Save The Future With Love – Why is ‘Interstellar’ Having a Resurgence?

Save The Future With Love – Why is ‘Interstellar’ Having a Resurgence?

by Alex Billington
December 6, 2024

A few years ago, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s grand sci-fi movie Interstellar again on the big screen. One of my local art house theaters was running a 70mm retrospective of many various movies and they just so happen to own a 70mm print of this one (which they play once or twice a year). What better way to watch it? My screening was mostly full but not entirely sold out – plenty of open seats. Beginning this weekend in December, Paramount is re-releasing Interstellar again with a limited IMAX run (starting on December 6th). According to early reports, all of the IMAX showtimes at a prominent theater in New York City were sold out entirely a month in advance already. Turns out lots of people LOVE this movie. And not the usual love where they enjoy Nolan’s movies so they always watch them on the big screen – Interstellar seems to be having some kind of resurgence. The time-traversing, love-is-the-fifth-dimension science fiction thriller first opened in theaters in November 2014 – just over 10 years ago. It wasn’t a huge hit – only at #2 at the box office opening weekend. Why are more people connected to it now? Let’s go into the black hole to find out…

“Like remembering you can dream. To breathe, cry. To believe in hope again. What was once lost is found again.” One of my most (in)famous tweets is this one which I wrote immediately after watching Interstellar for the first time at its very first screening in October 2014. I flew over to Los Angeles just to be there for the first screening (I had to!) but I wrote this tweet before I processed any of it. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of Interstellar, it’s pretty low on my list of Nolan favorites and I believe it has quite a few flaws (more on that later). It still only has 73% from critics on RT. So why is there so much more love for it now – 10 years later? Covering movies for the last two decades I’ve noticed that right now there is very little analysis from anyone that examines the deeper connection between contemporary society and the movies that people are enjoying & watching more over others. Perhaps because most are afraid to analyze other people’s opinions and interests. But also because it’s a tricky topic to get into because it also involves analyzing our society – which is extra tumultuous now following the pandemic, with politics and economics in disarray worldwide. However, perhaps this is exactly why Interstellar is connecting more with audiences now than 10 years ago.

Speaking to a screenwriter friend in Hollywood for additional analysis, he explained it succinctly by saying: “Everyone’s a cynic now. Everyone’s jaded.” Nolan made a movie that was ahead of its time in terms of being ahead of the pessimism of society. Back then we were more hopeful, and this movie is less about hope more about love. Back in 2014, Barack Obama was still president, none of the bad things from 2016 onwards had happened yet (Trump, pandemic, wars, etc). Interstellar is a cynical movie – Cooper makes a difference in the end, but only after going into the black hole and missing the entire lives of his kids spending years lost in space. It’s also rather pessimistic in its depiction of climate change – Earth is destroyed and humans can no longer survive. There’s no way to fix it anymore because it can’t be fixed. Instead it’s about finding a new home elsewhere in the stars. At the end, thanks to TARS and Cooper in the tesseract, they’ve been able to launch humanity onward & outward – leaving Earth behind for good but saving humanity. At least that’s the most direct interpretation from what we’re presented in the final few scenes. This story resonates way more nowadays than it did in 2014. Especially because it’s looking more & more like humanity is not going to stop climate change from ravaging Earth – possibly leading to an uninhabitable planet in the centuries to come.

Which is exactly what Interstellar depicts pretty clearly. It got that right. We’ve also transitioned fully into a post-truth society in 2024 and the movie also shows that they’re living in a post-truth society, featuring a scene where Cooper is reprimanded by Murph’s teachers for telling her that the Apollo missions were real…

This tweet above (replying to a thread about Interstellar showtimes being completely sold out) also touches upon something deeper within this emotional movie and its themes. The main plot of Interstellar follows Matthew McConaughey, a former NASA test pilot turned farmer, who joins a new mission into space to travel through a wormhole & explore other potentially inhabitable planets. But the core of it is about Cooper as a father – his two kids Murph & Tom (Mackenzie Foy & Timothée Chalamet) don’t want him to go because he’s all they have left on this dusty, near-death planet. After everything that happens, we learn that it’s Cooper’s love for Murph that matters – he helps her solve the equation to save humanity and transmits it to her. But his focus is always on his family: his love for them and desire to return safely to them. Ultimately this makes Interstellar a movie where love for our family is what saves the world all of humanity. And once again, this idea is way more relatable to audiences now than it was 10 years ago. There’s more at stake now – the planet is in worse shape. Sometimes I wonder if people are connecting to it because they also fantasize that by loving their family even more, maybe they, too, can save everyone simply through the power of love.

When Interstellar came out, and everyone started to analyze what happens in the tesseract inside the black hole at the end of the movie, one of the ideas (sort of a joke but also quite serious) is that “love is the fifth dimension.” There’s even a Reddit thread from 10 years ago about it. Humans currently can comprehend three dimensions – the fourth dimension is supposedly time, but this also still just a theory. I like the idea that Interstellar considers “love” the fifth dimension because it’s a very powerful concept that everyone can relate to. I remember reading a story once about how love is one of the only things that remains long after someone is gone – you can still feel the love from and for someone even after they have died. And in this movie, Cooper’s love for his kids is what keeps him alive, and keeps him coherent enough in the tesseract to figure out how to reach Murph and send her the calculations. This power of love resonates even more now in 2024 than in 2014 because everything feels much more hopeless, more worrisome, more dangerous as we move forward into very dark times. And the one thing we’re all holding onto now is love. Love for our family, love for the planet, love for each other. No one trusts any institutions anymore, and everything has broken down, but life goes on anyway. Maybe there is some hope in the distant future – if we love our kids enough.

Interstellar is also built upon a few tender ideas of hope that I believe many are grasping onto nowadays. Even if it’s just a subconscious, deep recognition of sharing the same feelings, that matters when it comes to connecting with movies. Interstellar shows us that one person can make a difference. Which is the ultimate fantasy nowadays. Everyone wants to believe that whatever they’re doing matters – even if that’s just raising a good family with smart kids. It feels empowering when you’re just doing simple things – taking care of your family and fighting to return safely to them day after day. There’s also hope in the idea that humanity can be saved and will be saved eventually – maybe not by our generation or the next one, but down the line some smart people will figure it out. There are times where I think it’s less of a sci-fi movie, more of just a pure drama about parents and parenting and love, and how this flows through time. It feels more like a sci-fi movie that non-sci-fi fans can also love because it’s not overly dense sci-fi, it’s more about parenting with an exceptionally vivid emotional core. The scene where Cooper breaks down watching the video of his kids growing up over 23 years is one of the most heartbreaking & moving scenes in any movie this century.

Whenever I try to have conversations analyzing movie opinions, most people become dismissive of deeper analysis and just exclaim that they enjoy the movie because they think it’s good and that’s that. Yes, it could be that simple, but I don’t believe it is that simple. There is something more to it and why it resonates more now. My own frustrations with Interstellar come from changes made to the screenplay – it was originally a script written by Jonathan Nolan for Steven Spielberg, and even included some kind of alien creatures. Nolan took all that out and made it all the more bleak and cold. I’m also not fond of the way it ends – there’s nothing out there and it’s all about just getting back and taking care of our loved ones. I like when sci-fi movies take more bold & ambitious risks to tell us that something is out there, something perhaps we can’t even understand, and it will have answers that we need to listen to now. This is why I love Arrival – it’s one of my all-time faves. While the tesseract does help Cooper save humans and does help him get answers, it’s a very peculiar conceit that also seems like an Earth-based construction – not anything seriously cosmic or unexplainable or mysterious. Once we get to that point and it shows us what Cooper is doing to reach Murph, it’s a quick “ah okay there we go.” That’s all he gets from going into this black hole? Nothing else? We also never get to learn about Murph’s final equation, how it helps them move on from Earth, and other specifics. Nolan keeps real hard science out of the movie and instead focuses solely on the emotional plot.

This might be why more and more people are feeling connected to it as they watch it over and over again. Or when discover it for the first time at home. The movie is easy to understand and never overly complex. Even Inception is more complex and intricate than this one. It’s entertaining like any good action movie, it keeps viewers engaged, there’s always something going on – it keeps moving forward and keeps everyone on the edge of their seat no matter how many times they watch. It is a thrilling science fiction space adventure, but it’s grounded in Nolan’s reality, and grounded in family and love above all else. The ending really hits home with this feeling: at the end of all things, we’ll have each other. Could James Gray’s Ad Astra have the same resurgence in a few years? It’s very similar in many ways – a family member goes on a deep space mission only to return a long time later after discovering there’s really not much out there and the only thing holding us together is our love for each other at home. My screenwriter friend also brought up an interesting point – he has two kids now that he didn’t have when it first opened. Maybe more people have become parents since 2014 and feel more connected to this story of the Cooper family and how they save humanity by reaching out across time and space and through a black hole. Maybe it just needed more time to resonate with audiences.

Of course maybe lots of moviegoers just think it’s a spectacular movie. 🪐 Maybe more & more have settled on it being a sci-fi masterpiece. And that’s enough to get them into theaters to watch it again. This article written in 2020 dives into why so much of this movie is rousing (even if I don’t entirely agree). It features some dazzling sci-fi action sequences, including the docking scene which is especially exhilarating to watch on IMAX screens. There’s also the possibility that more people are becoming Nolan fans after he won all the Oscars for Oppenheimer earlier this year. Maybe enough people didn’t get to watch it the first time on the big screen and now they jump at any chance they get since it’s the “best” way to experience it. Some movie lovers also relish the opportunity to see any big sci-fi classic on the big screen again – I went to see Avatar 1 and Dune: Part One during re-releases in IMAX recently as well. These are all valid explanations for why it’s selling out and why so many people are excited to rewatch it. I’m still curious to ask them all to dig deeper and tell me why they’re so excited about watching this now and/or why they didn’t see it 10 years ago when it first opened in theaters. And I really do think it has to do with how bad things have become on this planet and how dreaming of the stars and escaping to another planet is a fantasy more and more are indulging in.

The sad truth though is that Matt Damon’s character is a reminder it’s not as easy as we think. Everything went right, he found the right planet, but couldn’t finish the mission properly – because of the human heart and selfishness. He just wanted to go home, too. But this is another darker side of Interstellar, another part of the movie that bothers me… Interstellar is not the first movie to be ahead of its time, with an unexciting original opening only to go on to become a beloved classic a decade down the line. This happens often. But I do believe there is something about the great despair and concern many are feeling nowadays in modern society connecting to the love and hope (and despair) found within Interstellar. Maybe we don’t need all the answers, we just need love? Maybe it really is believing in the hope of Cooper (+ Murph) as he goes through all these astonishing space experiences. Maybe it is just an inherent desire to escape from a climate change-ravaged Earth to explore other worlds in deep space? That’s always been my dream ever since I was a kid…

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