Summary
- Interstellar takes place in a future where humanity is facing extinction due to a new Dust Bowl and the depletion of natural resources. Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper, leaves Earth to search for a new home for humanity.
- The movie's timeline spans nearly a century, but Cooper himself barely ages due to time dilation from his various cosmic adventures. This makes it difficult to determine which year the movie takes place in.
- Interstellar begins in 2067 and jumps ahead 23 years while only a few hours pass for Cooper. The movie ends around the year 2156, with Cooper being 124 years old and reuniting with an elderly Murph.
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Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar starts off in a year in the distant future, but its story timeline goes decades even further into the future. Interstellar takes place during a new Dust Bowl when humanity is running out of natural resources and struggling to grow new food. Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a farmer who reluctantly leaves his kids behind on Earth to search the universe for a new home for the human race. Thanks to time dilation, the mission ends up taking decades. Coop misses his kids growing up and returns to find that humanity came up with a Plan B: living on a giant space station.
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The movie’s timeline spans nearly a century, imagining where humanity might end up when it’s no longer sustainable to live on Earth. Coop himself barely ages throughout the film, because his trips to planets with longer days and his various cosmic adventures through wormholes and black holes mean that, from his perspective, nowhere near a century has passed. Since the world keeps turning but the protagonist looks the same, it can be tricky to figure out which year Interstellar takes place in – and how many years have passed by the time the movie finally ends.
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Interstellar Starts Out Set In The Year 2067
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Based on the official tie-in material released to expand the Interstellar universe, the story begins in 2067. The wormhole was discovered in 2019 and the “present” is 48 years later, placing the opening scenes of the movie in 2067. At this point in the future, Interstellar imagines that the human race is on the brink of extinction. People around the world are dying of starvation because ecocide has destroyed the natural world and prevented the production of food. Humanity has abandoned scientific endeavors like space exploration, so Coop lost his job at NASA and now owns and operates a farm instead.
Released in 2014, Interstellar begins about 50 years into its own relative future. This is a little further into the future than the average sci-fi movie dares to venture. Both 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of Interstellar’s biggest sources of inspiration, and Blade Runner, another seminal classic of the genre, take place a little over 30 years into the future. 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey takes place from 1999 to 2001, while 1982’s Blade Runner takes place in 2019. Interstellar starts out even further into the future than those movies, and it only gets further and further into the future from there.
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Interstellar was Christopher Nolan's first film set in the future.
Interstellar Jumps Ahead 23 Years (Only 3 Hours For Coop)
The first planet that the Endurance crew visits in Interstellar – and the first planet in the system orbiting Gargantua – is a waterworld discovered by Dr. Laura Miller. After discovering the planet, Dr. Miller sent out a thumbs-up beacon, so the Endurance crew decided to check it out and see if it would be a viable new home for humanity. The planet has a punishing 130% gravity, 4,000-foot-tall tidal waves, and, most notably, Romilly calculates that one hour on Miller’s planet equates to seven years on Earth, which is the key to figuring out the film’s timeline after they depart from Miller’s planet.
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While Coop and the others are on Miller’s planet for what seems like a few hours, 23 years and change are said to have taken place on Earth. However, by this point, it’s 2092, because it took the Endurance crew a couple of years to travel there. This makes sense with the casting of older actors, since Jessica Chastain is 23 years older than Mackenzie Foy. Murph is said to be 10 at the beginning of the film, rather than 14 (as Foy was at the time), so older Murph is 34, despite the fact that Chastain was 38 during filming.
Interstellar Ends Around The Year 2156
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After entering a black hole and traveling through time in a five-dimensional tesseract, Cooper is spat out in the orbit of Saturn, where he’s rescued and taken back to humanity’s new home: an O’Neill Cylinder floating through space. At this point in the story of Interstellar, Coop is said to be 124 years old. He was 35 when he left on the Endurance mission in 2067, so that puts the ending around the year 2156. This means that the elderly, dying Murph with whom he reunites is around 99 years old (although Ellen Burstyn was only 82 at the time of shooting).