What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Interstellar’ on Paramount+

As we enter the last few weeks of the year, multiplexes will continue to be dominated by the Thanksgiving-week blockbusters Moana 2, Wicked, and Gladiator II – but at a few locations, a November hit from a decade ago will be added into the mix. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar returns to IMAX screens to celebrate its tenth anniversary. So if you’ve always wanted to see (or rewatch) Interstellar on the biggest screen imaginable… well, you may still be denied the chance. In Manhattan, the one theater capable of showing the film in full, 70mm-print IMAX glory sold their seats weeks ago, though a few stray tickets have popped back online because of returns. Effectively, though, the six-day run is sold out. Other, less spectacularly huge IMAX screens did still have some tickets as of this writing – and anyone looking for a small-screen revisitation can find the movie on Paramount+, or for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.

Why watch Interstellar tonight?

It must feel vindicating for Nolan to see his movie continue to draw such devoted crowds a decade later, just as an IMAX rerelease of Tenet did earlier this year. Tenet, as it happens, is the only Nolan movie since The Dark Knight to gross less in the United States than Interstellar – and Tenet had a bungled mid-COVID release to shoulder the blame (even if it’s unlikely such an obtuse, if wildly entertaining, movie would have become a mega-smash under any circumstances). It’s not that Interstellar was a huge flop; for an original sci-fi movie, it did quite well. But it wasn’t as big a hit as Inception, Nolan’s previous IMAX-ready sci-fi epic, and his more grounded follow-up Dunkirk eked out a slightly bigger gross in the United States. Between that and Oppenheimer’s smash success, Nolan is in the unusual position of having a stronger financial track record in movies about World War II than big-canvas, effects-heavy sci-fi. Not even Spielberg can make that claim (unless Raiders of the Lost Ark counts as a movie about WWII).

Spielberg is probably the correct reference point for Interstellar – but at the time, plenty of folks were still hung up on  considering Nolan as a modern-day equivalent of Spielberg’s pal Stanley Kubrick. Though Nolan doubtless reveres Kubrick, this has never been a particularly apt artistic comparison, and Interstellar is the movie that should have made this clear once and for all. As with other Kubrick parallels, a few superficial signifiers are there: Interstellar uses visual effects that look more like material from Kubrick’s 2001 than up-to-the-minute CG, and is less interested in the pure fantasy elements of space travel that have fueled so many sci-fi blockbusters. But the movie’s father-daughter story is more Spielbergian, and heartfelt, than the analytical remove Kubrick was known for.

The film follows Coop (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA worker in a near-future where Earth is dying, eventually recruited for a mission to explore possible inhabitable planets in another galaxy. This involves leaving his children, including his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, then Jessica Chastain) for a space mission of undetermined length, alongside Brand (Anne Hathaway) and some other scientists. The movie takes great advantage of Nolan’s eye for stately spectacle, in its depiction of space travel, wormholes, and desolate far-off planets (including an eerily watery “time-dilated” planet where a few minutes passes as months or years for the ship orbiting it). But one of its most famous sequences has no such sights. It simply features Coop, after a brief-to-him mission on the time-dilation planet, receiving a series of transmissions of videos that allow him the beauty and horror of watching his children grow up without him. (Interestingly, the movie came out just a few months after Boyhood built its entire narrative around a form of time-lapse heartbreak.) This gutting sequence of McConaughey openly weeping as he sees his children age decades before his eyes is not what you’d call “Kubrickian.”

And it’s all the better for it. Interstellar was lightly derided at the time of its release for a vaguely hippy-dippy the-secret-to-the-universe-is-love point of view that, indeed, would register as incongruous if you were under the mistaken impression that Christopher Nolan might make A Clockwork Orange or Eyes Wide Shut at any minute. But Inception is also about a man searching for a way back to his children, and the tragedies and triumphs of Nolan’s other movies leading up to Interstellar often turn on whether men are able to accept love and/or help, or if they insist on pursuing some greater glory that will ultimately not save them.

At a time when big-budget movies are as lacking as ever in any kind of personal vision, this more sentimental element of Interstellar – the way Coop’s technical mission turns metaphysical, making him over into a lingering ghost in his daughter’s life who can attempt to bend the fabric of time to reach her again, however briefly or fleetingly – has only aged for the better over the past decade. That’s only fitting, because one of Nolan’s chief preoccupations, both technically and emotionally, is time and its manipulation. It’s there in the nesting chronologies of Inception, the head-spinning backwards traveling (and temporal pincer movements!) of Tenet, and the intercutting of Oppenheimer, among others. Interstellar is arguably his least clinical use of this idea, despite all of the scientific gobbledygook the characters spout. It lays bear the sadness and inevitability of feeling as if there’s not enough time, alongside the exhilaration of knowing (or hoping, anyway) that life will continue onward in some form. That’s not a catharsis that requires IMAX-sized scenes, even if Nolan knows how to fill them like few others.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Interstellar on Paramont+