Mann's Barren Planet
The planet on which our protagonists find Dr. Mann is a visual echo of the hopelessness he feels and that drives him to malice. The planet is stark, cold, and foreboding, and therefore symbolizes the dead end that was his journey and the unforgiving nature of his failure. After all, in a story about survival, hope is life and life is hope; where there is one, there is the other. On Mann's planet, however, there is no possibility of sustaining any sort of life, and so neither can there be hope. Nolan uses the frigid, colorless, glacier-like landscape of Mann's planet to show us this.
The Endurance's Tiny Appearance
With the crew on board the space station Endurance, Nolan places it against a canvas of black space speckled with the light of stars as it continues to move further away from Earth. This image is meant to convey to the audience the vastness of the space the crew is about to enter, what they're leaving behind on Earth, and the isolation they're going to experience as they travel through the infinity of space. This image returns as the crew awakens from hibernation, when we see the Endurance as a barely visible grain of sand against the massive backdrop of Saturn.
Murph's Life Unfolds Before Cooper's Eyes
Cooper finds himself in a tesseract where he can see every moment in Murph's life from behind the bookshelf in her room. The imagery provokes the sense that his daughter's life is passing before his eyes. He is able to relive everything from his decision to leave for the mission up to her figuring out the Morse code from the watch's hand, despite the burden of having to leave her behind and forego seeing her grow up.
The Dust Storm on the Horizon
Just after Murph notices that her nephew has a cough, Nolan cuts to an image of the house. There are cornfields in the foreground, Murph's car and Tom's truck parked outside, and in the distance we see a dust cloud heading their way. The image shows us the ever-looming reality of the land's infertility. It also shows that with the dust comes sickness. The two cars parked outside represent the two contrasting plans of action that Murph and Tom have: Murph believes the family needs to leave the farm, while Tom demands that they stay. Thus, the dust cloud further represents the siblings' clash on the horizon, a storm that threatens to tear them apart and sentence Tom's wife and son to death.
