If you liked Interstellar

01 / Movie · 2016 · Denis Villeneuve

Arrival

Matches: A bond across impossible distance

A linguist is asked to talk to visitors who do not experience time the way we do, and the way she learns their language changes how she sees her own life.

Arrival is the closest emotional match on this list. Like Interstellar it uses a big science-fiction idea to tell a story about a parent and a child, and its final reveal reframes everything you have seen. It is smaller in scale and has almost no action, and its last twenty minutes hit harder for it.

The pace is deliberate and the structure only fully makes sense at the end. Go in knowing as little as possible.

A radio astronomer finds a signal from another star, and the world has to decide whether to believe her, build what it describes, and send someone through it.

Contact is Interstellar's most direct ancestor. It is based on Carl Sagan's novel, and Sagan's questions to Kip Thorne about wormholes helped shape the physics Interstellar later used. It also stars Matthew McConaughey and centers on a daughter shaped by a lost father. It is more interested in faith and evidence than in spectacle.

Its 1990s effects and politics date it in places, and the ending is intentionally ambiguous.

03 / Movie · 2007 · Danny Boyle

Sunshine

Matches: Awe at a vast scale

A crew carrying an enormous bomb flies toward a dying Sun to restart it, and the closer they get the harder it is to look away.

If the part of Interstellar you loved was the sense of humans as tiny objects next to cosmic forces, Sunshine is built entirely around that feeling. Its images of the Sun are some of the most overwhelming in science fiction, and the crew's arguments about sacrifice are close to Interstellar's debates about whom to save.

The final act turns sharply toward horror, which some viewers love and others find a jarring change of genre.

In the 2070s, a small crew collects dangerous debris from Earth's orbit, and the job turns out to be about ambition, labor and what it costs to reach space.

Planetes is the most grounded pick here. Where Interstellar treats spaceflight as a desperate last voyage, Planetes treats it as work, with paperwork, injuries, budgets and real orbital physics. The emotional payoff comes slowly over 26 episodes, as its characters decide what they are willing to give up to go further out.

The opening episodes are light workplace comedy; the series becomes much more serious in its second half.

05 / Video game · 2019

Outer Wilds

Matches: Awe at a vast scale

You explore a tiny handmade solar system that ends in a supernova every 22 minutes, and the only thing you keep between loops is what you have learned.

Outer Wilds may be the purest Interstellar feeling outside a cinema. Gravity, orbits and time are the puzzles themselves, and working out what happened to the people who came before you produces the same mix of awe and loneliness. You never fight anything or upgrade your ship. You get further by understanding more.

Flying the ship is awkward at first, and spoilers ruin it more than almost any game. Do not look anything up.

A science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory, and slowly works out that he is humanity's last chance against whatever is dimming the Sun.

Project Hail Mary shares Interstellar's belief that science is something people do under pressure, with their hands, while scared. Andy Weir solves each problem on the page with real reasoning, so the triumphs feel earned. It is far funnier and more hopeful than Interstellar, and its central relationship is one of the most loved in recent science fiction.

The narrator's jokey voice is not for everyone, and the science sections are long if you prefer feeling to mechanics.

Ambient music written for a documentary about the Apollo moon missions, meant to capture the strangeness and calm of being in space.

Hans Zimmer's organ score is half of Interstellar's power. Apollo, made by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno, chases a similar weightless feeling, only more gently. "An Ending (Ascent)" has become one of the most borrowed pieces of music in film and television for exactly that reason.

This is ambient music: no beats, few melodies, and best heard with headphones and nothing else going on.