This Interstellar Photo Comes With Some Intriguing New Plot Details

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

interstellarAny time Christopher Nolan makes a movie it’s a big deal, and when he turns his lens on a science fiction story, that’s doubly exciting for us. In that spirit, his next film, Interstellar, is one of our most anticipated movies of the year. Just the other day, the studios released the first official poster, and now they’re back with a new photo from the film, as well as some new plot details.

This image, which showed up in Entertainment Weekly, doesn’t reveal too much. It’s a simple visual composition, features star Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper and two kids; one of them is presumably his daughter. Though this is definitely a terrestrial picture, there’s still a link to the space part of the story. You don’t exactly know why, but Cooper has a model of what appears to be one of the Apollo Lunar Modules.

The plot of Interstellar is still being kept under wraps. Nolan’s penchant for secrecy may be even more extreme than J.J. Abrams, though somehow he doesn’t catch nearly as much grief for it. Perhaps it’s just because he’s quieter about this stance than his counterpart. Nolan and company simply go on about their business, lips clamped firmly shut, and people seem to leave them alone. Abrams, on the other hand, is so vocal about the privacy on his movies that it almost feels like he’s taunting people, challenging them to find out anything.

What we know of the story is that it involves space travel, wormholes, climate change, and corn. That doesn’t tell you much, now does it? Supposedly this wormhole will be used “to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances in an interstellar voyage.” You probably gathered it was something similar, and as promising as that sounds, it isn’t very specific.

Nolan’s production designer Nathan Crowley added a few more details into the mix. He said the director asked if he was interested in working “on a movie about black holes, relativity, gravity, and their effect on time.” How can you say no to a proposition like that?

Producer Emma Thompson said Interstellar “emphasizes…mankind’s destiny in the universe.” But while the film also explores this larger, overall theme, it does this through a smaller scale story. She continues, “ultimately, it’s this very human story about a father and a daughter.” Presumably she’s talking about Cooper and the young woman in the photograph.

Recently we also heard that the first proper Interstellar trailer will accompany Godzilla into theaters later this month, but until then we have to satisfy ourselves with this earlier teaser. This video is appropriately obscure and sticks with the program of not telling us much. What it does, however, is create a tone and set a mood, one of mystery, excitement, and exploration. The idea of destiny and fate plays into everything we’ve seen so far, and promises to figure into the plot of the finished product.

Interstellar also stars Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, and many more, and opens November 7.

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