A Force that Transcends Time and Space: Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) 10 Years Later

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Ten years ago, I ended our roundtable discussion of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar commenting on how the relationship of Nolan to the material of Interstellar echoed Steven Spielberg’s relationship to A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Kubrick, except with Spielberg as the Kubrickian figure here. I ended by saying, “I contend that the long view is showing A.I. to have been a masterpiece, and it’s too early to tell for Interstellar, but I can envision a critical reevaluation one day.” I think that another decade has cemented the A.I. reevaluation among contemporary critics, and by and large it seems that the same is now true for Interstellar.

Like A.I. before it, Interstellar has been critiqued for its sentimental elements and what unattentive viewers believe to be pure deus ex machina endings. But both films find the human heart in their ambitious science fiction tales. Interstellar is the more optimistic of the two in its belief in humanity’s ability to survive across time and space, as our relationship with future generations is the one that sustains us. In Interstellar, love is a force as real as gravity that can transcend time and space, impacting our experience of both in tangible ways that shape our actions and knowledge.

Interstellar is a film about parents and children. Our duty to our children both drives us on, but also reminds us (or at least should) that we are no longer living for our own future but the future of our children and future generations. It’s easy for this kind of logic to become too focused on cold, utilitarian moral calculations (take a look at the popularity of Effective Altruism or EA, if you’re skeptical of the force of this logic), but Interstellar resists this over-intellectualizing by showing how love can cross those boundaries of space and time that give the film its epic scale. In a film about wormholes and black holes, love has a gravitational pull of its own, in other words. People mock the scene where Anne Hathaway’s Dr. Brand, the daughter of the elder Dr. Brand, played by Michael Caine, basically spells this theme out explicitly, but the truth of the statement is backed up both by our human experience of reality and the physics of the film.

In the intervening years, I’ve aged and my children have grown (I now have crossed the threshold into having a teenage child!). I’ve revisited the film a handful of times in the decade since it came out. I even once had the opportunity to see the film at an outdoor summer evening screening at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics here in Waterloo, with a gravity researcher who was a colleague of Kip Thorne’s (the technical advisor, who the original screenplay credited for its black hole concepts). Most recently, I watched it with my 13-year-old son. As Aren texted me when I told him we were about to watch the film for its tenth anniversary, he remarked that it was a good opportunity for a boy to see his father weep in front of him.

That wasn’t hyperbole. The film has become increasingly moving to me as I age and embrace the experience of myself becoming my “children’s ghost,” as Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper puts it in the film. Nolan isn’t just manipulating his audience, or being sentimental. This idea of memory, love, and time being intertwined is central to the film’s structure and themes. When you combine it with the fantastic craft on display, it makes for a particularly excellent cinematic experience.

The story of the film in its broadest strokes holds that humanity must find a new home among the stars; Cooper heeds the call when he is recruited by the elder Dr. Brand to lead a mission through a wormhole and determine which of the potential planets identified in a distant galaxy holds the most promising future home for humanity. But the cost is him leaving his children behind, children who will live with this ghost of a father; neither dead, nor with any way of letting them know easily if he is okay. It’s a mission that, thanks to our understanding of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, we understand might take only a few years for him, but decades for his children, as time is impacted by the speed of an object and its gravitational force. Cooper feels this is what he was born to do, as he remarks to his father-in-law, Donald (John Lithgow), and that doesn’t make it wrong. But, likewise, as Donald recipes, “it just might.”

Cinematically, rather than a hubristic message of human transcendence, Interstellar insists that this entire, seemingly miraculous reality is oh so fragile. Considering the vastness of space and time, the fact that love is born of the reality that two individuals just happen to be existing in time and space at the same time is incredibly improbable. The film emphasizes this, first through its scale and how it shows the smallness of people travelling through space. One of the film’s most beautiful moments juxtaposes the sound of rain and crickets on earth with the spaceship crossing in front of Saturn, dwarfed by the gas giant and its rings. Cinema is a tool that allows us to represent our experience of these crossings of time and space, as does our memory.

Likewise, cinema allows us to experience years and decades in mere minutes. In this way, Nolan shows something he further explored in Dunkirk, Tenet, and even Oppenheimer, which is how cinema is the perfect medium for exploring our temporal relations to experience. Cinema opens up the possibilities for representing scales of time and distance that would otherwise be impossible. It allows us, as Andrei Tarkovsky described it, to “sculpt in time,” to craft time just as we would clay or wood, revealing the contours of temporal experience in a work of art.

Thus, through Interstellar’s exploration of relativity and the gravitational impact on time, we get to experience things that distill this contraction and expansion of time in dramatic and emotionally compelling ways. The film’s most iconic moment may be Cooper’s playing messages from his kids after 23 years has elapsed, while for him and the viewer only a few minutes has passed on Miller’s Planet (the water planet that orbits too close to Gargantua’s event horizon, severely distorting time). He returns, viewing a screen and seeing his children age when for him, he has only been gone a few brief moments. There’s a reason the McConaughey reaction video has become a meme staple in the decade since. It captures something about both cinema and our relationship to time elegantly and movingly. Frankly, the very thought of the scene causes me to well up with emotion.

A decade on, Interstellar may also be the Nolan film that best anticipates Oppenheimer, with its story of humanity’s destiny as impacted by what our scientific discoveries have found being intertwined with individual desires and love. Einstein and his theories sit in the background of both films, by theoretical extension and literally in the case of Oppenheimer.

Looking back at that roundtable a decade ago, I didn’t have as much to say as the brothers at the time; I was still trying to figure out how good I thought Nolan’s film was. Something about the film had deeply moved me at the time, but it hadn’t coalesced into a strong feeling about it. I ended up slotting it third on my Top 10 of 2014. It took a long time for me to recognize what the film was doing. Ten years later, I am prepared to call it my favourite Christopher Nolan film, and that’s saying a lot given the esteem we here at 3 Brothers Film hold for the director.

Few films merge affective experience with intellectual exploration in such a cinematic synthesis. The fact that Interstellar may be Nolan’s most emotionally intense film isn’t an outlier, but rather shows that such deep emotional bonds are actually key to the impact of all his films. It has transformed from a film that I deeply enjoyed to one that I think is among the best films of this new century.

Interstellar (USA/UK, 2014)

Directed by Christopher Nolan; written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan; starring Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow.

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