Interstellar

In the near future, Earth’s biosphere is collapsing under relentless crop blight and catastrophic dust storms. Society has regressed into an agrarian struggle for basic sustenance, and history books have been revised to claim the Apollo moon landings were faked. Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA test pilot and engineer, runs a farm with his father-in-law Donald and two children, Tom and Murphy. Murph believes her bedroom is haunted by a poltergeist that knocks books from her shelves and leaves dust patterns on the floor. Cooper realizes the dust patterns form binary geographic coordinates, which lead them to a clandestine subterranean research facility guarded by armed sentries.

The facility is revealed as the covert underground headquarters of NASA, led by Cooper’s former mentor, Professor John Brand (Michael Caine). Brand reveals that atmospheric nitrogen is suffocating the planet, and oxygen will deplete within two generations. Forty-eight years earlier, an artificial wormhole appeared near Saturn, placed by a benevolent higher-dimensional intelligence referred to as "They." A decade prior, the Lazarus missions sent twelve astronauts through the wormhole; three—Miller, Mann, and Edmunds—transmitted promising viability signals. Brand proposes Plan A (cracking a quantum gravity equation to lift massive orbital colonies) and Plan B (colonizing a new planet with 5,000 frozen embryos). Cooper agrees to command the Endurance alongside Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), physicists Romilly and Doyle, and military robots TARS and CASE.

Endurance traverses the wormhole and enters a star system anchored by Gargantua, a supermassive rotating black hole. Miller’s planet orbits close to Gargantua’s event horizon, causing extreme gravitational time dilation: one hour on the surface equals seven terrestrial years. Cooper, Amelia, and Doyle descend in a ranger craft, discovering a worldwide knee-deep ocean. They realize Miller’s ship was destroyed only minutes earlier in local time, and her beacon was merely the initial crash echo. Colossal tidal mountain-waves strike the craft, killing Doyle and flooding the thrusters. By the time Cooper and Amelia return to Endurance, Romilly has waited alone in orbit for 23 years, 4 months, and 8 days. Cooper breaks down watching 23 years of video transmissions from his aging children.

With fuel depleted, the crew chooses Mann’s planet over Edmunds’. Mann’s planet is an inhospitable wasteland of frozen clouds and toxic ammonia. Dr. Hugh Mann (Matt Damon), revered as humanity’s greatest pioneer, is revived from cryosleep. In truth, Mann falsified his telemetry out of terrifying isolation and fear of death. During an excursion, Mann attacks Cooper, cracks his helmet visor to asphyxiate him, and detonates a booby trap that kills Romilly. Mann hijacks a ranger craft and attempts an unauthorized forced docking with Endurance, blowing out the airlock and destroying himself. Endurance goes into an uncontrollable 68 RPM spin plunging toward Gargantua. Cooper and TARS execute an impossible manual spin synchronization to dock and stabilize the ship.

Low on propellant to reach Edmunds’ planet, Cooper devises a gravitational slingshot around Gargantua to send Amelia forward while shedding mass. Cooper and TARS jettison their craft directly into the black hole. Surviving the gravitational tidal forces, Cooper ejects into a 5-dimensional Tesseract constructed by future evolved humans where time is manifested as a traversable physical dimension. Cooper finds himself behind the bookcase of Murph’s childhood bedroom—realizing he was the "ghost" all along. Recognizing that love is the only force capable of transcending dimensions of time and space, Cooper uses gravitational pulses to transmit the quantum gravity equation through the second hand of Murph’s wristwatch using Morse code.

Adult Murphy (Jessica Chastain) decodes the Morse code pulses and solves the gravitational equation, allowing humanity to build massive cylindrical O’Neill space habitats and leave Earth. As the Tesseract closes, Cooper is ejected back through the Saturn wormhole and rescued by an orbital fleet. Chronologically 124 years old but physically 35, Cooper reunites with his centenarian daughter Murph on her deathbed. Murph insists that no parent should watch their child die and urges him to seek Amelia. Cooper steals a scout ship with the restored TARS, setting course for Edmunds’ planet where Amelia is establishing humanity’s new dawn beneath an alien sky.