Examples Of Sacrifice In Interstellar

Despite having the trappings of a hard sci-fi adventure story, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a deeply humanist and spiritual film exploring philosophical and emotional issues in a complex way (Dean, 2015). Central to this are the concepts of bravery and sacrifice: as Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and the rest of his crew take great risks and travel vast distances to save humanity from a dying Earth, the characters all display varying aspects of the human condition, especially related to these very big, complex ideas. As the characters of Interstellar go about their mission and weigh the risks and rewards of each and every decision, they each find their own definitions of bravery and sacrifice, weighing their own personal decisions against

Mann acts much more selfishly and not in accordance with a traditional notion of bravery. While Mann was one of the first people to bravely go through the film’s wormhole to seek out planets, his major mistake was in firing off his beacon to get the others to pick him up, all while knowing that his planet would not solve Earth’s problems. This decision, and his choice to murder some of the crew of the spaceship Endurance for his own safety, is the very definition of cowardice. While Mann justifies his actions by saying “This is not about my life, or Cooper’s life. This about all mankind,” Matt Damon’s performance and the film to that point suggests this is an ethical smokescreen he uses to assuage his guilt over the inhumane actions he is taking. Mann purports to be motivated by humanity’s survival, but it is clear that he places self-preservation above all other

Cooper represents the emotional, deeply principled and family-oriented perspective of humanity, in which the greater health of humanity is less important than the people we love and care about. Amelia, meanwhile, is the more pragmatic, big-picture thinker, hoping to use the objectivity to clearly save humanity, even if that means starting over. Mann, meanwhile, hypocritically takes Amelia’s perspective on the surface, but secretly just wants to live regardless of who dies in his place. By exploring these character dynamics, and the grander thematic questions the plot brings up, Interstellar becomes a fascinating treatise on how we define bravery and