What Year Does Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Take Place?

Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic Interstellar is still wowing viewers 10 years on, thanks in no small part to its striking, near-future setting. But what year is Interstellar supposed to take place in, exactly?

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What Year Does Interstellar Take Place?

Interstellar‘s narrative unfolds at more than one point in time. Of course it does; this is a Christopher Nolan joint, after all! So, let’s run through the movie’s various chronological settings, from earliest to latest. Interstellar starts in 2067. All the stuff with Cooper and l’il Murph – right up until Coop rockets off on the Endurance – takes place then. Coop then spends two years in cryosleep aboard the Endurance, awakening in 2069. A time dilation-related misadventure then leapfrogs Coop and Amelia Brand 23 years into the future. This shifts Interstellar‘s story to 2092, which overlaps with the grown-up Murph’s exploits as a NASA scientist.

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We spend a decent chunk of screentime in 2092, before Coop, Brand, and TARS slingshot around Gargantua (the movie’s all-important black hole). This costs them another 51 years, so when Coop and TARS enter Gargantua – and Brands heads off to the third and final target planet – it’s 2143. From here, Cooper and TARs take a brief pitstop inside a four-dimensional tesseract that exists outside conventional time and space, which Coop uses to interact with Murph in 2067 and 2092. The tesseract ultimately collapses, spitting out Cooper and TARs in 2156. Coop reunites with the elderly Murph, then leaves to track down Brand (who’s still young, thanks to cryosleep).

Christopher Nolan Based Interstellar’s Future on the Past

That’s how Interstellar‘s timeline shakes down – but did you know Christopher Nolan didn’t base the film’s future on any current scientific theories? Instead, he and his co-writer (and brother) Jonathan Nolan primarily took inspiration from historic calamities (such as the Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s) when visualizing their blight-stricken Earth. According to Nolan, this kept Interstellar from straying into finger-wagging, “movie message” territory.

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“We go to the movies to escape, and that’s why the film isn’t about global warming or addresses climate change,” Nolan told Direct Conversations. “Interstellar deals with an agricultural crisis of the type that has happened before, and that was to give the idea of the film credibility. I want people to feel afraid for the end of the world at the beginning of the film. I want them to feel like these guys really have to do something to save it.”

Interstellar is currently streaming on Paramount+.