Interstellar

How this film uses it

Kip Thorne, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, served as scientific consultant and executive producer. The wormhole and the black hole Gargantua are based on his equations. As a matter of fact, rendering Gargantua produced new scientific insights about gravitational lensing (gravity bending light), which were published in peer-reviewed journals.

Where to see it

The first view of Gargantua. It's a scientifically accurate black hole rendered at feature film resolution.

How this film uses it

1 hour on Miller's water planet equals 7 years on Earth. Cooper watches his children age in video messages while almost no time passes for him. Here, the physics of the universe is what forces an unbearable separation between a parent and his children, so the science plays as tragedy.

Where to see it

Cooper watching 23 years of stored-up messages from his children. This happens after he returns from Miller's planet.

How this film uses it

Hans Zimmer built the Interstellar score around a custom pipe organ and treated its long held tones as the sound of deep time and cosmic scale. The organ connects the film's science to its spirituality. It's the church instrument in space, and it makes the physical world feel religious.

Where to see it

The Endurance's approach to Saturn. This is the first time the score uses the full organ against the silence of space.

How this film uses it

Production designer Nathan Crowley built the Tesseract as a physical set of stacked bookshelves stretching in all directions. The camera and Cooper move through it as a place that has both space and time as directions. It turns love and gravity into a structure you can see.

Where to see it

Cooper navigating the Tesseract. He uses the bookshelf to communicate with Murph across time.

How this film uses it

Hoyte van Hoytema shot the film's space sequences on 65mm and IMAX film, and the frame expands to the full 1.43:1 IMAX ratio in space. The physical grain of the large-format negative gives the cosmos a solid, touchable presence, so space is something you feel.

Where to see it

The docking sequence above Mann's planet, as the damaged Endurance spins. It uses the full IMAX frame in extreme conditions.