Interstellar: The Re-Release Of Nolan's Soaring Space Opera

Interstellar: A Re-Release, A Reminder, A Relapse Of Hope

To see Interstellar today is to not only hope for a future but also remember the vocabulary of hope. It’s to relearn the possibilities of art and the limitations of a civilisation that triggers art, writes Rahul Desai .

THE IMAX re-release of Interstellar is already one of the biggest movie events of 2025. It may sound like a foregone conclusion. I mean, it’s Interstellar . It’s the gravity of the title. It’s Christopher Nolan. It’s a space spectacle so big that it’s small; so dense that it’s simple. It’s soul disguised as science, heart parading as head. It’s Nolan’s work-ex Hans Zimmer’s operatic world (and solar system). It’s Matthew McConaughey grieving the unceremonious passing of time. It’s Anne Hathaway wrapping clunky exposition in the non-mathematical vagaries of love. It’s the 2014-first-day-coded gasp when Matt Damon’s face appears from hydra-sleep. It’s a teenage Timothee Chalamet before Timothee Chalamet was Timothee Chalamet. It’s also that docking scene. Basically, why not?

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It’s important to note that the hype around Interstellar is not your usual hype. Needless to say, it has “aged well” (like Cooper and Brand after the Miller’s Planet debacle) for a variety of reasons. That’s the thing about re-releases. The growing significance of a title often tends to expose the current cultural and cinematic landscape. It’s true that Nolan is one of the few directors on this planet — or perhaps the only one — whose name alone is a commercial and artistic compliment at once. His fame is rarely second to the stars he casts. But the cult popularity of his wildly ambitious space opera — and the other-worldly anticipation to rewatch it on IMAX screens — is partly due to the slow but sure extinction of the Original Tentpole Blockbuster.

In the last decade, Marvel and DC movies have come, gone, stayed and defined an era of franchise fatigue and spectacle contamination. Very little of it is cinema and storytelling for the sake of cinema and storytelling. Ironically, the Indian re-release of Interstellar was postponed to February because Pushpa 2: The Rule — the Indian equivalent of franchise overkill — was busy wreaking havoc at the box office. While younger viewers have enjoyed the superhero-fication and VFX-isation of mainstream film, the dearth of big-budget imagination and curiosity and intelligence has not gone unnoticed. Nolan is one of the last behind-the-camera action heroes — a connoisseur of narrative language and old-school scale. Even though he continues to command the respect of cinephiles, geeks and average moviegoers alike, Interstellar is emblematic of a pure and dizzying sci-fi vision that perhaps the now-Oscar-winning director has moved on from. He still plays with form and technique, but the post- Tenet filmmaker is less of a dreamer and more of a dreamy doer.

The simple explanation is that “they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore”. But there’s something about Interstellar and its almost naive grasp for greatness — the science jargon weaved into an impossibly romantic story about fathers, daughters, heroes and the anti-romance of survival — that no longer exists. It’s a film composed of memorable moments, but also a moment composed from the history of film. The soundscape shapes the DNA of an entire generation that revered and dissected Nolan plots on quora and reddit. It’s like watching a concert by a beloved band in an age of viral reels and branded posts. It’s not nostalgia so much as the chance to say “we were there” and “where are we now?”.

Between Inception and Interstellar , the boundaries of mainstream cinema were no longer tethered to the perceived intellect of the common viewer. It didn’t matter if someone got it (though that’s a whole other sub-cult) as long as they felt like it was bigger than them. Non-franchise movies just don’t aspire to do that these days. They’re not allowed to. It’s all about coherence and logic and clarity; the identity of a film is determined by the capacity to understand it rather than be flummoxed by its audacity. How might one narrate the gravitational centre of an astronaut communicating with his daughter from the future while decoding gravity through Morse Code? How might one imagine that a corny line like “love transcends dimensions” can mean so much?

More importantly, there’s the geopolitical aspect to the belated big bang of Interstellar . It’s not just the familiarity of the mid-21st century, climate change-ravaged planet of dust storms and crop blights. Post-apocalyptic predictions are par for the course. It’s also the fact that the Earth that accommodates (barely) Cooper and co. has now come full circle: humanity is almost back to where it began because of its own follies and excesses. The ecological crisis feels like an inevitable consequence — a post-truth endgame — of where we stand today. Whether it’s the Los Angeles fires, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the mysterious deaths of Boeing and Putin whistleblowers, the Hindutva-spouting robots of Bollywood, or American president Donald Trump’s renewed commitment to fascism, most of us confront an everyday reality replete with historical revisionism, fear-mongering and blatant propaganda. Moving forward is going backward; the loop is one of oppression, not wonder.

To see a young Murph getting reprimanded at school for ‘claiming’ that the Apollo missions were not fabricated is to live in a world that constantly challenges — and dilutes — our perception of what is real. To see science take a backseat to agriculture is to see dreams and ambitions take a backseat to religion and state-sponsored entertainment. To see every family reduced to corn farming is to see studios produce run-of-the-mill, algorithmic franchises that deter audiences from desiring more than corn. To see Dr Brand lie about the mission to aid the continuity of humankind is to see the bravest minds of this generation get consumed by their quest to defy post-truth systems. To see NASA having to find another galaxy for colonisation is to see modern storytellers — like Nolan himself — create new mediums and ways to tell their stories. To see Cooper fly against all odds and find elusive data in a black hole is to see film-makers like Damien Chazelle and George Miller swing big to alter the grammar of this profession.

It’s all there, hardwired into the ‘restored’ experience of Interstellar . The eyes see a magnificent epic that stands the test of time. The subconscious mind, though, sees the manifestation of all that shapes the anatomy of our time. It’s not just any story. It’s our story in motion, condensed and expanded into the grammar of visual escapism and cultural reckoning. To see Interstellar today is to not only hope for a future but also remember the vocabulary of hope. It’s to relearn the possibilities of art and the limitations of a civilisation that triggers art. It’s to be this unabashedly corny and sentimental about a re-release by trying to decipher where the emotions are coming from. It’s to go to the cinemas and be a part of life again; it’s to go back to living and be a part of cinema again.

Interstellar re-releases across Indian theatres on 7 February 2025.

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