The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. – Pascal

After a hectic few days and on the cusp of a weeklong trip, I decided to sit back last night and watch a movie. At the top of my queue was a suggestion from my brother — Christopher Nolan’s 2014 opus Interstellar. [Warning: spoilers ahead. But if you haven’t seen this movie by now, you’ll probably never see it.]

It’s a bit strange that I had yet to see Interstellar. I consider myself a fan of Christopher Nolan. Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Inception are all great movies that showcase a filmmaker of increasing confidence and ambition, who doesn’t mind challenging audiences with cerebral material while also delivering visceral thrills.

Nolan has also had some misses, most notably the bloated and incoherent The Dark Knight Rises, that show his ambition sometimes exceeds his reach. The mixed critical and audience reception of Interstellar had led me to believe it might be another one of his misses. That, combined with the almost 3-hour running time, was enough to cool my jets on seeing it in the theater and relegate it to rent-it-someday status.

I’ll start with the bottom line: I found Interstellar to be a thought-provoking and moving film that worked despite its flaws. The mixed initial reactions don’t surprise me. A lot of people seemed stuck on the quasi-scientific concepts, such as the plot device of time dilation borrowed from general relativity, while others bemoaned the convoluted third act or arcane dialogue. None of these bothered me.

In general, there are two camps of movie goers – those who like plots to be clear, straightforward and unambiguous and those who don’t mind a healthy dose of complexity, contradiction and unresolved ambiguity. I definitely fall into the latter camp and enjoy movies that don’t completely make sense, whether it’s David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, or Andrei Tarkovsky. The enigmas are the ones you rewatch.

Nolan has been at the forefront of trying to bridge these two camps by making summer blockbusters that smuggle in intricate plots and weighty psychological themes. And while the logic of Insterstellars’s ending gets hairy and the pseudo-science is laid on a little thick, I am totally ok sacrificing some clarity for thematic richness.

Interstellar sets the stakes at no less than the survival of humanity, but keeps the focus on the personal struggles of a small group of characters. The central relationship is between Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper and his daughter Murph. All other characters take a backseat to this relationship, which drives the movie from start to finish. Cooper embarks on a mission to travel through a wormhole to find a habitable home for humanity, whose Mother Earth is dying. And more importantly, to save his daughter.

Nolan manages to cover a lot of thematic ground, from the destruction of Earth by tech-driven consumerism (“when I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some, gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas. But six billion people, just imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all.”) to the indomitable spirit of scientific exploration and human achievement. Yet, the ultimate theme is the ability of love to transcend time and space and, to some degree, to redeem humanity.

Put in abstract terms, this sounds clichéd and sentimental. But the movie delivers some of Nolan’s most emotionally powerful scenes, as McConaughey watches his son and daughter back on Earth grow up and grow old without him as he remains young due to the relatively slow passage of time in his orbit around a black hole.

The movie effectively captures the sense of being far from home in the deep reaches of space and the aches of aging and the passage of time. Some of the images, such as the mountain-size waves on one alien planet, are haunting (I’ve had a recurring dream about similar-looking waves). In short, it poignantly conveys a sense of melancholy, alienation and nostalgia that many of us experience without leaving Earth.

Interstellar treats love and gravity as cosmic forces that bind and communicate across literal and metaphorical distances. Dr. Band (Anne Hathaway): “Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful…Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”

This cosmic conception of love is one that we rarely see in the movies, but goes at least as far back as Plato’s Symposium (~360 B.C.E). In his speech about the god Eros, Eryximachus says, “Love certainly occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe…and directs everything that occurs, not only in the human domain, but also in that of the gods.” In other words, what binds humans together is what binds everything together.

It’s the bond of love between Cooper and his daughter that lets him communicate with her (by manipulating gravity) from inside the black hole and enables the discovery that saves humanity. As ridiculous as this sounds, it works as spritual allegory – love-in-the-face-of-death and love-as-antidote-to-death.

Like Pascal, the film emphasizes the vastness and silence of space compared to our finite being and the pain of being separated from loved ones by time, space, or death. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Michael Cain reminds us. In Nolan’s vision, love is a tangible reality capable of bridging “the eternal silence of infinite spaces” and calming our dread. Let’s all hope to god that’s true.