Best Films of the 2010s: Interstellar

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Interstellar

  Her was the best example of the inward looking sci-fi that dominated this decade; with Interstellar Christopher Nolan delivered that shaggy, glorious old-fashioned beast: an epic. Inception may have been more innovative and Dunkirk tighter, but this is the Nolan film that combines heart and dizzying ambition to the greatest effect. The motivator for Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper to take to the stars is climate change- in this future almost every grain has been blighted and the natural world is suffering. Cooper’s time in space throws up all sorts of dilemmas about thinking as a family member versus thinking as a species. In some of the places he must go to seek a future for humanity time runs differently. This leads to an extraordinary scene where McConaughey must watch videos of his children growing up. Decades for his kids are elided into seconds for him. As we as people age, favourite films act as time machines transporting us back to the people we were at the time of previous viewings. It’s a marker of the rise and fall of new icons that when this film was released in 2014, no one (maybe his family had faith I guess?) knew that the younger of Cooper’s two children was played by Timothee Chalamet, and that he was going to be a star. In 2014 I'd never seen one of the main inspirations for this film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now it is one of my very favourite films and I'm so grateful to Christopher Nolan for leading me there.

    One foundation of what makes us human is the instinct to protect and love the people closest to us. Climate change demands of the characters in this film that they transfer that love to the species as a whole and start now. Beyond this potent relevance, though, the film features mythic imagery of two lone men duking it out in an icy hellscape, Michael Caine being Michael Caine (excellently) and a robot with sarcasm settings turned up high. Like the legendary onion, it’s got layers.

Next and FINAL time: compassion and home cooking must stand in for space rockets in the quest to heal.