The Emotional Appeal of Science Fiction Cinema: In Awe of Interstellar
The Emotional Appeal of Science Fiction Cinema: In Awe of Interstellar

Summary/Abstract: Science fiction has almost become a modern-day mythology, and it is a genre that reaches the masses in the field of cinema, in a way that its literature counterpart cannot. The ‘sublime,’ identified as one of the attractive aspects of science fiction literature, is a philosophical and aesthetic concept with a wide semantic application associated with greatness, power, and limitlessness. The expression of the sublime in cinema creates an emotion of ‘awe.’ Awe as a complex emotion has been increasingly explored in theoretical and empirical studies in recent years. In this study, the emotion of awe is examined with the example of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014). The film has distinctive depictions of the sublime and it suggests two distinguishing features of awe (i.e., vastness and a need for accommodation) through various aspects of science fiction themes and certain affective qualities. It has been concluded that awe as a cinematic emotion is the emotional core of Interstellar. The film embodies the operational structure of awe.

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