It has been more than a decade now since Interstellar came out, and I have, in that time, watched a fair number of the space movies that followed it. The Martian. Ad Astra. Arrival. Various lesser entries that came and went without much notice. Each of them has had its strengths. Several of them have been, by various measures, technically superior films to Interstellar. None of them, when I look at them carefully, have managed to do the specific thing that Interstellar did, and that I find I have, almost without noticing it, been measuring every subsequent space movie against.
The thing it did is not the thing the film is usually celebrated for. It is not the science, which was unusually accurate for a Hollywood blockbuster, owing largely to the involvement of the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne as a consultant. It is not the visuals, which were genuinely impressive and which have been adequately reproduced in subsequent films. It is not the score, however much I love it. It is something else, something the genre, by its conventions, rarely even attempts.
What Interstellar did is treat the love between a parent and a child as a force of equivalent narrative weight to the cosmic phenomena the film was depicting. Not as a backdrop. Not as a motivating sentiment. As the actual structural mechanism by which the story resolves.
Why the genre usually avoids this
The space movie, as a genre, has a long-standing preference for treating human emotion as the small thing happening inside the bigger thing. The bigger thing is the cosmos, the mission, the alien encounter, the technical challenge of survival. The human emotion is the texture that makes the bigger thing feel relatable. The emotion is calibrated to support the spectacle. The spectacle is the point.
There are good reasons for this convention. Space, as a setting, is genuinely vast and indifferent. The realistic depiction of human beings inside that setting tends to emphasize, by visual contrast, the smallness of the human concerns relative to the cosmic ones. The genre, accordingly, has tended to treat human emotion either as a brave gesture against an indifferent universe (the heroic mode) or as a small absurdity that the universe will, eventually, render irrelevant (the existential mode). Both modes preserve the bigness of the cosmos as the dominant narrative force.
What Interstellar did, and what almost no other space movie I have seen has had the nerve to do, is treat the love between a father and his daughter as the equal of the cosmos. Not the rival of it. Not the brave gesture inside it. The actual equal. The narrative resolves, in the end, because love does something the science alone could not have done. The film is willing to make this claim, in the face of all the spectacle it has spent two hours assembling, and it does not flinch from it.
The bookshelf scene
The scene that does this work is the bookshelf scene, in the tesseract, near the end of the film. Cooper, having fallen into the black hole, finds himself in a strange constructed space that turns out to be the back of his daughter Murph’s childhood bedroom, accessible across time. He is, for a long moment, trying to communicate with his daughter. He is doing this from the other side of a wall of time. He is using, of all things, gravity and the second hand of a watch to send Morse code.
The scene should not work. By every conventional measure of film criticism, the scene is sentimental, on-the-nose, and bordering on absurd. The premise—that love is the force that operates across dimensions—is, on its face, the kind of line a more cautious film would have cut, or hedged with irony, or undercut with a knowing wink. Interstellar does none of these things. It commits to the premise fully. The film treats the father’s desperate attempt to reach his daughter as the most important thing that has ever happened in any of the spaces the film has depicted, including the black hole.
And it works. The reason it works, when so many similar gambits in lesser films have failed, is that the film has spent two hours setting up the conditions under which the claim can be made without collapsing. The father-daughter relationship is not introduced in the third act as a convenient hook. It is the substance the film has been building, in the background of every other scene, from the opening sequence. The setup is so thorough that, by the time the bookshelf scene arrives, the claim that love is operating as a structural force does not feel like a cheat. It feels like the culmination of what the film has been about, all along.
This is, on examination, one of the harder things any film can attempt. Critics writing about the film’s tenth anniversary have repeatedly identified this synthesis—of rigorous science with unembarrassed emotional centrality—as the defining feature of the film, and as the reason it has continued to grow in reputation over the decade since its release. The synthesis is not, on the available evidence, easy to replicate. Few films have managed it.
What the criterion has become, for me
What this has produced, in my own viewing habits, is a quiet criterion I find I apply to almost every space movie I encounter now. The criterion is not whether the film handles the science well. Plenty of films handle the science well. The criterion is not whether the visuals are striking. Almost every space movie made in the last decade has striking visuals. The criterion is whether the film is willing to treat human emotional life as a force of equal weight to the cosmic phenomena it is depicting.
Most films, when I apply this criterion, fail it. The Martian is a wonderful film in many respects, but the human emotional life in it is, structurally, the small thing happening inside the bigger thing. The cosmos does not, in The Martian, owe anything to the love between any of the characters. The film is fine with this. The film is calibrated to a different mode.
Ad Astra attempts something closer to what Interstellar attempted, with its father-son arc. It is, in its way, a more melancholy and stylistically restrained film than Interstellar. It is also, by my reading, less willing to fully commit to the claim that the relationship between the father and son is structurally equal to the cosmic backdrop. The film keeps hedging. It keeps suggesting that the journey is, in some way, about the relationship, while also keeping the cosmic backdrop in the dominant position. The hedging produces a film that is, in some real way, less risky than Interstellar, and accordingly less rewarding when the emotional moments arrive.
Arrival comes closer than most. It is willing to treat the protagonist’s relationship to her daughter as a structural feature of the narrative, not merely as a sentimental layer. The film is good. The film is, in some real way, the closest competitor to Interstellar in the post-Interstellar decade. But Arrival is also operating in a different register—more intimate, more contained, less interested in the cosmic spectacle that the space-movie genre traditionally trades in. Arrival is doing something adjacent to what Interstellar did, rather than the same thing.
Why this matters
The reason this matters, beyond a question of personal taste, is that the space-movie genre is, on examination, one of the few cultural forms that regularly stages questions about what human life is for, against the largest possible backdrop. The films are doing, in their popular and broadly accessible way, the kind of work that philosophy and religion have historically done. They are asking what a finite, mortal, emotionally entangled being is supposed to do with the fact of the universe being as vast and indifferent as it appears to be.
The default answer the genre gives is some version of stoicism. The universe is vast. We are small. We persist anyway. This is, in its way, a noble answer. It is also, on examination, the answer the genre gives because the alternative—taking emotional life seriously as a structural feature of what the universe contains—requires a particular kind of nerve that very few filmmakers have been willing to summon.
What Interstellar suggested, in the bookshelf scene and in the broader structure of its narrative, is that the alternative answer is available. The alternative answer is that human emotional life is not, in fact, the small thing happening inside the bigger thing. It is, in some real way, one of the bigger things. The love between a parent and a child is not a footnote to the cosmos. It is, in the film’s account, one of the actual phenomena of which the cosmos is composed. The science does not contradict this. The science, in the film’s careful telling, simply has not yet figured out how to describe it.
This is, I want to acknowledge, a claim that can sound mawkish when stated in summary. It is one of the more remarkable features of Interstellar that the film manages to make the claim without sounding mawkish in execution. The execution required, on Christopher Nolan’s part, an unusual willingness to commit to the claim. Subsequent assessments of the film’s legacy have repeatedly pointed to this commitment as the reason the film has continued to resonate. The visuals would have been forgotten. The science would have been technically dated by now. What has lasted is the willingness to take the emotional substance seriously enough to build the entire structure of the film around it.
The honest acknowledgment
A decade on, what I find I want from a space movie is not, on examination, what the genre is conventionally calibrated to provide. I do not particularly need the visual spectacle. I do not particularly need the scientific accuracy. I have, in the last decade, seen enough of both to be reasonably saturated.
What I want, in the genre, is the willingness to make the claim Interstellar made. The claim that human emotional life, in its most ordinary and domestic forms—a father missing his daughter, a parent trying to reach a child across an unbridgeable distance—is one of the actual subjects of the cosmos rather than a sentimental layer applied to it. The willingness to make this claim is, on examination, a particular kind of artistic nerve. Most space movies do not have it. Interstellar did.
This is the criterion I have ended up applying. It is, I now think, the right one. The space movie has the unique opportunity, available to almost no other genre, to set the smallest things human beings care about—the love for a particular other person—against the largest possible backdrop, and to ask whether the small thing is, in fact, small. Most films answer the question by treating the small thing as small. Interstellar, in its willingness to answer differently, did something the genre, before and since, has rarely attempted.
I will keep watching space movies, in part because I keep hoping that one of them will, again, attempt what Interstellar attempted, and succeed. The hope has not, in the decade since, been rewarded. The hope persists anyway. The space movie is, after all, one of the few cultural forms in which the question can still be asked. The asking is, on examination, the reason I keep going. Interstellar, alone among the films of its era, gave the answer I find I have been waiting for the genre to give again.
