No matter how incompatible your personal tastes might be with his work, it’s impossible to deny the impact that Christopher Nolan has made and continues to make in a cinematic landscape forever changed by COVID-19 and the rise of the nostalgia market. Even now, with a box office that bows almost exclusively to fandom films, Nolan is still capable of pulling massive audiences with his standalone juggernauts, the next of which will be an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.
But it was Interstellar that marked the beginning of the latest and greatest Nolan era as the first film to follow the conclusion of his Dark Knight trilogy. Since then, Nolan’s films have flourished on the back of his singular impulses more than ever, and try as some folks might, the effectiveness and perseverance of his style is undeniable.
And the Netflix charts would agree. Per FlixPatrol, Interstellar is currently the eighth most-watched film on the United States’ Netflix film charts at the time of writing, though it seems to be having a tough time keeping up with a fifth-place Despicable Me and a sixth-place Despicable Me 2. Indeed, depending on the day, even IMAX-worthy spectacle will struggle against the calculated gibberish of Universal’s one-eyed merchandising critters.
Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot living on a dystopian, blight-ridden Earth who’s recruited for a mission through space in the hopes of finding a new home for mankind. A wormhole just might lead him to the answers he’s looking for, but perhaps those answers are closer to home than he initially realized.
Nolan famously forgoes immediately comprehensible logic for the sake of a viscerally cinematic experience if need be, and Interstellar is certainly one such case. The awe-inspiring biomes, scientific density, and existential girth of Interstellar makes for a particularly chunky soup that doesn’t easily accommodate the film’s plot (or, depending on who you ask, the film’s xerox of a plot).
In this way, however, Nolan’s filmmaking method fundamentally challenges the way that most people tend to watch movies, and arguably invites viewers to actively think about how they watch movies, and how they can change those habits. With that in mind, Interstellar is perhaps the quintessential Christopher Nolan film, as it prompts us to think about ourselves and our place in the universe, and how we’re capable of addressing our relationship to our existence, just as Nolan’s style prompts us to reconsider our relationship to watching a film.
As for how exactly Interstellar does that, there’s perhaps no better example than this quote on love from Anne Hathaway’s character, Dr. Amelia Brand: “Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”