What It Felt Like to Watch “Interstellar” In the Cinema

I got in just as the trailers ended. I shuffled through my row in the dark, said goodbye to my friend who got the only seat left near the back – I myself didn’t manage to snag a middle seat, but thought it was okay to be near the side in case I needed to go to the bathroom within the nigh-three hours of the film (I didn’t—a miracle). The theatre was nearly full, so it was really hot and I had to take off my coat jacket (I made a crazy decision to dress up as Christopher Nolan). Then the film began, and the people hushed…

I saw Interstellar for the first time in 2022 (yes, I’m a straggler), at home – previously I thought it was one of those great movies that I would never find time to watch. But that day in October, coming home from a long day at university and work, I found the house empty – it’d usually be buzzing with my family’s activity. They were out doing something without me. So I took advantage of having the TV to myself and put it on.

I’d already read its plot some years before, out of curiosity due to it swimming around in pop culture (and since Mackenzie Foy was in one of my favourite films, “The Little Prince”). I was also familiar with “Cornfield Chase” especially since my dad loved replaying Hans Zimmer’s concert on Netflix. (If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s about a father who has to choose whether to stay with his daughter, or save the world and go into space, not knowing if he can come back.)

When I finally watched the film, I began to be immersed in it and its story that felt unique – although I’d be interrupted by calls from my parents and preparing for dinner. I particularly remember wanting to cry at the scene after Miller’s planet where Cooper listens to 20+ years of his children’s video messages, but I was interrupted by a phone call. And the immersion of getting to know the characters was broken early on by seeing Anne Hathaway – a familiar face who carried the baggage of other movies I’d seen and loved with her in it – so it stopped feeling like I had entered another world in that film once she made her entrance.

Regardless of the interruptions, my fate was sealed: Interstellar became one of my top favourite movies. I wrote about it in my book/movie journal (which I never was consistent in keeping; I’d only write if something was thought-provoking enough), and my first note was, “Did Dr. Mann’s name deserve to be on that memorial?”

I also wrote how I could relate to the feeling of sending a message to someone who may not be alive (like Tom, Murph, and Dr. Brand Sr.) I had a friend who was serving as an artilleryman in the army at the time – a very dangerous position to be in, and sometimes I was afraid he would never get to reply.

Sheesh… Anyways, the Dr. Mann concept was probably the one that drove me to join the r/Interstellar forum on Reddit, and posts from that community kept showing up on my feed for the next few years. My favourite type of posts were how people were personally affected and moved by the film (especially the new dads 🥹) and fanart – one guy was a watchmaker who even made a stunning watch model with so many references to the film.

Last year, as you might’ve seen in my past posts, I got into Christopher Nolan because of my basics of directing class and got interested in (re)watching his films. Simultaneously, people on Reddit were buzzing about the upcoming 10th anniversary IMAX rerelease of the film in December – people were planning to drive more than six hours or catch a plane just to get to a city with an IMAX theatre that would screen it.

Getting into the hype, I searched IMAX theatres in Abu Dhabi – since Armenia doesn’t have IMAX, my next best shot was in the UAE, where my family was set to go for my dad and brother to attend a Me & My Dad camp (my dad was a speaker), and my parents were also going to speak at a parenting seminar. (Hmmm I just realised how that connects with Interstellar’s themes 🤔😍) But alas, it was not going to be screened there.

I thought of where I was 10 years ago when the movie came out. I just recall being in the Philippines that time for a couple of months, hanging out with my school and church friends at CCF Main – I always longed to be with them across time and distance, since my family lived in Nepal; funny that being with them was the memory that came to mind when I thought, “Why hadn’t I heard about Interstellar on November 2014?”

Anyways, since I wasn’t able to watch it in IMAX, I just decided to watch it on December 6 (the same day it’d be released in the US) at home while my parents and brother went ahead to the UAE. I invited my neighbourhood kids to watch with me that evening:

While we watched the scene where Cooper was crying, something poetic happened: my dad video-called me at the same time, and I felt grateful that we could have a conversation, though we were 3,000 kilometres away – unlike Coop and his daughter. 😭

When I finally arrived in the UAE, it was funny because I knew where almost all the IMAX theatres were because I had searched for Interstellar. I’d have a flicker of recognition driving by the new Galleria Mall in Abu Dhabi or seeing the logo of VOX Cinemas outside lots of malls in Dubai and Sharjah. Bruh, so many IMAX cinemas in the UAE but no Interstellar…

A new hope arrived when I came back to Armenia. Moscow Cinema (a historic cinema in Yerevan) was showing Inception, and I requested that they show Interstellar, as it wasn’t on their roster of upcoming films. Nearly three weeks later, my friend and I were hunting for a movie on the Moscow Cinema site. There, I spotted that they were actually going to show Interstellar in February. AHHHH THANK U LORD!!!! 😆

I forgot to book a ticket, but I was reminded the next day. We had presentations at my Cinematography class, where my friend and I presented on Nolan films almost back to back (she did Interstellar; I did Insomnia). During my break, I saw the ad for the Interstellar screening, and that they acknowledged people like me 🥹

Right after the class ended, I booked my ticket. I was disappointed that all the middle seats were taken already (cue the Dexter “I have failed you” meme because I remembered the article of Nolan talking about how his favourite seats were in the middle; on particular rows). Nevertheless, I was grateful because I was hoping beyond hope to see it in the theatre. It would also be the perfect end-of-semester reward!

One of my neighbours (who was at the movie night), Joshua, and a friend from university, Gacia, decided to watch the film with me. Planning what to wear, I asked Josh to help me decide whether to wear my Spock t-shirt (I didn’t have anything Interstellar-related otherwise :p) OR pull through with a crazy idea to cosplay Nolan HAHAHA 🙈 I said I’d make his small Casio TV that he always wears around his neck on set instead of having monitors to watch the scenes they had shot. And Josh was like, “No question – pick Christopher Nolan.” 😂 Consequently, he decided to dress as Cooper.

I decided to make my own version of his Casio EV 4500 using a thin Russian oatmeal box, removing the oatmeal that was still inside (I put it in some tupperware 😂), and creating the likeness of the TV. (I’ll probably make another blog post about this just for the heck of it haha.)

To wear it around my neck, I found an ID lanyard with a clip and attached it to the box (which already had a hole to pour the oatmeal out :P). The final appearance was bigger than the original and looked ridiculous, but eh, it was fun to make.

Leading up to the day, I was worried something would come up and prevent me from seeing the film (like how I sprained my ankle in December before we flew out 😅), but it was all smooth sailing. Before going to the theatre, I had a call with a friend from the Philippines who’s a fellow film buff, so we got to talk a bit about what this movie meant to us, especially the father-daughter theme. She wanted to watch the movie at the same time as me, but reconsidered since it would end at 3AM her time!

Soon, Joshua and I headed out – as Joseph Cooper and the girl version of Christopher Nolan 😂 – into the winter evening to walk to the theatre. Josh was already wearing his Cooper get-up the whole day, complete with a watch for Murph and boots (not pictured):

We climbed up to the cinema hall where lots of people were already lining up – it was a full house that night! Wearing my TV, I felt a little silly…

Though, I didn’t feel super out of place since there were other foreigners watching (a lot of Russians, as I expected). My friend Gacia and her boyfriend were already inside. I sat alone since my friends got tickets later, so we were all separated. But I was glad to be seated with two Armenian ladies my age to the left and two middle-aged Armenian women speaking in Russian to my right. It was really funny because when Tom Cooper showed up, the older lady on my right asked her seatmate, “Chalamet?” 😆❤️

I assumed that 50% of the people there didn’t understand English pretty well, as English isn’t spoken widely here in Armenia (the film was provided with Russian subs), but I was glad Interstellar had such an appeal here. And I chuckled when Murph’s schoolteacher said “the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union,” because I was sitting in a historically Soviet theatre (called Moscow Cinema, for goodness’ sake) in a post-Soviet country.

Back to the theatre experience: Bro, the Nolan sound mix struggle was real – I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue especially during the loud spacecraft scenes (I didn’t recall a lot of the lines even if I was rewatching it), so I relied on my rudimentary knowledge of Russian and read the subs to find out what was being said. (“You don’t look so bad for 120!”)

It was distracting when my seatmates would pull out their phones: some to take shots of the screen (what happened to cinema etiquette these days T_T it’s not just here in Armenia, of course…) – there was also someone on the rows ahead of me taking a video of the black hole scene (I felt sad because they wouldn’t experience the emotional weight of it), or simply because they were bored. This was more common (it’s understandable though lol, it’s hard to sit through nearly 3-hour-long movies these days, plus people had to go to the bathroom).

As for my personal viewing experience of the film itself, I’d say there were two facets to it: the appreciation of the art form as intended by the director, and the appreciation of the story and being moved by it on a higher level.

I’d read reams and reams about Nolan’s advocacy for films to be consumed in the theatre, like his unflinching dedication to release Tenet in 2020 amid the pandemic. He’s not alone – for example, my favourite director Jeff Nichols also spoke about how the cinema experience is still supreme and it’s a shame that TVs don’t get to show the technical specifications which he and his cinematographer painfully and thoughtfully chose to tell their stories with. I didn’t really understand what they meant until that day at the theatre.

There are some scenes from films I watch at home that I wish I got a better sense of scale for, even if we already have a big TV screen. Seeing the Interstellar space scenes that day fulfilled that unspoken desire of mine. Though, it’s hard to explain it unless you’ve experienced it yourself.

And I later on revisited these following shots someone took of a 70mm IMAX screen in LA, and realised my cinema’s screen was about 1/3 the size of it T_T

but hey, my theatre was enough for me. It worked even if I mostly had to sit forward because the screen was a little far… (I got the 10th row from the screen lol, and there were two tall Russians in front of me whose heads kept blocking the bottom of the screen 🤣).

As for the appreciation of the story – well, it was my first time watching this movie in one sitting. It heightened my emotional immersion, and I finally got to bawl my eyes out 😂 It helped that I’d seen the film two times, and pretty recently (a couple of months before). So it was like rereading a favourite book.

I was able to stay longer with the characters – like how I’ve always wanted to linger at art museums, but my family or friends want to keep moving on. This helped me to understand them more, honouring the members of Cooper’s mission for desperate determination, relating to the flaws of Brand Sr. and even Dr. Mann, and not judging Murph for lashing out at her dad – I understand how her love for him was still there underneath the surface (remembering that one Reddit post about how her Carhartt jacket as an adult looks like her dad’s – it’s not exactly the same, but it is so similar).

My favourite new realisation this time round was noticing how, after they catch the drone on the cornfields, Cooper takes his laptop and shows Murph how to operate the drone with two fingers on his trackpad. I’d seen this before, but in the theatre it hit me how he was going to have to leave her, and it made me sad.

And I suddenly remembered a childhood memory of how my dad – who was in I.T. – would let me and my sister watch him ride the mountains on Google Earth. His laptop looked like Coop’s (same trackpad!) That made me tear up.

People argue how Nolan’s films are emotionally cold and more focused on the technical aspects; how as a director he’s more of an engineer than a poet, but I disagree. When I saw Inception I was moved by how it expressed the idea of grief, and I thought, “You couldn’t talk about grief this way if you haven’t experienced it yourself.” So, despite him being famously reticent about his personal life in interviews, and saying that his least favourite writing advice is “write what you know,” it was interesting to surmise whether Interstellar was a film for his daughter, Flora.

A few weeks ago I saw a reel of both of them on the set – Flora was still a little girl – and I learned that she also had cameos in the film! I was able to spot her in the theatre. And while searching for the previous photo I also found out that the working title for this film (Nolan’s films often have these to keep them secret) was “Flora’s Letter” 😭💔

The best moment in the cinema for me was during the black hole tesseract scene. It was an instance where I projected my own experience onto it – as a third culture kid, my tendency was to replay memories of better days with people I miss in countries I call home – and it made me cry. But, since movies are a way I communicate with God – they somehow illuminate his Word and make it more immediate, visceral, understandable – I felt him comfort me and say that he saw everything, he was there, and I was not alone back then.

And previously, I’d been thinking about how the scientists (especially Doyle and Romilly) gave up their lives to save a dying world. And here was Cooper in the tesseract, wailing because he couldn’t go to the past and be with his daughter again, barred by all those books and threads and time…

It reminded me of what Christ went through for me – for us. He wept in Gethsemane, he wept in front of Lazarus’ grave – because sin barred him from us. He loved us so much. He gave up his life, all to save a dying world – his sons and daughters. And he did it because he was driven by the love of the Father.

That’s how I felt assured of his tangible presence there. He didn’t need to tap Morse code on a watch to tell me.

And so… the film became more than an expression of me being a Nolan fan or a weekend retreat hanging out with friends after completing my semester. It became the Father’s letter for me.

At the end of the film, everyone clapped. My friend Gacia’s boyfriend, who was from New Zealand, said it was his first time to watch a film at the theatre where everyone clapped at the end!

During the following weeks, up till now, it made me appreciate my parents and their sacrifices more. I felt a new motivation to serve them more earnestly. Seeing how Cooper and Brand fought and reconciled because they had become family over the course of their mission, I learned how to be more patient with my own family, and obey Paul’s admonition to “be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love.”

It’s interesting to experience the power of cinema like this. I guess it’s in the way we look, the way we see, the way we reflect and react to it. And it’s a privilege to still be able to see films like this in the theatre, and be changed by the experience.