| Director | Christopher Nolan |
|---|---|
| Genre | adventure film, drama film, dystopian film, hard science fiction, science fiction film, thriller film, time-travel film |
| Runtime | 169 min |
| Country | United Kingdom, United States |
| Budget | $165 million |
| Box office | $774.7 million |
In the near future, humanity faces extinction due to dust storms and widespread crop blights. Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot, works as a farmer and raises his children, Murph and Tom, with his father-in-law Donald. Following a dust storm, Cooper and Murph discover that dust patterns in Murph's room, which she had attributed to a ghost, result from a gravitational anomaly. Cooper recognizes the patterns as binary code specifying coordinates, which lead him and Murph to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand.
Brand explains that 48 years earlier, a wormhole appeared near Saturn, apparently placed there by an unknown intelligence, leading to a system in another galaxy with 12 potentially habitable planets located near a black hole named Gargantua. Volunteers of the Lazarus expedition had previously traveled through the wormhole to evaluate the planets, with three Miller, Mann, and Edmunds reporting back desirable results.
Cooper is enlisted to pilot the Endurance spacecraft through the wormhole as part of a mission to colonize a habitable planet with 5,000 frozen embryos and ensure humanity's survival. Meanwhile, Professor Brand would continue his work on solving a gravity equation whose solution would enable construction of a spacecraft for an exodus from Earth. Cooper accepts against Murph's wishes and promises to return. When she refuses to see him off, he leaves her his wristwatch to compare their relative time when he returns.
The crew, consisting of Cooper, robots TARS and CASE, and scientists Amelia Brand (Professor Brand's daughter), Romilly, and Doyle, traverses the wormhole after a two-year voyage to Saturn. Cooper, Doyle, and Brand use a lander to investigate Miller's planet, where time is severely dilated. They land in knee-high water and find only wreckage from Miller's expedition before a gigantic tidal wave kills Doyle and waterlogs the lander's engines.
By the time they leave the planet, Cooper and Brand discover that 23 years have elapsed on the Endurance. Having enough fuel left for only one of the remaining planets, Cooper and Romilly decide to go to Mann's planet, despite Brand's protests, as he is still broadcasting. En route, they receive messages from Earth and Cooper watches Tom grow up, marry, and lose his first son, while an adult Murph is now a scientist working on the gravity equation with Professor Brand. On his deathbed, Professor Brand confesses to Murph that the Endurance crew was never meant to return, since a complete solution to the equation was impossible to obtain without measurements from inside a black hole.
On Mann's planet, they awaken him from cryostasis, and he assures them that colonization is possible, despite the extreme environment. During a scouting mission, Mann attempts to kill Cooper and reveals that he falsified his data in the hope of being rescued. He steals Cooper's lander and heads for the Endurance. A booby trap set by Mann kills Romilly, but Brand rescues Cooper with the other lander and they race back to the Endurance. Mann is killed in a failed manual docking operation, badly damaging the Endurance, but Cooper is able to regain control of the spacecraft through his own docking maneuver.
With insufficient fuel, Cooper and Brand resort to a slingshot around Gargantua, which costs them 51 years due to time dilation. In the process, Cooper and TARS detach in their craft to lighten the Endurance so that Brand and CASE may reach Edmunds' planet. Falling past Gargantua's event horizon, they eject from their craft and find themselves in a tesseract made up of infinite copies of Murph's bedroom across moments in time. Cooper deduces that the tesseract was constructed by advanced humans in the far future, and realizes that he had always been Murph's "ghost". Using Morse code, he manipulates the second hand of her wristwatch to transmit the data TARS collected, enabling Murph to complete the gravity equation's solution.
The tesseract, its purpose fulfilled, collapses, ejecting Cooper and TARS. Cooper wakes up on a station orbiting Saturn. He reunites with Murph, now elderly and on her deathbed, who tells him to seek out Brand. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Brand and CASE, who are establishing the human colony on Edmunds' planet.