So, Is Interstellar a Masterpiece or Not?

Ten years ago, I journeyed up to New York City’s only true IMAX and sat down for a press screening of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the director’s hotly anticipated first feature since being freed from the shackles of Batman. (To be fair, he did manage to make Inception between Batman movies.) Interstellar promised to be a dizzying, enveloping trip through the cosmos, a drama-thriller about blackholes and time and—somehow, amidst all that vastness—family. I was excited.

But as the movie unspooled, I grew more and more disappointed. Sure, the visuals were impressive. Hans Zimmer’s churning, Morse-code score, its deep rumbles and pipe organ crescendos, was a marvel. And the acting, from Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway and nascent movie star Jessica Chastain, was solid. But Nolan’s reasoning and emotional argument were shaky, flimsy. The conclusions of the film seemed pat. I didn’t like Interstellar, and wrote as much in my review. (Which everyone online was very chill about.)

In the ensuing years, I’ve often been asked if there’s one review I regret—if I thought I’d gotten a movie wrong. Of course there are myriad examples I could point to, but the one I cited most frequently was Interstellar. Because, when I rewatched the film at home in 2016 or so, Interstellar moved and breathed a lot better, with less of the anticipatory press-preview pressure bearing down on it. Its hokey speeches about love were less of a problem, more easily offset by Nolan’s awesome vision of relativity, of the wide and frightening yawn of space. I was into the movie, and rued giving it such a hard pan.

So when the opportunity arose to see the film at the very same theater where I first saw it, almost exactly a decade later, I leapt. Interstellar has enjoyed a successful anniversary re-release this week, and my Tuesday morning IMAX screening was pretty much sold out. Given my contrition over the years, I expected to be confirmed as a diehard by that afternoon.

Sure enough, the early stretches of Nolan’s 169-minute movie are entrancing—a doleful imagining of Earth’s near future, in which humanity is slowly dying alongside its hope. We keenly feel the weight of hero pilot Cooper’s decision to leave his family, including his youngest daughter, Murph. And then there’s the terrible awe of Cooper and crew tearing into space, rocketing inexorably toward either doom or salvation. It’s a grand spectacle, and probably Nolan’s most nakedly sentimental work to date. The scene in which Cooper, having lost years of Earthtime because of relativity, watches video dispatches sent by his son as he grows up presents a truly wrenching idea, a manifestation of what I assume is a common parental anxiety: how much of my child’s life am I missing while I’m out working, trying to sustain and better their lives?

That’s what a lot of Interstellar is about, right? Nolan uses an epic scale to wrestle with and atone for all the time he had to spend away from his family while working on his massive productions. There’s something sweet (if a bit self-aggrandizing) in that allegory, the arch wizard of the blockbuster reflecting on the private cost of all that success.

And, of course, the movie is a reaction to our ever-darkening reality, as the climate mutates into something increasingly inhospitable to animal life. Ten years on, things have certainly not gotten better, and thus the environmentalist warning of Interstellar registers all the more potently.

Yet when the movie headed into its final two acts—the decision to travel to Dr. Mann’s ice planet, and the struggle to flee it—my old distaste for Interstellar came creeping back. Hathaway’s monologue about love being a measurable force in the universe is so overwrought and, I daresay, nonsensical that it badly tarnishes the movie’s otherwise cool, probing philosophy. And then Nolan shrinks the film back down to a family story, yokes their narrative to that of the entire human species. I suppose that choice is narratively necessary, but it also makes Interstellar‘s heroes so special that the center of the universe is literally in Murph’s childhood bedroom.

I rolled my eyes at stuff all over again; maybe I wasn’t wrong ten years ago after all. But then, well, the coda of the film began, in which Cooper is somehow rescued by the ark of humanity and reunited with his now elderly and dying daughter. I cried for maybe the last ten minutes of the movie, bowled over by Interstellar’s rendering of a bond echoing and enduring across many decades, forward and back. We don’t need all the posturing about love to feel the significance of these final moments; they speak plainly and loudly for themselves.

Back in 2014, I wasn’t as moved by this cosmic reunion. What has changed, of course, is that time has passed. Now, one decade closer to the end of things, I more painfully understand what Nolan was pondering. The hoary adage about time speeding up as one ages is, in fact, horribly true, and Interstellar literalizes that sensation in staggering macro dimensions.

It’s Nolan’s cleverest conceit, one I wish he let emerge and seep in more naturally. That said, I think if you leave a three-hour space movie with tear-stained cheeks, a job has probably been pretty well done.