‘Interstellar’ Is a Spellbinding and Philosophical Odyssey | by Ben Ulansey | Dec, 2024
It’s a rare achievement for a film to sell out theaters on a Tuesday night ten years after its release. But then, if you haven’t had the privilege of seeing one of Christopher Nolan’s movies in IMAX, you likely don’t understand what makes this the norm rather than the exception with his grand cinematic undertakings.
Oppenheimer’s box office run this past year was so successful that it returned to cinemas just a few months later. And even on that second stint in theaters, buying a ticket for an IMAX screening proved for me to be a nearly impossible ordeal. (Thankfully, I live within driving distance of one of the few IMAX screenings on the East Coast of the United States.)
Shot largely with IMAX cameras, many of his movies are built from the ground up to take advantage of the colossal screen sizes that such cinema provide. Where most movies need to be modified to work with those larger screen sizes, Nolan’s films are built directly for them. Watching the atomic bomb fall for the first time on that enormous panel, and feeling the whole room suddenly overcome with silence, it’s not hard to understand why Nolan has remained so committed to using onerous IMAX…