All images: IMDB
Released in 2014, Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" is perhaps one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. It features Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine in lead roles. McConaughey, who plays the role of ex-NASA pilot Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans when Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future.
Over the years, Interstellar has gained massive respect in the scientific community with how realistic it is. But how much of this movie is rooted in actual science is still debatable.
Nolan's movie accurately depicted black holes five years before the first real proof of how they looked came out. According to a report by Screen Rant, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and his team pulled off the depiction so well that it resembled photos of the actual black holes captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019.
Nolan took guidance from Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne who had served as Interstellar's official science consultant and an executive producer. One of the most respected figures when it comes to astrophysics, Thorne is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his research on gravitational waves. Nolan relied on Thorne’s research to figure out changes in the space-time continuum for the movie.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is widely known for simplifying the study of space, praised Interstellar over Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In an interview with NBC, Tyson praised Interstellar's accurate exploration of concepts, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and about curvature of space.