Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ Ten Years Later: Climate Change as a Hero’s Journey

A decade ago, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar imagined a near-future of apocalyptic climate change. Dystopia is a Hollywood commonplace, but part of what made Interstellar different from, say, Planet of the Apes or The Hunger Games was that its future felt and looked very much like our present. As the film marks the 10th anniversary of its release this week, with record high global summer temperatures and a brutal hurricane season underway, Nolan’s bleak vision feels both more relevant and closer at hand than ever. But it’s easier to see the problem than imagine a solution, and in retrospect Nolan’s movie seems to run away from the issue of climate change rather than confront it.

The movie starts in 2067, with earth facing a catastrophic food shortage because of a global crop blight. Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot, is forced—like most people on earth—to become a farmer to try to raise enough food to feed the population. Bored with his lot, he leaps at the chance to fly a last ditch mission through a galactic wormhole to find a new planet where the human race can survive and thrive.

There’s a lot (a lot) more plot in the 169 minute movie, including giant waves on alien water worlds, frozen planets, noble droids sacrificing themselves for the greater good, and lots of time dilation. The film is famous for its impressively plausible special effects and epic sweep, building on such touchstones as Star Wars, Alien and (especially) 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Like those predecessors, Interstellar is also indebted to Westerns and adventure films. It is, in fact, in large part a moral parable justifying and trumpeting the spirit of individual exploration epitomized by Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and all those heroes riding across the sage to tame a (supposedly) uninhabited and uncivilized wilderness.

McConaughey’s Cooper, in an early scene, establishes himself as a swashbuckler in the tradition of Skywalkers and Mavericks past. He goes to a parent-teacher conference about his brilliant daughter Maddy and is confronted by two irritating school functionaries. They tell him that they rely on a “corrected” textbook in which the moon landing never happened (it was faked to provoke the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself) and that he and they are part of a “caretaker” generation. It’s their lot to steward the earth through a difficult time, leaving something behind for others. 

After the meeting, Cooper, disgusted, declaims to his father-in-law (John Lithgow), “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are. Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers… We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.”

The challenge facing earth isn’t the blight in itself. Instead, the blight is a metaphor for stagnation, and for humanity turning its back on exploration, pioneering and fun Hollywood adventure narratives. 

Interstellar, then, like lots of big epic Hollywood movies, is a meta-celebration of big epic Hollywood movies. Its self-referential back-patting is epitomized by a mysterious force which appears to exist in the fifth dimension, guiding humanity towards its destination through clues and nudges about the nature of reality. This mysterious force creates the wormhole itself, which functions as a kind of literalized plot hole which allows for otherwise impossible and improbable interstellar travel. Nolan all but tells us he has his fingers on the scale, standing outside the narrative and shoving his characters towards their looping, time-bending destiny, complete with (literal) cliffhangers and tearful catharses. 

These genre beats turn environmental collapse into a recognizable adventure movie, in which Cooper’s individual heroism, hot flying and love for his children can save humanity from starvation and (even more importantly) boredom.   

That’s more or less what you expect in a big-budget space movie. Nolan ties himself and space-time into a pretzel trying to find a way for one guy—and his brilliant scientist daughter (Jessica Chastain)—to save humanity from environmental collapse. 

But addressing environmental issues isn’t about one guy being brave and cool. It’s about a collective commitment to, well, caretaking. When human beings were faced with ozone depletion and acid rain, they didn’t solve those problems by flying spaceships fast through magical wormholes. They solved them through painstaking scientific research which identified chemicals causing environmental degradation, followed by international agreements which banned or regulated those chemicals.

Collective action to control emissions and protect the environment can be successful. When we work together, we can preserve our air, our waterways, our climate. These successes though, aren’t very photogenic. A three-hour movie about people protesting, petitioning and voting, or about leaders signing agreements—maybe that could be a mid-budget documentary. But it doesn’t have the big screen blockbuster oomph that really packs butts in seats.

Elon Musk, and other billionaire would-be saviors, like the idea of space travel as salvation precisely because it seems adventurous and allows them to be the genius farseeing heroes saving everyone. But the billionaire fascination with these tropes is just a subset of the way that the public, billionaires and non-billionaires alike, enjoys tales of pioneering derring-do. We all want to see stories about explorers, not caretakers. Telling stories about adventurers is expected; it’s easy; it’s a sure thing. 

The more difficult and inventive approach would be to tell a dramatic story about environmental caretaking. Everyone does interstellar space exploration. Staying home and making the earth we have livable—that’s the real unexplored wormhole.

There are some examples of caretaking narratives, though mostly in novels rather than big budget films. Urusula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1985); Claire Holyrode’s The Effort (2021); Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers (2023) all are about how communities negotiate environmental challenges through collective agreement, collective disagreement, and through thinking themselves (with more or less devastating bumps) into a better, more equitable world. 

Interstellar doesn’t have the patience to take that approach. Nolan is a big budget Hollywood director, and big budget Hollywood’s range, despite its cosmic claims, is decidedly limited. Interstellar is a film that picks up serious environmental concerns and then goes nowhere with them, very very fast. If we’re going to face the real challenges of the next decade, and the centuries beyond that, we need to find a way to embrace narratives that are adventurous enough to care for heroes less, and our one planet more.