10 Movie Moments You've Always Misunderstood

9. Brand's Love Speech Is Supposed To Sound Ridiculous - Interstellar

What Everybody Thinks

By far the most widely-ridiculed element of Christopher Nolan's ambitious sci-fi epic is the scene in which Brand (Anne Hathaway) argues to Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) that love is "observable, powerful", an "artefact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive", and finally, "the one thing we're capable of perceiving...that transcends dimensions of time and space."

The scene was widely scoffed at by audiences, who assumed that Brand's perspective was also that of the movie and therefore Nolan himself.

The Truth

It's important to remember that Brand is lobbying to Cooper to visit the planet inhabited by her boyfriend, Edmunds, at the time, and the entire point of the scene is that it's supposed to show Brand shedding her scientific head for a more sentimental one.

We're supposed to find her insistence that love is a transcendent force saccharine, because she's basically doing anything she can to convince Coop to go to Edmunds' planet.

Interstellar's marketing definitely shoulders a lot of the blame here, though: the line was featured extensively in trailers with an earnest solemnity which betrays its actual context in the movie.

It's fair to say that Nolan's film doesn't fully reconcile its ambitions for both hard sci-fi and thoughtful philosophy, but this scene isn't quite the cringe-fest many think it is.