Interstellar

"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here."

Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film from director Christopher Nolan, his first major release since The Dark Knight Rises.

In the not-too-distant future, Earth is slowly growing inhospitable and most of humanity seems resigned to fade away in a few generations -- or maybe in less than a few. Joseph Cooper is an astronaut-in-training turned farmer after an accident put an end to his aerospace career, living with his father-in-law, teenaged son Tom, and ten-year-old daughter Murphy ("Murph"). A few mysterious coincidences lead Cooper and Murph to the remnants of NASA, who want to turn things around with a mission to spread humanity through a wormhole to another solar system. A dozen crewed probe missions have already been dispatched, and three are returning positive results, but they need to send a bigger spacecraft, the Endurance, to find the right planet and get enough data on gravity to allow the rest of humanity to leave the gravity well and join them. Even if "Plan A" fails, the Endurance can complete "Plan B", carrying enough embryos and seedlings to start a colony from scratch on the chosen planet. They want Cooper to join the mission as one of the few aerospace engineers left in the world. However, the mission entails a flight through a wormhole, which means (due to time dilation) that while a few years would pass for Cooper, decades will pass on Earth, and Cooper is left with the prospect of having to leave his children behind to help save humanity.


 * Anti-Intellectualism: Most of humanity has adopted this philosophy. Cooper's former profession is politely dismissed as "useless" at a parent-teacher conference.  The reason that conference is happening at all is that Murph brought in an old edition of a book that mentioned the Moon landings, when the "revised and approved Federal edition" refers to the Apollo program as a failure and a waste of resources.  NASA was publicly shut down and has been operating in secret because of this.
 * Broken Pedestal:
 * Cool Ship: The Endurance, a sort of flying space station. It carries enough embryos and seedlings to found a whole colony in the event that humanity is unable to leave Earth in time.
 * Crapsack World: Blights have killed most of Earth's crops and the characters essentially live in a world with an expiration date.
 * Dirty Coward:
 * Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: The Catch Phrase and Survival Mantra of Doctor Brand.
 * Fallen Hero:
 * Last-Name Basis: Joseph Cooper is almost always referred to by his last name.
 * Messianic Archetype: All over the place. The twelve Lazarus missions, Joseph Cooper ...
 * Mind Screw: Not so much for the audience, but is pretty hard on Cooper.
 * Missing Mom: Cooper's wife died of a brain tumor. Before things went to pieces, it could have been detected and operated on, but in an age when humanity struggles to grow enough food to feed itself, MRIs and other advanced medicine is seen as "wasteful".  Cooper's still somewhat bitter about it.
 * Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Class 5, Speculative Science. While some liberties are necessarily taken with the actual journey through a wormhole (we've never sent anything through one, and our understanding of what happens inside the event horizon is still hazy), Interstellar is about as "hard" as major sci-fi films get.
 * Murphy's Law: Murph is named for it. She's not wild about it, but Cooper reassures her that he doesn't think of her (and her mother didn't think of her) as something that "went wrong"; rather, "anything that can happen, will."
 * NASA: They're on their last legs, with no public support and officially shut down. They're launching one last mission to spread humanity beyond Earth before they go extinct.
 * Oh Crap: The planets visited are not as habitable as they seem at first, and our heroes find out about both very suddenly. Miller's planet, and Mann's planet
 * Practical Effects: The robots and the Endurance were all physical objects.
 * Relativity: Very seriously treated in this film. Some liberties are taken with the actual journey through a wormhole, but the appearance of Gargantua and the effects of time dilation were made with the best scientific knowledge of the day, with noted physicist Kip Thorne serving as science consultant.  Scientific papers were written based on the computation work that went into rendering Interstellar!
 * One major plot point (that is often overlooked in sci-fi) is that time passes more slowly the deeper in a gravity well you go. Cooper and Amelia experienced a few years in all, but Romilly experienced 23 years during the excursion to Miller's planet that felt like a few hours to them, and many more decades passed on Earth before their mission finally ended.
 * The Reveal:
 * Robot Buddy: TARS and CASE.
 * Single Biome Planet: Miller's Planet is mostly ocean.
 * Southern-Fried Genius: Joseph and Murph Cooper.
 * Spiritual Successor: To 2001: A Space Odyssey. A hard sci-fi film about humanity venturing into the unknown, complete with mind-screwy finale.
 * Standard Establishing Spaceship Shot: Averted. All shots of the Endurance were filmed by a camera placed on a physical spacecraft (either the Endurance itself or a spacecraft approaching it) rather than floating "in space" nearby.