Christopher Nolan Movies: Ranking The Rug-Pull Moments

5. Behind The Bookshelf (Interstellar)

Nolan's most recent picture has managed to radically split opinion, with some citing it as his worst film to date. What Interstellar is, more than any of Nolan's other work, is an homage to the director's own cinematic influences and this may have hampered the director's uniquely meticulous and original visions people have come to expect of him. However, the true measure of Interstellar's success is in its ability to fuse emotional family drama with sprawling sci-fi epic, offering an emotional core often missing in his previous work. Whilst Matthew McConaughey characterizes this genre-blend in his affecting representation of Cooper, a father travelling across the universe to save his children, the film's final act also serves to bring together these threads in a characteristic, Nolan-esque manner. Interstellar opens with Cooper's daughter quizzing her father about the ghost in her bedroom. It later becomes apparent that the ghost is in fact Cooper, trapped inside a five-dimensional 'tesseract', designed by utopian humans that have mastered the ability to manipulate time and space. Its chicken or egg foundation has been a stalwart of discussion in time travelling circles for as long as the concept has existed, but Nolan does not try to justify his logic with puffy exposition. He uses the power of Cooper's determination to get back to his kids as the cornerstone on which to build his twist. It is a rug-pull that some will argue they saw coming but its message is unshakable, clichéd but ultimately endearing. Matt Damon's Dr. Mann talked about basic survival instinct being the unremitting drive to continue existing, but Nolan takes a step into the profound to suggest that a parent's love for their children is the most powerful force in the universe. Sweet and sufficient, but by no means his best.