Christine Calhoun

Spoiler: Until the very end ai wasn’t sure if Iris was real or somehow sent to him through time-time. Once you know you can go back to critical moments and make sense of them. First of those moments was when he realized the drawing of an iris was also the little girl’s name. But given that, you have to follow through and wonder if he ever actually knew her name, albeit he knew he had fathered a girl. Then you think back to him bringing up the list of evacuated missions, then connecting to the picture of the one crew still out on a mission, resting on the member we learn as “Sully”. In the end as he communicates with the remaining two crew members, introductions are made and you learn “Sully” is in fact Iris, apparently never learning that this scientist she admires is her father. We have known from the start he has an incurable cancer so it was always probable that he was hallucinating the little girl all along, but once he realized her name, in hindsight, you might think they could have done more with the emotional side of this somehow. It lacked that — emotion. I feel like every bit of sentiment was completely wrapped up in the scene where she finally speaks and asks if he loved “her” and the movie is so heavily jolted right there that it separates the viewer from the impact of the moment. You are certain that he is, in a sense, grateful for her company, but there is no real reaching out to her to confirm it —or confirm anything, really. There are several other moments that make you wonder if she is real while also confirming his concern for her. But the starkness of the movie setting, lack of emotion from his early years to current all make the viewer feel very much like a voyeur. Maybe that was the point of it all — he would never have been able to nurture people over his endless exploration to save humanity, he would never have been a good husband or father. But in the end he managed to save some humanity, at least what we can gather, and it was actually his daughter and her future. Great potential for a tear-jerker but it just kinda ended with the viewer spinning backward in all that was seen or implied.