🎬 The Interstellar ending splits my friends right down the middle

We watched Interstellar again on Saturday night at my friend Imran's flat. 6 of us, a big bowl of chips. Most had seen it years ago. Nobody asked to skip anything. We were all quiet until the ending started. Then it began, the same argument we have every time. Somebody groaned at the bookshelf scene. Tesseract, love as a force, the ghost in the room. By the credits we were shouting over each other. 3 of my friends cry at the father and daughter part. They think the love bit makes sense in a film about grief. The other 3 say it ruins the serious science the film built for 2 hours before that. I'm in the middle. The father and daughter scenes get me every time, whatever the physics is. But I do see why the ending feels like the film suddenly stops trusting you. Our friend Farooq works with something close to physics and he gets properly annoyed. Same complaints every rewatch. He listed them again on Saturday, almost word for word. We could have said them with him. Someone threw a chip at him. He ate it and carried on talking about black holes. I stopped listening around the third complaint and went to make tea. What I noticed this time was the first hour. The farm and the dust and the corn. It's slower and quieter than I remembered, and it worked better on me than the big finish. Funny, because everyone always argues about the last 20 minutes only. So I'm curious. Does the ending work for you, or is it a weaker note after all that build up?

Nobody in these debates ever seems to bring up TARS, the robot has some of the best written dialogue in the entire movie and somehow gets overlooked completely whenever the ending discussion comes up. My personal take is the ending works fine emotionally but the actual editing pace during the tesseract sequence drags slightly longer than it needed to for the same effect.

Agree about the farm scenes. The dust storm early on scared me more than anything in space. I watched it again last month and the first hour felt almost like a horror film. Then they leave Earth and it turns into a different movie. A good one, just not the same one. I'd happily watch a 3 hour version that stays on the farm.

Find the ending the weakest stretch of an otherwise excellent film, not because the emotion does not land but because it feels like the movie suddenly stops trusting its own earlier restraint and spells everything out through dialogue instead. The docking sequence right before it is still one of the best tension scenes in any movie I have watched, ending just cannot quite match that same level.

I'm in the emotional camp. The first hour sets up Cooper and Murph so well that the ending works for me.