50 Essential Sci-Fi Films of the 21st Century (So Far)

Cognisant of the challenges facing humanity today, Christopher Nolan positioned Interstellar both as an exploration of what is waiting out there for us, in the future and the skies, and a damning indictment of what we’re doing now on Earth. The year is 2067, and the Earth is on its last legs. Global warming has brought on a worldwide crop blight and humanity is scrambling for alternatives, sending astronauts into the farther reaches of the galaxy looking for another habitable planet to colonise.

NASA physicist Professor Brand (Michael Caine) recruits former pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to lead such a mission, relying on him as one of the last remaining hopes for humanity’s survival. Anne Hathaway in tow (as Professor Brand's daughter and NASA scientist Dr. Amelia Brand), Coop slingshots through a wormhole and heads towards three separate planets that have been identified as potentially liveable. But they hadn’t reckoned on the unpredictable forces of space, facing extreme time dilation, and black hole physics.

While not as far-flung as Inception, Interstellar is all the more impressive for its realism, presenting a believable near-future with rich, breathtaking visuals that mark a leap forward in the presentation of outer space on film, comparable to the change Stanley Kubrick brought with 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Nolan’s rendering of Coop caught in a tesseract (fourth-dimension space) is deeply impressive and wholly unique, challenging us once again to not just passively observe, but think deeply about the experience.