.
Just as "they" brought Cooper to a library and allowed him to communicate with his daughter
and save humanity, "they" also brought him back back to safety once he was finished with
his mission.
Only instead of Earth, he's now on a gigantic colony floating through space.
Thanks to Murph's calculations and the data acquired from the black hole, humans were
finally able to leave Earth en masse, and now they're spread out over several different
space habitats.
And it's all thanks to those mysterious forces, who helped Cooper in the library and made
sure people would find him once it was time for the library to close.
Due to the "time slippage" that Brand warned about before executing the slingshot maneuver
around Gargantua, at least 51 years have passed for the people of Earth.
But it's only been hours for Cooper.
By the time he makes it to the space habitat known as Cooper Station, his daughter Murph,
whom he last saw as a little girl, is an old woman on the verge of death.
On the flip side, Cooper appears to be about the same age as he was when he left.
While Cooper is overjoyed to finally be reunited with his daughter, Murph knows that she won't
live much longer, and tells him that he should go so that he doesn't have to watch her die.
"No parent should have to watch their own child die."
Cooper takes his daughter's advice and steals a ship, intending to head back through the
wormhole and join Brand on Edmunds' planet.
Like Cooper, she would've only recently arrived, and she'll soon be entering hyper-sleep, keeping
her the same age until he reaches her.
Sadly, Edmunds himself has died at some point during the decades he spent waiting for NASA
to send a team to his planet.
But as Brand takes off her helmet and breathes in the air of her new home at his grave site,
it's evident this is the planet the astronauts have been searching for, where humanity can
rebuild and, eventually, thrive again.
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