"In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method."

It's worse than this! Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I got a strong anti-scientific, anti-rational vibe from the movie.

Consider this: the movie's two top scientists are scheming liars. The professor who ran the whole show lied to everybody because he's smarter than all the dummies on his team. And the guy from the second planet is the most brilliant scientist among the astronauts, and turns out to be an egocentric asshole who develops a sinister plan that endangers the whole mission for his personal gain. Lesson learned: never trust a scientist, they're up to no good!

Second: Rational decision making is for the birds. Our hero decides on an order in which to visit the planets based on the available evidence. Meanwhile, the girl who's allegedly a scientist but who uses "love" as her compass had intuitively favored the "right" planet all along. In fact, things don't start going right until people start doing crazy things based on fuzzy hunches. Lesson learned: Love is a better basis for decisions than evidence and reason.

I get the impression this attitude is "trending" in the US, and it worries me. There's a worrisome anti-science sentiment afoot, apparent in denial of evolution and global warming, opposition to vaccination, a hysteric fear of various foods and distrust of "conventional" medicine.

I didn't get an anti-science vibe. If anything the scene at the school was a pretty transparent poke at the folks today who seek to take accurate science out of school curricula.

The main professor lied to everyone in order to create the will to work on "Plan B", the frozen embryos. He thought folks would never work on that if they all thought they were doomed.

The evil scientist turned bad because of the extreme isolation and thought that he would never see anyone again. It's a variation of the "space madness" trope from 100 science fiction plots--tired, but not anti-science, in my opinion.

I totally agree with you but I feel that our discussion is missing a crucial detail here. A bit of philosophical and cultural theory.

Did you notice how lots of people after the movie were like "Wow, I've got an epiphany, I've understood something." Did that something was about physics? No. It was about philosophy.

And damn, Interstellar philosophy is awful. Postmodernism at its worst.

Happy to share why.

Postmodernism is deeply suspicious of academia and academics. Who were the negative characters? Dr. Mann("the best of us") and Prof. Brand. "Do not go gentle in the dying light" A poem written for the poet's father losing his vision. Who was his father? Literature professor.

Postmodernism rejects reason as a epistemological foundation and states that rationalism is just another narrative. Who was right about the planet? Amelia Brand was. What did she say? "Maybe we've spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space".

Postmodernism is dismissive of science. Did Romilly's data that he collected during the years of scientific pursuit help anyone from the crew or humanity at large? No. Scientific method of trial and error was useless, but "magical tesseract pixies" powered by love saved the humanity and the protagonist.

Millions and millions of movie viewers "understood" that science and reason is not as important as love and magic. My hypothesis is when people were watching this movie they had a bit of postmodern values imprinted in their minds. That was their epiphany.

Christopher Nolan made an dystopian world he pictured a little closer. That is if you agree that modernism or super-modernism philosophy is more conductive to development of humanity than a postmodernism one...

But you know what really gets to me?

Nolan knew all of that. His Memento movie is an example of postmodernist film in the Wikipedia! He was perfectly aware what he was doing.

This citation must be included in the discussion.

-- On a deeper level, Jessica Chastain may have said it best when telling Entertainment Weekly that “Interstellar” is a love letter from Nolan to his daughter, Flora. The film’s production title was “Flora’s Letter.” Underneath it all, that's what "Interstellar" really is — a father-daughter story reflected in the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murph (MacKenzie Foy), the two lead characters at the center of the film. --

A love letter. Now the movie makes perfect sense as an educational content for a child. Question the authority. Promote love. Instill hope and faith.

But at what price for humanity at large? For me, a price that was too high. That's why I consider Interstellar to be harmful, irrational postmodernist trojan horse that supposedly promotes science but actually does the opposite.

Thank you, Christopher Nolan for making humanity a little bit less rational, thank you so much.