'Interstellar is Christopher Nolan’s best film'

Interstellar celebrates its tenth anniversary this November, and the more time passes the more that people have begun to come to the conclusion that it is Christopher Nolan's best film.

Okay, Interstellar didn't win Nolan his first Oscar, that was his brutal nuclear war film Oppenheimer, but the 2014 sci-fi film is an extraordinary feat by any standard. It encompasses everything that Nolan does best, deliver a story with heart that makes viewers think about the way the world is but also transports them with its mind-blowing visuals

Interstellar is a film of epic proportions, particularly thanks to its narrative. The film centres on Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a NASA pilot who is tasked with leading the Endurance mission to find planets for humanity to call home after climate disasters have made Earth nearly uninhabitable. What follows is an intense narrative of space exploration that becomes increasingly more dangerous the further Cooper, Dr Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and their crew get from Earth.

Cooper is desperately trying to complete the mission so he can return to his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, then Jessica Chastain), but that won't be an easy task particularly when they stretch the fabrics of time and space in the process.

Interstellar was a film that deeply impacted me whilst I was watching it, when Cooper, Amelia and Doyle (Wes Bentley) risk losing years of their lives in minutes by visiting an ocean world my breathe caught in my throat. Hans Zimmer's profound score enhanced the feeling of racing against time, as the crew tried and failed to complete their mission on the first go and paid the price for it.

Nolan has a knack for playing with time, making viewers aware of it in a way that heightens the intensity without detracting from the story itself — he did it in Inception and Interstellar, and continued to do so in Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer.

I can still remember how my heart raced watching that sequence on the ocean planet, the desperation I felt for the characters to get out before it was too late. I was invested in a way I find difficult to describe, but that desire to see Cooper make it back home continued to prevail —if not grew exponentially— over the course of the film.

Interstellar taps into two distinct feelings, loss and hope. A scene in which Cooper watches back years of taped messages from his daughter Murph and son Tom (Timothée Chalamet, later Casey Affleck) is deeply moving because of the loss that McConaughey conveys. As he watches the screen he slowly breaks down into sobs, making us understand the depth of his despair at the years he's lost by going on the Endurance mission.

It's an emotional performance and one of McConaughey's best; Much like how Nolan won his first Oscar with a different film, McConaughey won his first for Dallas Buyers Club — but Interstellar is one of his most profound takes on a character to date.

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Another aspect of Interstellar that makes it feel timeless is its approach to space, space travel, and the enigmas of the scientific world that continue to confound us. The film's scientific accuracy was debated in great detail at the time of its release, as was some of the ways it pushed the boundaries of what we know about black holes.

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne worked on the film as a scientific consultant and executive producer, and the film's depiction of a space and black holes has been commended by experts in the industry because of how realistic it is. The scientific approach to the film is one of its strengths, by being grounded in fact, or within the realm of probability, it becomes believable to those watching — whether they are well versed with the subject or not.

Nolan ends the film with a breathtaking, if mind-boggling, final sequence when Cooper enters the fourth-dimension, pushing the boundaries of what viewers could believe is possible. For some it was perhaps too much to get their head around or find probably, but it is a breathtaking sequence regardless.

Nolan has made a number of stunning movies over his prolific career, from his stunning breakout film Memento to war epics like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Of course, the Dark Knight trilogy are perfect superhero movies in their own respect, and Inception showed how creative the filmmaker could be when it comes to the realms of possibility.

There are films of his that haven't landed as well as they could have, like Insomnia or Tenet, but Nolan has set such a high bar for himself that all his films can be appreciated in one way or another.

Interstellar is a masterpiece because, in a good and bad way, feels like an entirely possible future, given the climate crisis we are currently facing. In fact even on a re-watch it is startling how relevant the movie feels ten years later, we can still learn from the lessons it sends to viewers. If that's not the sign of a perfect movie, I don't know what is.

Interstellar is being re-released in cinemas on Friday, 6 December. The film is available to stream on Sky and NOW.