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Interstellar’s Most Enduring Quality Is What People Used to Hate About It


Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi spectacle is fascinating precisely because of what so many pegged as its fatal flaw in 2014: its unabashed emotionality.

Interstellar is filled with long stretches of silence and awe and scenes of characters explaining dizzying facts about astrophysics … but it’s also a movie in which Anne Hathaway gives a speech suggesting that love can transcend time and space. In Interstellar, the thematic fulcrum on which the whole movie turns is a series of scenes where our hero Coop (McConaughey) says good-bye to his 10-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) in her room before heading off to space for one last mission. All of Interstellar ’s talk of black holes and wormholes; all those massive machines spinning and connecting across the vast Imax chasms of space; McConaughey riding the universe’s biggest wave; that stentorian score, with its ticking clocks doing constant battle against funereal organ chords … It’s all been leading to this moment — a man replaying the time when he broke his daughter’s heart.

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