Ten years ago I traveled to the one and only IMAX in New York City and attended a press screening Christopher Nolan‘S Interstellarthe director’s highly anticipated first feature film since his release from the shackles of Batman. (To be fair, he did it beginning between Batman films.) Interstellar promised to be a dizzying, captivating journey through the cosmos, a drama-thriller about black holes and time and – somehow, in the midst of all that vastness – family. I was excited.

But as the film played out, I became more and more disappointed. Sure, the look was impressive. Hans ZimmerThe roiling Morse score, the deep rumble and crescendos of the pipe organ were a wonder. And the acting, from Matthew McConaughey And Anne Hathaway and aspiring film star Jessica Chastainwas solid. But Nolan’s reasoning and emotional argument were shaky and flimsy. The film’s conclusions seemed pathetic. I didn’t like it Interstellarand I wrote as much in my review. (Which everyone online was very relaxed about.)

In the years that followed, I was often asked if there was a review I regretted – if I thought I had misunderstood a film. Of course, there are countless examples I could point to, but the one I cited most often was Interstellar. Because when I watched the film again at home around 2016, Interstellar he moved and breathed much better, and the expectant pressure of the press preview was less on him. His cheesy speeches about love posed less of a problem and were more easily offset by Nolan’s impressive vision of relativity, the vast and frightening yawn of space. I loved the film and regretted giving it such a harsh spin.

So when the opportunity arose almost exactly a decade later to see the film in the same theater where I first saw it, I jumped at it. Interstellar enjoyed a successful anniversary re-release this week and my IMAX screening on Tuesday morning was all but sold out. Given my years of regret, I expected that afternoon to confirm myself as a dyed-in-the-wool man.

In fact, the opening sections of Nolan’s 169-minute film are enchanting – a sad vision of Earth’s near future, in which humanity slowly dies along with its hope. We clearly feel the weight of hero pilot Cooper’s decision to leave his family, including his youngest daughter Murph. And then there’s the terrible awe as Cooper and his crew fly into space, racing inexorably toward doom or salvation. It’s a magnificent spectacle and probably Nolan’s most overtly sentimental work to date. The scene in which Cooper, who has lost years of Earth time due to relativity, watches video broadcasts sent by his adolescent son presents a truly harrowing idea, an expression of what I think is a common concern among parents: how much of my child’s life do I miss them while I work and try to maintain and improve their lives?

That’s what a lot of it is Interstellar That’s what it’s all about, right? Nolan uses an epic scale to wrestle with and atone for the time he had to spend away from his family while working on his major productions. There’s something sweet (if somewhat self-aggrandizing) in this allegory, as the arch-wizard of the blockbuster ponders the private cost of all that success.

And of course the film is a reaction to our increasingly dark reality as the climate becomes increasingly inhospitable to animal life. Ten years later, things have certainly not gotten better, hence the warning from environmentalists Interstellar registers all the more powerfully.

But as the film entered its final two acts – the decision to go to Dr. Mann’s ice planet and the struggle to escape it – brought back my old aversion to it Interstellar came creeping back. Hathaway’s monologue about love being a measurable force in the universe is so over-the-top and, I suspect, nonsensical that it severely mars the film’s otherwise cool, questioning philosophy. And then Nolan reduces the film back to a family story and connects its narrative to that of the entire human species. I suppose the choice is narratively necessary, but that’s what it does InterstellarThe heroes are so special that the center of the universe is literally in Murph’s childhood bedroom.