Do not go gentle into that good night

How a father’s love can save the world, and other lessons from my first time watching 'Interstellar'

Nov 24, 2024

“Love isn’t something that we invented. It’s observable, powerful. It has to mean something.”

Last night, I left my friends’ house after watching Interstellar for the very first time, tears still streaming down my cheeks. I walked to my car, stopped at the door, and looked up at the sky. I stood there for a few moments, neck craned, eyes fixed on one that appeared brighter than the others, and thought about my life as it fits into the cosmos. I was bowled over with the realization that the universe is expansive, huge, unfathomably so, and the moments and atoms and feelings and molecules that make up my life, in comparison, are smaller than the tiniest speck of dust imaginable.

I looked up into the night sky as framed by my small life here in Nashville, and I asked myself — or, I asked the sky, or whoever may be listening out there — what could this all mean? Why am I here, at this moment in time, standing on this street, experiencing consciousness in this exact way at this exact point in the space-time continuum?

I didn’t find my answer. At least not yet. But Interstellar begins with this same question, with humans looking up at the sky and seeing not just beauty but potential. The Earth tethers us. It holds us down with its gravity, its history, its mistakes. But the stars, beyond our understanding, share their light with us and make us question everything we’ve believed.

After watching this for the first time, I feel like I have been punched in the chest. I’m not a film reviewer, so this is not a film review, but more of a reflection on how it moved me and what I learned from it. So, this is an (obvious) warning for spoilers ahead — and if you haven’t seen Interstellar, like I foolishly hadn’t until just over 10 years after its release, I’d encourage you to stop reading, go watch it immediately, and come back to me. Thank you.

Interstellar is not a film about space, black holes, or time dilation. It’s not about stars, science, equations, or farming. It is, at its core, a film about love and the way that it guides everything we do and everything around us.

Cooper is not an astronaut chasing scientific answers to a space equation; he is simply a father chasing after time. Every decision he makes, the risks he continuously takes, are all fueled by the powerful love he carries for Murphy, his daughter. This love between them, and specifically the aching love that Cooper feels for Murphy, drives the narrative forward, even as time warps between his fingers. This love is what ultimately saves humanity from extinction. His love is so potent and enduring that it defies the constraints of time and space, manifesting in every choice he makes even when he doesn’t realize it. His decision to go on the mission isn’t motivated by ambition, but from the desperate hope to secure a future for his daughter.

Even in the void of the Tesseract, when logic fails and it seems impossible that he could survive or make it out at all, it is Cooper’s love for Murphy — a love encoded into gravity, communicated through the tick of a watch — that bridges the gap between dimensions. He believes in her ability to decipher the messages he’s sending, to solve the equation. His belief reflects a trust in the resilience and brilliance of the next generation, led by his very own daughter. In the end, science is not what saves the world; it’s the emotional tether between a father and his daughter, proving that even in the vast, unforgiving cosmos, human connection holds power beyond comprehension.

Love in Interstellar IS gravity. It’s intangible, immeasurable, omnipresent. It anchors us and lifts us, sending us into other dimensions, to other planets. Love not only bends the fabric of our lives, but it makes up the stitches within it. When Cooper leaves Murphy, his love literally stretches across lightyears, threading through space and decades. Even when time ceases, love persists. It persists because it must.

We are so small in the grand scheme of things. We’re just specks on a small blue dot, floating in the abyss. I was moved watching Cooper and Brand choose to leave that small blue dot, sacrificing years and lives and relationships, guided only by the hopes of salvation for the rest of humanity. Guided by love. Their choice to seek out answers, knowing that they may never return to the lives they left behind but still pushed forward by the possibility of finding more for their loved ones, for humanity. Keeping the love they had for those they left behind within them and letting it guide them through the fabric of time and space. What greater testament to human audacity than all of this—to insist that our emotions can transcend across and beyond the cosmos, that our love continues to matter in a universe that could swallow us whole without notice?

“Maybe it means something more — something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”

Time erodes all things—civilizations, mountains, the stars. We see this every day in the way we age, the way things change. And yet, time is somehow the most human of all constructs, something we have tried to cage and quantify since its beginning. Ancient civilizations created sundials to begin to observe the passing of time. Astrolabes, water clocks, pendulum clocks all followed. Eventually, time reached our fingertips. We can now pick up a device at any moment and know exactly what time it is, where we are in the galaxy. We can observe our own lives moving down a linear demonstration of time, which is, in my opinion, both a blessing and a curse.

Likewise, in Interstellar, time is both an ally and an enemy. The film’s most moving moments are not battles against aliens or cosmic storms, but battles against the clock: hours on one planet become decades for those on the Endurance, a single miscalculation means Cooper misses most of his daughter’s childhood. Time is not an abstract idea here, nor is it a linear concept—it acts as a thief, taking away precious potential moments of love and connection.

The Tesseract, where Cooper manipulates gravity to send messages to Murphy through different points of her life, is one of the film’s most poetic interpretations of time. Time is not linear — it’s a multi-dimensional, breathing, living being where past, present, and future coexist visibly, all around Cooper. He does not necessarily overcome time, but he does communicate beyond it, proving that love can bend the supposed rules of the universe and space.

In real life, for people (like me) who do not interact with space, it’s just this is vast, unknowable expanse beyond our reach. But in Interstellar, space acts as its own living and breathing creature. There’s a scene where Romilly listens to the sounds of rain and thunder on an old MP3 player. It’s a quiet, short, almost throwaway moment, but in context, it’s a reminder that humanity endures because we carry pieces of home with us wherever we go. We build houses, we tell stories, and we keep going. He is trapped in space, knowing that he will likely never return to the life he once lived, and he still reaches for home.

“We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, that our destiny lies above us.”

History is a series of impossibilities that humans have turned into realities, not because of the promise of success but because we believed in trying. Interstellar celebrates this very audacity, this refusal to accept limits we’ve been taught to be absolute truths. It is a film about pushing beyond what is known.

Yes, humans often get it wrong. We’re cruel, selfish, shortsighted. But this film shows me that we’re also adaptable, courageous, and endlessly curious. We see problems and tell ourselves we can fix them. We look up at the stars and see a beginning, not an ending.

In the end, Interstellar is a love letter — to Earth as we know it, to exploration, to the spirit of humanity, however messy and stubborn it may be. It reminds us that we should reject the idea that we are tethered to tradition. We’re able to change our destiny with sheer free will and audacity. We are creatures of possibility — our desire to learn, change, grow, and move sustains us through our entire lives.

I am overwhelmed by the spectacle of this film. By seeing Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away, by seeing the imagining of a black hole, by the ambition of proposing the idea that time is its own dimension, the persistence of love through struggle and time dilation and black holes.

From Interstellar, we learn that time does erode all things, except one: our love for each other. That will last as long as the stars are shining.

I’ve never had a reaction to a film like this, ever, in my entire life. I cried halfway through the film, and then I cried for the entire last 30 minutes, and then I cried for my entire drive home, and then I cried for the rest of the night. As I sit here, the next morning, writing this, I’m fighting the urge to cry again.

It’s not a surprise to anyone who knows me that I cry a lot. I’ve always been this way, to my dismay. Someone looking at it through a positive lens would call it “being in touch with my emotions,” or that it’s a “sign of deep emotional power.” I, personally, would call it extremely annoying that it takes little more than a singular ounce of disapproval from an authority figure to bring me to tears. I cry when I see a stray cat on the sidewalk. When my niece calls me to tell me she knows how to write her own name on a piece of paper, I start sobbing. Sure, I’m tapped in to my emotions or whatever, but the inconvenience of being unable to withhold tears as soon as I feel them bubbling beneath the surface is not something I’m particularly proud of.

That being said, films seldom elicit this response from me. I can count on two hands the number of films that have genuinely made me cry (the first one to ever bring me to tears was High School Musical 2), and I can count on one single finger how many films have left me so moved in this way—only Interstellar. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I will likely be thinking about the impact this film has had on me for the rest of my life.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.