Spoiler Alert! Some Theories About That 'Interstellar' Ending

Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in Interstellar

So you’ve just gotten out of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. If you’re like me, your ears are ringing with Hans Zimmer’s overwhelming (some might say, overbearing) score, your eyes are saturated by the Kubrick-esque outer space imagery and your mind is zooming along at hyperspeed trying process what you just saw — particularly everything that goes on during the film’s final act, which literally vanishes down a wormhole into otherworldly narrative territory.

Devising wild theories to “explain” the ending of a Nolan film has been a popular pastime dating back to Memento and reached a crescendo with his most elaborate mind game yet, 2010’s Inception. There’s plenty to debate about Interstellar's finale as well, particularly after you’ve logged onto forums like Reddit to see what other folks are thinking. Inspired by the film, I’ve harnessed the power of wormhole science to communicate with my past self — the one who just emerged from a screening of Interstellar a couple of days ago — to break down the various elements of what’s going on in the third act.

Element #1: We Are the Monolith

Present Self: Okay, past self: instant reaction time. Explain what you just saw!

Past Self: Excuse me, but you’re going to have to speak up a little. I can’t quite hear you over the sound of Zimmer’s pipe organ.

Present Self: Is it better if we communicate by pushing books off a shelf?

Past Self: Only if you want this chat to last for 23 years. I think I understand the broad strokes of the ending; it’s essentially another one of the riffs on 2001: A Space Odyssey that Nolan has embedded into the movie, along with those walking, talking monolith robots and the spinning space station. In 2001, Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick posited that humanity’s evolution from warring apes to space explorers was aided by some kind of interstellar guardian angels. They were the ones who left the monoliths behind as an educator and a marker, as well as the guardians of the Star Gate, which leads Dave Bowman to his own personal evolution into the Star Child.

Here, it seems like humanity functions as its own guardian angel, with our distant descendants having unlocked the secret to existing in dimensions beyond our current three. To ensure that their ancestors make the crucial discovery that paves the way for this far-off future, they’ve located the exact moment in the time stream that set mankind on its new course and choreographed events to ensure that moment comes to pass. And the all-important moment just so happens to be the instant that grown-up Murph (Jessica Chastain) finally figures out that the “ghost” dropping books in her bedroom is her long-absent dad Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), communicating to her from deep within a black hole in a five-dimensional environment constructed by these future humans. So “we” are the “they” that everyone in the movie keeps talking about.

Present Self: Yeah, that seems to be the prevailing opinion from where I stand. In his lengthy recap over on ScreenRant, Ben Kendrick adds that the environment of the Tesseract — the M.C. Escher-esque recurring images of Murph’s bedroom — was constructed specifically for Cooper, with the understanding that he’d be able to make sense of his surroundings and communicate effectively with his daughter.

Past Self: Does he also ask how — if humanity was really as close to extinction as the movie repeatedly suggests — anyone survived to create the wormhole in the first place?

Present Self: He asked and Tom Bond over at Den of Geek attempted to answer. His line of reasoning is that since mankind has the key to the fifth dimension thanks to Cooper and Murph, “it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for humanity to advance and evolve that far, because this knowledge allows them to transcend time and space.” Let’s also not forget, though, that Amelia (Anne Hathaway) is implementing Plan B — the canisters of human embryos — on the third planet on the other side of the wormhole, so all those kids could make up the bulk of the future human population responsible for setting the events of the film in motion.

Element #2: Gravity Falls

Past Self: I gotta say, Murph’s spinning watch wasn’t anywhere near as cool an image as Dom’s spinning top in Inception. Why should I care about that again?

Present Self: Because it’s all connected to the movie’s take on gravity — the force, not the Sandra Bullock movie. Gravity is what causes the vast time differential between our Milky Way and the galaxy on the other side of the wormhole, and it’s also the central problem that NASA-certified genius Brand (Michael Caine) has to crack to make Plan A the viable option he pretends it is. By making Murph’s books fall, and then her watch fluttered, Cooper provides her with the necessary information to crack the gravity conundrum and transform her into the venerated inventor (played by Ellen Burstyn) she’s become decades in the future. Speaking of gravity, over on Reddit some are speculating about the significance of the gravitational anomaly that crashed Cooper’s shuttle early on in the movie. One user is postulating that it might have been an early trial attempt on behalf of future mankind to get their gravitational method of communication working, while another wonders if it might be the other Lazarus pilots trying to communicate with the world they left behind. Or it could just be a plot hole on Nolan’s part…as if that would ever happen.

Element #3: Time Enough for Love

Past Self: This is Nolan’s second movie in a row where the hero narrowly (and somewhat inexplicably) survives certain death and runs off to shack up with Anne Hathaway. Should Amelia be dead or, at the very least, as old as Murph by the time Cooper shows up in her neck of the new galaxy?

Present Self: Survey says…no. Going back to Kendrick’s ScreenRant post, he notes that the time difference between galaxies works out in favor of the couple. First off, because time moves slower when you’re in the vicinity of a black hole, Cooper emerges from his bookshelf conversation with Murph a few seconds’ older, while the inhabitants of the Milky Way galaxy have aged almost a full century. Back through the black hole, Amelia’s clock is ticking just as slowly, so when Cooper decides to make a reverse trip — after bidding farewell to the other woman in his life, Murph — he expects to find her still looking like Anne Hathaway and not, say, Helen Mirren. Not that having Helen Mirren waiting for you on the other end of a black hole would be at all a bad thing.

What do you make of Interstellar's ending? Sound off with your thoughts and wild speculations in the comments.

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