Plot Summary – When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

★★★★  

Rewatched 15 Dec 2024

This review may contain spoilers.

I was eleven years old when this movie first came out. I remember watching it and not being as impressed or blown away as all my friends were. I remember arguing with people about it and them telling me I was too stupid to understand this movie. And at eleven, I believed them. Maybe I was too stupid. And because of the fear that I have not yet become smart enough to understand this movie, and the fear of the backlash I would receive if I revealed that after all these years, I still am, stupid, I never revisited it.

Thankfully, the ten-year anniversary of this film came around and I was able to watch it again in IMAX, as Nolan himself truly intended. I gave it a fair shot. I really wanted to be able to call it a masterpiece this time. To understand it this time. It is technically perfect. Every shot, every breath, every cue perfectly timed. Every cut is incredibly well-placed. Hoyte van Hoytema is a masterful cinematographer who captures every frame in a picture-perfect way. Hans Zimmer makes what might be the best film score of all time and carries the weight and emotion of this film. Nolan knows how to pace and while it is a long movie, it is never a dull movie. If I taught a film class, I would use this movie to teach.

I would use it to teach how writing can muddle an otherwise perfect film, cause even ten years ago, I didn’t think this film was that deep. Watching it again, it is incredibly emotionally effective, it makes you feel. But Johnathan and Christopher Nolan masterfully distract you from thinking about the effectiveness and the subtext of its script by making it overly complicated. They want you to come out and say “I didn’t understand it, but it was so good” (which is what my friend said after coming out). Then it shies away from the fact the movie’s core message is so muddled and so incoherent that it changes its mind. It wants to shock you with the “wow” of the plot twist, that he is the ghost and it does that, to distract from the fact that most of the other characters are two dimensional. They may give long emotional speeches with jargon in the middle, just short enough to keep your attention, but just long enough to make you not think about it too much.

Cause what is it trying to say? Am I still not getting it? Or was I never meant to get it? Oppenheimer is about the perils of Great Man history and about how innovation and science cannot be the sole thought-process behind development. The Dark Knight is about how Batman and The Joker are two sides of the same coin and serve the same purpose of perpetrating corruption and greed (among other things). What is Interstellar about? If it is about love, then it is sparse with love. If it is about humanity, then it keeps you at arms length from a majority of these humans. Maybe in ten years, I will understand, I will finally see it. Maybe then I won’t be so stupid after all. But until then, I think I want to call Nolan’s bluff. This is a movie that is shockingly brilliant and borderline incoherent at the same time. It’s an oxymoron. But it’s an oxymoron that makes you feel, feel so hard. Feel on a visceral level. That is why you still have to submit yourself to it. And experience it. Cause Interstellar is not about love, or space or humanity. Interstellar is about blowing you away, and despite everything, I was blown away.