Why Christopher Nolan’s 10-Year-Old Sci-Fi Film Was Much Easier To Understand Than His Other Time Travel Movie

The time travel featured in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was much less confusing compared to a more recent film by the director. Nolan has earned the reputation as a director who makes ambitious, oftentimes complicated movies, and Interstellar remains one of his boldest cinematic outings. In Interstellar, Earth is suffering from a blight that will make the planet uninhabitable. Therefore, former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper is sent on a mission across the galaxy to find a habitable planet that humankind can move to.




The ending of Interstellar introduces an element of time travel. Time travel always naturally complicates a story, but Interstellar explains the concept of time dilation quite well. Six years after Interstellar’s release, Nolan’s 2020 movie Tenet also dealt with time travel. Compared to Interstellar, how characters in Tenet travel back in time is much more confusing. This led to many moviegoers completely being lost about what actually happened in the movie by the end of Tenet, making it a less satisfying high-concept story than Interstellar.


Most Of Interstellar’s Time Travel Is Relatively Factual And Sticks To Real-World Science

Interstellar Explores The Concept Of Time Dilation


In Interstellar, three astronauts were sent to different planets that NASA believed may potentially be able to sustain human life. The first planet Cooper and his team arrive at is Miller’s planet, which is very close to a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. It is on this planet that the characters in Interstellar experience time dilation. The science of Interstellar is based on the works of Albert Einstein, who believed that time is directly influenced by gravity. Therefore, since Miller’s planet is so close to the strong gravitational field of Gargantua, time moves significantly slower on the planet compared to Earth.

Cooper and his crew were on Miller’s planet for roughly three hours and seven minutes, which means that 23 years, four months, and eight days went by on Earth.


In Interstellar, for every hour that Cooper and his crew spend on Miller’s planet, seven years pass on Earth. Cooper and his crew were on Miller’s planet for roughly three hours and 17 minutes, which means that 23 years, four months, and eight days went by on Earth. Technically time traveling into the future because of time dilation had a profound effect on Cooper, since his children, whom he left to embark on the mission, were fully grown adults by the time he got off Miller’s planet.

Interstellar’s Ending Is Where The Movie Truly Becomes Science Fiction (But It Still Works)

Fifth-Dimensional Humans From The Future Ensured Humanity’s Survival In Interstellar

The majority of Interstellar is a linear story, but because of the time dilation Cooper experienced on Miller’s planet, the ending of the film gets slightly confusing. At the end of Interstellar, Cooper is pulled into The Tesseract, which was built by humans from the future with knowledge of fifth-dimensional physics. The fifth-dimensional humans, who can observe the past, present, and future, built The Tesseract so that Cooper could communicate with his daughter, who is also trying to figure out a way to save humankind.


Related

10 Things I Learned Rewatching Interstellar 10 Years After Christopher Nolan’s Space Movie Came Out

Interstellar has just turned 10 years old, and here are 10 new things that I learned upon rewatching Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic in 2024.

While the concept of fifth-dimensional humans is somewhat complicated, the time dilation that Cooper experienced on Miller’s planet easily explains how he is able to communicate with his adult daughter. The information that Cooper is able to provide Murphy with during the climax of Interstellar dramatically advances humanity’s understanding of space and time, and ultimately ends up saving the species.

Interstellar’s Time Travel Was A Lot More Straightforward Than Tenet’s

Characters In Tent Travel To The Past


While there are still some very complicated subjects tackled in Interstellar, the high-stakes of spending too much time on Miller’s planet was effectively communicated to the audience, and makes for one of the most nerve-racking sequences in the film. While Cooper technically traveled into the future in Interstellar, characters in Tenet travel into the past. In Tenet’s story, a scientist from the future invented a machine called the turnstile which inverts the entropy of anything or anyone placed inside it.

Movie

RT Critics Score

Worldwide Box Office

Interstellar (2014)

73%

$733,491,575

Tenet (2020)

70%

$365,304,105


Characters in Tenet can move backwards through time, rather than forwards, using the turnstile. However, while characters in Tenet are moving backwards through the past, everything around them is still moving forwards, which makes several sequences in the film very disorienting and hard to follow along with. The time travel featured in Tenet is based on a hypothesis in theoretical physics by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, but it is not explained nearly as well as time dilation in Interstellar. Therefore, the time travel in Interstellar is much easier to understand than Tenet.

  • Interstellar

    From Christopher Nolan, Interstellar imagines a future where the Earth is plagued by a life-threatening famine, and a small team of astronauts is sent out to find a new prospective home among the stars. Despite putting the mission first, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) races against time to return home to his family even as they work to save mankind back on Earth.

  • Tenet Poster

    Tenet

    Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a nameless Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.