Is there a movie you rewatch on flights?

This little maneuver's gonna cost us 51 years.

Nine hours into a 13-hour flight last Saturday—one full meal, three cups of coffee, countless snacks and exactly two hours of sleep in—I slipped back into an old habit and pressed play on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar on the 12-inch screen in front of me.

Interstellar has been my go-to in-flight movie for as long as I can remember. My very first screening of the film was on a long-distance flight, followed by several rewatches, until I finally got to see it on glorious imax 70mm last year at AMC City Walk. I don’t know what it is about this 169-minute movie that especially calls to me 30,000 ft. in the air when it’s obviously made for the largest screen possible. Every other movie I opt for in-flight tends to be lighter fare—Nancy Meyers’ The Intern comes to mind as another frequent pick. But there’s something about this dense—and at times ridiculous—odyssey that gets me on another level while sitting in an uncomfortable chair with strangers snoring next to me.

For those unfamiliar, Interstellar is about many things: Climate change, black holes, time dilation, isolation, the question of “are we supposed to leave the Earth if we fail to save it?”. But most importantly, it’s about Matthew McConaughey manually docking his Ranger on an uncontrollably spinning spaceship while Hans Zimmer goes crazy on the organ. It is, imo, a perfectly imperfect movie—you get Anne Hathaway offering the most earnestly beautiful theory that perhaps love is the fifth dimension that transcends the bounds of time and space. Then you also get way too many attempts at explaining relativity to us, in varying degrees of success. Something about the in-flight conditions (low oxygen?) makes me more willing to forgive its missteps and go along with its larger-than-life ambition—showing what a miracle it is that we are here on this planet at all.

What really cemented Interstellar as my first choice happened during this latest flight, when the stars have aligned and a particularly turbulent patch of the flight coincided with the part of the film where The Endurance passes through the wormhole, accompanied by unnerving silence and uncontrollable shaking. Sometimes that is what it’s all about.

What’s your favorite film(s) to watch while up in the air?

+ICYMI this week:

15 Questions With Tasbeeh Herwees, Author of No Bad Days

I’ve had the pleasure of being featured in this very fun HB piece titled The PAPER Guide to Dressing for the Movies and I also chatted with Alex Zaragoza for her investigative piece on a question that plagues Los Angeles: Why Is the Escalator at the AMC Burbank 16 Always Broken? Enjoy!