Revisit "Interstellar" At Its 10th Anniversary: How I Went from Being a Full-On Nolan Detractor to Half of One

Paramount Pictures and Christopher Nolan's dispute over the production of new copies for the 10th-anniversary re-release of Interstellar has once again brought the film into the media spotlight. The planned global re-release, initially set for this fall, has been delayed until the end of the year due to the loss of the original 70mm film prints.

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Interstellar (2014)

Regardless, revisiting Interstellar on its 10th anniversary is necessary. From a commercial perspective and in terms of mainstream audience reception, Interstellar is one of the last decade's most successful sci-fi films. However, for more discerning cinephiles, the film is often met with the same level of critique as it is with enthusiasm from Nolan's fans. Critics argue that Nolan's work, in terms of depth and scope, falls short of the masterpieces of predecessors like Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky. They also contend that Nolan's aesthetic style lacks the groundbreaking significance of films like Blade Runner or The Matrix.

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Blade Runner (1982)

I count myself among those who question Nolan's approach. When I first watched Interstellar in theaters, I didn’t find the film as romantic and graceful as the early reviews touted; instead, I found the film's narrative and visual execution cumbersome. To me, the entire film felt like the NASA spacecraft it depicts—sturdy, solid, and mechanically flawless as an industrial product, but lacking the grace and spirit of an art piece.

Ten years later, I watched Interstellar again. My expectations had changed, and so did my focus during the viewing. Compared to my first experience, I saw more of what Interstellar had to offer, but I also gained a clearer understanding of Nolan’s shortcomings.

So, what exactly are the film's strengths and weaknesses?

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A Dry Audiovisual Experience

As someone who holds no strong feelings for or against Nolan, my initial viewing of Interstellar ten years ago felt like a rather dry sensory experience, a feeling I couldn't quite articulate at the time. A decade later, that sensation was confirmed. Nolan’s disability to orchestrate visually compelling scenes is indeed his weak spot.

The master of cinematic language, Alfred Hitchcock, once said, "What can be shown through visuals should never be conveyed through dialogue." Yet, in Interstellar, too much is expressed through the characters' words. This narrating style is often necessary when dealing with concepts like wormholes, singularities, and extra-dimensional spaces—ideas that might indeed be incomprehensible to the audience without verbal explanation.

However, even phenomena like varying gravity on different planets and the differing flow of time between spaces—concepts that can and should be communicated through sensory experience and audiovisual language—are also delivered through Nolan’s characters' dialogue: "The gravity here is 80% of Earth's!" "I’ve aged 23 years, 4 months, and 8 days while you were on that mission!"

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The dry, matter-of-fact information presented in Interstellar could have been transformed into material for a richer sensory experience in the hands of a more visually talented director. Take, for example, the sense of weight. We don’t need to cite Gravity or 2001: A Space Odyssey; we can simply look at Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars. Despite its uneven quality, the film beautifully depicts the sensation of weightlessness, with a camera that floats freely in zero gravity, dancing a complex and beautiful ballet with the characters.

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Mission to Mars (2000)

Similarly, the concept of time could have been treated like malleable clay. Again, we need not invoke the dreamy Tarkovsky or the sensitive Wong Kar-wai. Even a socially conscious director like Martin Scorsese, not typically described as "romantic," effectively uses techniques like slow motion, fast motion, and freeze frames to manipulate the perception of time, highlighting key moments and emphasizing their emotional weight in the characters' memories—a form of emotional relativity.

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However, in Interstellar, such sticky, sensory moments that connect characters with the audience are few and far between. Almost all emotions and philosophical musings are conveyed through dialogue.

Matt Damon’s character delivers lengthy monologues about his survival philosophy; Cooper’s father-in-law endlessly defines Cooper’s character, fearing the audience might not grasp it otherwise; Michael Caine’s character recites Dylan Thomas’s poetry to distill the film’s central themes. All these clumsy techniques make the creator's intentions overly obvious, leading to a stilted emotional expression.

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Nolan’s monotonous approach to filming dialogue scenes—relying heavily on close-ups and medium shots, with little camera movement or attention to the surrounding environment—only exacerbates this stiffness. We can imagine that if someone like David Fincher directed these dialogue scenes, they would at least be visually more engaging.

When I recall Interstellar, I think of its in-depth scientific exploration, solid visual effects, appropriately cast performances, and Hans Zimmer’s haunting score. But it’s hard to recall any shots that are emotionally or poetically striking—I remember the black hole and the five-dimensional space, but their impact is more educational than artistic.

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When you think of 2001, you remember the space ballet and the psychedelic journey; with Solaris, the weightless dance in the room; and with Blade Runner, the bleak beauty of the ship taking off in the mud.

Compared to these masterpieces, Interstellar lacks a certain spiritual quality. For a film aiming to educate, this may not be an issue, but for an art piece, it marks a fundamental difference.

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The Romanticism of a Pragmatist

On the other hand, I don’t believe that the much-criticized lack of depth is a problem for Interstellar. Nolan isn’t a filmmaker who delves into profound existential questions; his stories are driven by very practical, tangible issues: executing a heist, competing with a worthy rival, surviving a war. In Interstellar, the story’s surface-level drive is human migration, while the underlying force is familial love and the promise of returning home—basic human emotions that resonate universally.

The mechanism behind Nolan’s films is quite simple. As the frontman of "puzzle films," Nolan's works operate on just two basic actions: identifying a problem and solving it. Everything else serves these two actions.

Thus, Cooper’s single-minded focus on completing his mission in Interstellar, with little interest in anything unrelated to it, resembles the practicality of his farmer son Tom rather than the adventurous spirit one might expect. But there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s simply, like Nolan himself, a pragmatist who values rationality, cause and effect, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

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Nolan’s storytelling prioritizes efficiency, which is why he often sacrifices aesthetics to dive directly into hard scientific concepts like time travel. Aesthetics, in his view, might hinder the progression of the mission. However, he also recognizes that always getting straight to the point can make a story too dry and monotonous.

His solution is to complicate the traditional three-act structure and last-minute rescue scenes, interweaving multiple timelines or parallel narratives through cross-cutting to achieve a more complex and impactful multi-layered climax.

This is true for Inception, Dunkirk, and Interstellar, where the fuel crisis faced by Cooper on one side of the bookshelf parallels the fire threatening his daughter’s cornfield on the other, both compounded by the global famine looming over humanity. These converge into a multi-layered "last-minute rescue."

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Dunkirk (2017)

The problem with Nolan's storytelling is that due to the precedence of structure and concept, there’s little room within the narrative framework for the characters' personal emotions to breathe. Within such limited space, the emotions available to the characters are basic—yearning for loved ones, reminiscing about a deceased spouse, a commitment to justice and humanity. These can evoke a basic level of empathy but often feel superficial due to their lack of specificity.

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However, in Dunkirk, Nolan managed to play to his strengths and avoid his weaknesses. He minimized the protagonist’s active choices, turning them into opportunists driven by survival instincts, navigating shifting circumstances. This approach better highlights the faint glimmers of humanity within the context of war.

Without the banners of familial love, justice, or nationalism, all that remains is a minimalistic form of heroism under the pressure of survival. This may represent a significant evolution in Nolan's creative process: he no longer loudly proclaims humanistic ideals but instead allows humanity to emerge as a natural response to specific situations, without making any value judgments.

It may be clumsy or dry, but we must admit that Nolan’s diligence, determination, and his scientific, unromantic approach possess a certain romanticism unique to pragmatists. The romance in Interstellar perhaps lies not in the return home but in the readiness to embark again. After fulfilling his promise, Cooper is reminded by his daughter that there’s a new problem: Dr. Brand is still stranded far away, and other potentially habitable planets still await exploration.

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Constantly identifying and solving problems imbues Nolan’s work with a sense of mission. In the years following Covid, he has taken on another mission: to preserve the glory of cinema. Can he continue to fulfill these missions? The answer remains uncertain, but we should have faith in him.

Because we can always trust a romantic pragmatist.

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