"Interstellar" 10th Anniversary Retrospective: The Best Bad Movie Ever Made

"Interstellar" sucked then, sucks now, and will always suck... but in the best possible way.

July 20, 2024

Millions of lightyears away, a spacecraft lands on a planet the inhabitants hope will be humanity's saving grace. Inside a cryostasis chamber is Dr. Mann, the most brilliant of all NASA scientists. Although the mission was to jet off into the universe hoping to find humanity’s new home, knowing full well that should his planet prove fruitless, he was not to be rescued, Mann faked data to get rescued.

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We're always the heroes of our stories; as Mann says, he never considered that his planet wouldn’t be the one. Following through when faced with reality is a different animal, and Mann simply couldn’t face a very simple truth:

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Being alone sucks.

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In fact, few things are worse than being alone, especially if you’re alone in your principles; even the most self-assured need to feel validated and affirmed.

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One, then, can imagine the isolation of being the only person in a movie theater thinking what you do of the film. In November 2014, I experienced this phenomenon. Yet, strangely, I didn’t feel lonely, only befuddled. Why was no one in the theater realizing how horrible this movie was?

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The film? Interstellar.

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Alas, every rainy cloud has a silver lining, and the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi "epic" was that it served as the perfect vessel for my oldest and tightest friendship to solidify. After my initial viewing, I clamored to inform her, at that point a fond acquaintance, of a singular moment, approximately halfway through the film, that was so hysterical, so ludicrous, it had to be seen to be believed.

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Thankfully for her and the anticipation I'd built, it was not a lie… a monstrous lie.

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This article could end right now and that one moment, featuring some of the most horrific writing in film history, could encapsulate the full glory of Interstellar, the most delightfully awful movie ever made.

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Of course, one needn’t wait that long to experience this paradoxical genius. At the beginning, after a bizarre conversation about fake ghosts and Grandpa's age, the father of one beloved daughter and a son he’d sooner cast to the seventh circle of hell than acknowledge outside of leaving him a crappy truck rises to the dawn sky casting its light over his massive farm to the tune of Hans Zimmer violating an organ. It’s theatrical, melodramatic, and followed by the most anticlimactic bass drop in cinema history:

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“The wheat had died.”

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Sadly, the movie didn't die along with it.

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That's hyperbolic since the laughter supplied by Interstellar’s shoddy plotting, general histrionics, and brooding self-seriousness are more important than ever since a narcissistic sexual deviant heading a conservative cult will likely once again be President of the United States. But if one were to disregard that intrinsic value to analyze the film objectively, one would find that, well, it sucks.

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The key to criticizing a bad movie (particularly one so rabidly adored by the general public) is to properly and fully explain why it sucks. It’s like that person everyone likes but you want to see get launched into an active volcano; on the surface, all seems well, but once one dives beneath, one finds the iniquity within. How do we unearth it so the world may see them for who they truly are?

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Thankfully, Interstellar does the majority of the heavy lifting for us, because the plot of the movie is as follows:

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Earth is dying, and we have no more okra. Humanity's last chance is for a pilot-turned-farmer to unscramble the mystery of the dust in his annoying daughter’s bedroom to locate the remnants of NASA, who somehow didn’t know that the only person who could man the species-saving mission was living next door. After agreeing to pilot the flight, the astronaut farmer abandons his beloved daughter (and that pesky son) to see which astronaut found a habitable world. After saying the words “anomaly” and “singularity” a million times, he discovers that love is the key to saving the world as he falls through a fifth-dimensional tesseract disguised as his daughter’s childhood bookshelf, from which he sends Morse code into a watch so that she can solve the "problem of gravity" and save the world.

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Yup, that’s what happens.

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In fairness, Interstellar does have its moments. Actually, it has its one moment.

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Actually, a moment is defined as being 90 seconds long, and this particular… instance is only 60 seconds long, so Interstellar has one minute: when Cooper reunites with Murph at the end of her life after saving humans from extinction. She tells him that despite people refusing to believe that “bulk beings opened a tesseract” for her father to use through the power of his quantifiable bond with her (ya know, since love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of both time and space) she knew she was right: it was her dad all along.

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But Murph, how did you know?

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“Because my Dad promised me.”

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You’ll cry, though far more on principle than any connection to Cooper, who’s essentially Matthew McConaughey playing himself (but in space), or Murph, who’s just a precocious kid for 20 minutes and then a whiny adult with nothing to do but talk about how things are "recursive" and "nonsensical."

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Additionally, it gets one other thing right: popcorn at a baseball game is unnatural.

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So, we’re left with, aside from all the accidental hilarity, the core of Interstellar's ineptitude. Yes, the writing is atrocious, the desperate act of a man who’s made a career off of making the average person feel like Einstein. The acting, though noble in trying to legitimize Nolan’s horrid screenplay, is mediocre at best. Look no further than Cooper’s departure as a heartbroken, regretful Murph runs after him, where McConaughey looks like he’s stoned out of his mind while getting the most tragic blowie of his life.

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But to cite something quantifiable that transcends dimensions of both time and space, the true failure of Interstellar is that it’s so enamored with itself that it rarely feels like a movie. Nolan’s fanboys criticize naysayers for "not understanding" the story, but it’s stupid. People dislike that word, but sometimes the least pretentious verbiage best applies. No matter how frequently it cracks open a thesaurus when relaying a simple idea or tries to convince us that Nolan tried making the science in this believable even for a movie, Interstellar is stupid. Sadly, stupid stories will always feel like a collection of scenes stitched together and not an actual story.

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Although visually, auditorily, and spiritually similar, there is little roping together the scene on the wave planet from the docking scene, Murph’s plea to Cooper to stay with her on Earth from Amelia’s asinine contention that love should dictate the fate of humanity, or Cooper’s musings about humanity’s fate to Murph and Tom’s squabbles over leaving a dilapidated farmhouse or condemning the latter’s family to a torturous collective death. They are all scenes in a film that technically necessitates their inclusion but in no way successfully makes them feel earned as a sequence of events building a larger whole.

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For most of its torturous, 169-minute runtime, it feels like a teenager’s creative writing project, or like the revenge story I wrote for my 8th-grade English teacher filled with teenage love, hanging corpses, an earthquake, communists, and boat trips to Africa: a bunch of stuff that one could technically argue is all connected based on its inclusion in the same thing but could not argue the same point from any other angle.

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If one needs to be convinced of this, let us review the number of ridiculous lines/scenes that are memorable for their idiocy:

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*ahem*

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The worst-looking shot of Saturn that could ever be put to film.
“We’ll be approaching the wormhole in about three hours,” which is the equivalent of answering, “Are we there yet?” with, “We’ll be somewhere in the vicinity of our destination in approximately this far away amount of time, which completely invalidates the need to say this because it could easily be said when we’re, ya know, not three hours away.”
Brand refusing to leave the wave planet without the completely useless data, which likely had something to do with transcending singularities or dimensional anomalies or Wolf Edmund’s penis.
Punctuating the urgency of having each passing hour equate to seven years on Earth by sitting around and talking about morality and parenthood.
“... some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of both time and space.”
Dr. Mann being apparently oh soooo brilliant that neither Cooper, Brand, nor Rommily knew his planet was worth jack upon immediately seeing it was a heaping pile of ice and rock.
“It’s not possible.” “No; it’s necessary.”
“Just like, save your family!”
“It’s recursive, it’s… nonsensical.”
“The bulk beings are closing the tesseract.”
Said bulk beings not being bound by anything… except the thing that makes them need Cooper to do all the work.

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and, of course, the coup de grâce to any chance this movie had of being good…

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Even in the moments where it seemingly escapes r/im14andthisisdeep territory and hits at some universal truths, it falters under the weight of its desperation. As Mann reveals that Amelia’s father deceived Cooper and his daughter and that there is no hope for the people on Earth, he drops a pearl of wisdom:

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“We can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.”

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In other words, we don’t care about people we don’t care about: how profound. In the words of Tywin Lannister, “You say that as if you were the first man alive to think it.” Truly, this is a movie not even Michael Caine and John Lithgow can save.

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But we understand. Many people never mature beyond 7th grade and always need to feel like the smartest person alive. Of course they love Interstellar; it was written specifically for them. Unfortunately, there are billions of other people on the planet who don’t hear “anomaly” and “singularity” 15,000 times and latch onto the film vomiting them to believe they’ve discovered genius in a sea of cinematic garbage.

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We have standards, and they are not met by what is essentially Christopher Nolan projectile-puking every idea he’s ever had and fancying it a masterpiece. We shall not be fooled; we know that pseudo-science and a thesaurus are the signature of awful science fiction screenwriting and that for every “anomaly” or “singularity,” we get a complete butchering of the meaning of Murphy’s Law or bastardization of the “jump off a cliff scenario.”

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Alas, I must accept reality, and reality is that no matter how ardently you warn humanity against its own destruction, it will always readily march into certain death, whether in the literal or spiritual sense.

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So, I can only send any who dare watch Interstellar, thus aging themselves 70 years and destroying what cinematic soulfulness they have left, off onto their galactic torture with some words of encouragement that will prove significantly more applicable to this scenario than they were when used in the actual movie:

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Do not go gentle into that good night

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light (and of the wheat).