The fan theory that suggests Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ is a prequel to ‘The Road’
Joining dots that may or may not even be there is an easy trap to fall into, but creating a direct link between Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and John Hillcoat’s The Road nonetheless recontextualises the two disparate films to create a unique double-bill.
Of course, there’s no correlation between the two whatsoever, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to view them as two halves of the same story. The latter’s author, Cormac McCarthy, has hardly been a writer deeply embedded in science fiction, either, but The Road‘s post-apocalyptic trappings only serve to deepen the connection should anybody choose to buy into it.
Nolan’s cosmic epic carries the overarching themes of humanity pondering its place in the grand calculus of the universe and just how far beyond the widely-held beliefs on physical and cognitive limits people can actually go, with Matthew McConaughey’s Joseph Cooper embarking on a dimension and reality-hopping journey of scientific and personal discovery.
However, the entire story takes place in the aftermath of The Blight, a global famine caused by the gradual erosion of the planet’s ecosystem that led to a worldwide famine and the population being ravaged. It’s established that Interstellar begins around 2067, a near-future that really isn’t all that far away.
Meanwhile, The Road unfolds in an unspecified time period, albeit one that’s years beyond the present day. In addition, the world of both the novel and the film has been ravaged by an unnamed and unspecified extinction event, one that led to the demise of all plant life and almost all animal life, too.
By extension, it was suggested by theorists looking for something truly “insane” to sink their teeth into that Interstellar is, in fact, a prequel to The Road. The people left behind on Earth are those forced to contend with The Blight and the unspecified event described by Viggo Mortensen’s character was the last vestige of the human race jetting off beyond the stars to settle on a brand new and habitable planet.
The resultant panic that set in as society turned on itself was, in effect, caused by the scientists who’d found their version of a solution to The Blight, neglecting to mention that not every survivor was invited to come along for the ride. In the world of The Road, they thought they were about to be saved, only to discover they’d been left behind.
Nobody is obligated to buy into it for even so much as a second, but it still draws parallels between Interstellar and The Road, with one feeding directly into the other as the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of what the world became in the aftermath of The Blight. Hardly a widely accepted theory, then, but an intriguing one regardless.
