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.

Tropes used in Interstellar include:

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: Dr. Brand was lying about Plan A -- he considered it impossible to crack the problem of getting all of humanity out of the gravity well, so he gave up on it privately, and only kept working on it to give everyone else hope and allow Plan B to proceed.
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: Dr. Mann. He falsified evidence to summon the Endurance because he couldn't stand the solitude -- he had not fully prepared himself for the possibility that his planet might not be "the one".
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: The Catch Phrase and Survival Mantra of Doctor Brand.
Fallen Hero: Dr. Mann was "the best of us", in Amelia's words, but when the planet he landed on turned out to not be life-bearing, the solitude got to him.
Killed Mid-Sentence: Dr. Mann: "There is a moment--"
Last-Name Basis: Joseph Cooper is almost always referred to by his last name.
Messianic Archetype: All over the place. The twelve Lazarus missions with one betrayal, Joseph Cooper descending into "hell" and returning, saving humanity...
Mind Screw: Not so much for the audience, but falling inside the black hole and viewing five dimensions squeezed into three 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 is entirely covered by oceans and massive tidal waves, and is too young to have the chemistry to support life, and Mann's planet doesn't have the required chemistry either...and Mann lured them in to get a ride home.
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: The "ghost" who led Cooper and Murph to NASA is Cooper himself, affecting gravity in the past with the power of the wormhole. He completes a Stable Time Loop by getting himself and Murph to NASA in the past, and then getting the gravity data to Murph in the "present", which allows humanity to leave Earth and, in the distant future, set up the wormhole that sets the whole thing in motion.
Robot Buddy: TARS and CASE. You'd think, with the 2001 parallels, that there would be a betrayal, but nope -- they're 100% on humanity's side. In fact, Dr. Mann had to disassemble his robot buddy in order to falsify his data.
Single Biome Planet: Miller's Planet is mostly ocean. Actually, it's all ocean -- what initially appears to be a mountain in the distance is actually a giant wave.
Sound in Space: Averted. The characters hear the sounds of their own ship, but everything outside is silent. With the exception of the explosion on the Endurance, heard as a faint rattling and rumbling as the escaping gas and debris brushes Cooper and Brand's lander.
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.