Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Arrives With An Incredible First Trailer

We're not meant to save the world. We're meant to leave it.

By Brent McKnight | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is easily one of our most anticipated movies of the year. The truth is, we don’t know much about it. Legendary and Warner Bros. are keeping details mostly under wraps. What we do know involves big ideas, space travel, wormholes, and massive global climate change. All of this and more is on full display in this new trailer. Some of you probably got to see it in front of early screenings of Godzilla, but now we have it for the rest of you, and it is fantastic.

The official description goes like this: “Interstellar chronicles the adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.” That’s pretty damn vague, but promising and offers a lot of room to work. While all of the broader themes definitely play a part in this trailer, the main focus is on the human side of the story.

Climate change has finally spiraled out of control, and the result, as you can see here, resembles a new, much more severe version of the dust bowl from the 1930. Like before, and on a massive, worldwide scale, food production has dropped off in catastrophic fashion. Basically the point is that the human race is all kinds of screwed, at least as far as our future here on Earth is concerned. But perhaps our destiny doesn’t lie on our home planet. Maybe, as Michael Caine’s character says, “We’re not meant to save the world, we’re meant to leave it.”

Wrecking up the joint and abandoning our home world is a big part of the current state of science fiction. Just look at The 100, Elysium, After Earth, Oblivion, and more for recent examples. Even Stephen Hawking assures us that we’ll have to leave Earth eventually.

This is where Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) comes in. He’s a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, a farmer, a pilot, and an engineer, and is one of the individuals selected to travel through the wormhole towards our collective future. But he’s also a father, with a daughter named Murphy, after Murphy’s Law, and this relationship is front and center here. This is obviously the human face Nolan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, are trying to put on the larger picture in order to ground the story and make it more personal.

I’m sure that will be all emotional and moving and that sort of thing. This seems to figure into McConaughey’s recent career renaissance, but it’s the footage here that looks truly spectacular. We can’t tell you how stoked we are to see those epic, sweeping shots of that ship soaring through the farthest reaches of space. We only catch glimpses of Wally Pfister’s cinematography here, but, as usual, every frame is gorgeous.

Interstellar also stars Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, William Devane, Casey Affleck, Topher Grace, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, and tons more, and opens everywhere November 7.

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