Interstellar’s Most Enduring Quality

“many awards pundits considered Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar to be that year’s Oscar front-runner.”

“Another space flick, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, had been a huge financial and critical hit the previous year, winning Best Director and six other Oscars.”

“Still, no science-fiction or space movie had ever won Best Picture. Not 2001: A Space Odyssey, not Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not Apollo 13, not The Right Stuff, not Star Wars.”

“Nobody, it seems, was prepared for how strange a movie Interstellar turned out to be, especially in the High Age of Online Snark.”

“It wasn’t the hard sci-fi of genre fiends’ expectations, nor was it the intense space adventure the fanboys were anticipating. Though it possessed some of those elements, it also had, shockingly, a soft and woozy center.”

“What the hell was this pioneer of cinematic grimdark, this master of cool surfaces and downcast narratives, doing making a movie that suggested love was a physical force even more powerful than gravity?”

“Interstellar’s opening-weekend gross of $47 million was respectable but lower than expected, coming in second place behind Disney’s Big Hero 6”

“It was successful internationally and ultimately turned a profit. It even won a bunch of technical awards but little else.”

“Its Imax rerelease this week is to honor its tenth anniversary, and it’s been a long time coming; most screenings sold out as soon as the tickets became available several weeks ago.”

“What makes the film so fascinating, and why it endures to this day, is precisely the thing so many wags pegged as its fatal flaw back in 2014: its unabashed, teary emotionality.”

“high-minded sci-fi and outright melodrama.”

“Interstellar is filled with long stretches of silence and awe and scenes of characters explaining dizzying facts about astrophysics … but it’s also a movie in which Anne Hathaway gives a speech suggesting that love can transcend time and space.”

“This proud yet queasy embrace of sentiment, which at the time felt so out of character for Nolan, now feels like part of a continuum that leads straight to the fugue-state despair of Oppenheimer.”

“Despite their immense scale, Nolan’s pictures turn on small moments, brief exchanges or intimate scenes that the narratives wind up returning to repeatedly, allowing us to see things differently each time.”

“If Coop doesn’t leave, humanity can’t be saved. But as he’s continued on his unusually melancholy and lonely journey, he’s come to regard it as the greatest mistake of his life. How can these two ideas be reconciled?”

“Here’s how I put it at the time:”

“It’s all been leading to this moment — a man replaying the time when he broke his daughter’s heart.”

“No, he can’t change the past. He can’t keep himself from leaving. But he can want to stay.”

“By realizing that he wishes he could have stayed, Coop unlocks the ability to communicate with humanity’s past. His anguish and affection become the missing link between the cold hard facts of the cosmos and humanity’s survival. In other words: Yes, the secret ingredient is literally love.”

““Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future,” Coop had told Murph earlier in the film. Later, he literally became the ghost in Murph’s room, trying to talk to her through her bookshelf. Now, he’s somewhere in between, a living person with a ghostly presence, out of time and place in a future century he really shouldn’t exist in.”

“The only one with an explanation is the dying Murph. “Nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come back,” she tells Coop. “How?” he asks. “Because my dad promised me,” she says.”

“It’s telling that Interstellar was originally set to be directed by Spielberg, who has always been more comfortable with sentiment, perhaps because he has little problem accepting the presence of the divine.”

“A strain of mysticism, even religiosity, runs through Spielberg’s work, whereas Nolan is the guy who made a superhero trilogy without ever resorting to the supernatural or to aliens with fantastical powers.”

“A materialist and a rationalist, Nolan builds his films with an engineer’s precision, with a constant need to understand and explain how things work. But in Interstellar, for all the astrophysics packed into the script, he can’t really explain it all.”

“He cannot undo the contradictions, only embrace them.”

“the overwhelming cataclysm of love.”