Interstellar: Man Tears

I’d like to consider myself a tough guy. I practise stoicism and don’t get emotional very often. A truly poignant work of art can move me, but it’s not often that I shed a tear.

Except for one occasion — when I saw Interstellar for the first time. I will never forget that first viewing — it was one of the very very few moments in my (adult) life that I actually had tears in my eyes. The breathtakingly grandiose, larger-than-life and yet deeply intimate theme of Interstellar makes it my absolute favourite film ever.

The Magical First Time

Let’s go back to November 2014: I was an aspiring IELTS teacher teaching my first class ever. It was a very close-knit group and we frequently hung out together after class. This time, we went to see a movie.

We picked a movie at random. Interstellar. I had no idea what it was about. We walked in, sat down, and the movie played.

Two and a half hours later, as the credit rolled, I found myself sitting there with my mouth agape and my eyes teary. It felt as if I had been transported into another dimension and now just got back to Earth, and my mind right then and there just felt blank, but also overwhelmed by a whirlwind of confusing emotions. I had never experienced anything like that before.

After leaving the cinema, I kept thinking about that moment. It felt so bizarre because I don’t usually cry. I have seen extremely sad movies — Life is Beautiful, Grave of the Fireflies, The Notebook, Schindler’s List — powerfully poignant films notorious for being tear-jerkers. While all have deeply touched me, I never got to a point of losing control.

That alone should be a testament of how powerful the emotions that flooded my mind that day were.

The Universe and Us

Interstellar has been widely praised for so many of its brilliant aspects: the breathtaking cinematography, the epic soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, the visceral acting, the scientific accuracy.

For me, what truly makes Interstellar a masterpiece is its overarching theme of human connection and the search for meaning in a vast, empty, and indifferent universe. Both of these are questions I ponder quite often and which makes the film particularly powerful for me.

The film is set in a near future when the world is ravaged by natural disasters and resources are running scarce. NASA develops a space programme to find a habitable planet to re-start the human race. The protagonist, Mr Cooper — an engineer and aviator with two children — is chosen as part of the crew to leave Earth and find the planet that can harbour life.

That’s the basic premise of the movie. There are so many memorable scenes, but one stands out in particular to me is when Cooper is on the spaceship heading into the black void of space, into an unknown destination, away from Earth.

Accompanying this scene is the score Day One by the legendary Hans Zimmer. The song perfectly captures the feelings of uncertainty, scare, longing, and wonder going through Cooper’s mind at the time. He is leaving home and flying into the darkness of the unknown, uncertain of what awaits.

I think so many of us can relate to this — as we sit in the car moving into a new city, leaving behind home to begin a new chapter of our life: a new job, new school, new adventure, all that’s running through our head is a melancholic sense of excitement and wonder. This is the piece of music to go along with those moments.

It’s also an incredibly fitting score for those times when we sit down and have an existential crisis, thinking about the awesome scale of the universe and how fleeting and inconsequential our existence is. Interstellar does a magnificent job of conveying that exact sense of awe and humility that we should feel when venturing beyond our blue marble and into the cosmos.

The Scene

Now, onto the part where my man tears came out: the end of the film. (Spoiler alert — skip this if you haven’t seen the film). The part when Cooper returns from his interstellar adventure to finally meet his daughter and fulfills the promise they made decades earlier, only to find his daughter lying on her deathbed and significantly older then he is, that’s when I lost it.

As soon as Cooper’s daughter sees him walking into the hospital room, she bursts out tears of joy. I couldn’t hold it either. Freaking sitting there looking at the cinema screen crying like a baby.

It’s not just a moment of a father meeting his long-lost daughter. It’s the reunification of two souls who have together made promises that they would uphold until the end of their lives. Cooper promises his daughter that he would return, and she promises that she will see her father again despite the extreme odds of time dilation and of humanity’s imminent extinction.

The entire movie is essentially these two characters doing everything they can to make it to the day when they can fulfill their promises and see each other again. The events, the plot, the drama, everything is a crescendo building up to this final moment of reunification.

It’s even more poignant considering how they are two tiny human beings separated by the light years of empty space and decades of time dilation, and yet it is the powerful, invisible force of love that transcends the distance and keeps them moving forward against all odds. This is also a major theme of the film — the inexplicable force of love that connects us in an infinite and hostile universe.

Looking back at it now, this is exactly why this movie packs such a powerful emotional punch to me: it’s two humans living their entire lives with a singular focus of keeping a crazy promise they once made. If I ever see someone going to great lengths and through insurmountable hardships all for an innocent promise, I’m going to be cheering so hard for them as well. Keeping our word for a loved one is such a human thing to do, after all.

A Feeling I Will Treasure Forever

It has been 6 years since, and I still have not experienced an emotional impact remotely close to that November day. From the reviews of Interstellar I’ve read, many people share the sentiment that the film is a massive perspective-altering experience. The plot might be a bit confusing at first, but once you get the logic behind the science, it will undoubtedly become a very, very special film. One that I will forever hold dear in my heart.

After that day, I decided to wait a couple of years before re-watching the film. I made sure to find the highest quality version possible — I got a 1080p copy after that, and now I have a gigantic 15GB 4K Ultra-HD file sitting in my hard drive. I will re-watch it.

But it will never be the same. I wish that I could erase my memory and watch Interstellar for the first time again. It was such a transcendental and magical moment, that I’m glad I got to see it in the cinema. I’ve heard that the IMAX version is even more breathtaking! I’ve got to put this in my bucket list — to see Interstellar in IMAX once before I die.