Tag: space travel

Ad Astra

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), under constant psychiatric evaluation to check he’s still up to the job, must journey first to the Moon, then Mars and finally to a space station at the far reaches of the solar system to stop his father Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a hero explorer officially declared dead having disappeared who is unofficially believed to have turned rogue. Power surges emanating from the vicinity of his father’s last known position are causing severe disruption to and may eventually destroy all human life on Earth.

That’s the essence of James Gray’s simple story, fundamentally a father and son tale with shades of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The film was written in collaboration with Ethan Gross, and the images of space travel and tech hardware are effectively realised.

The father was the leader of an expedition called The Lima Project to make contact with extraterrestrial life, a cause about which he was passionate. Because you already know (from the trailer, below) the father is played by Tommy Lee Jones, you also know he’s going to appear at least in flashbacks, comms messages and imaginings inside the hero’s head if not in the main, real time narrative.

The son is an isolated, self-centred individual. He’s away from home most of the time and his partner (played by Liv Tyler) scarcely gets a look in – either in their relationship or, indeed, in the film itself. And he needs to be isolated and self-centred in order to complete the mission on which he’s been sent – and of which he wryly observes at one point, “they’re using me”.

The Earth – Moon – Mars – father? trajectory is the main narrative spine. Roy travels with a series of different companions and ultimately alone as he heads towards whatever awaits him at his journey’s end. The episodes en route to and at the Moon in particular recall 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) although given that film’s lengthy prehistoric apes opening, some may consider Gray’s narrative narrower in scope.

Roy’s first companion is Colonel Pruit (Donald Sutherland) who travels with him to the Moon. Pruit knew Roy’s father and is one of the few people briefed with full details of Roy’s top secret mission. The octogenarian Sutherland plays Pruit as an adviser and guru, a substitute father for Clifford who left home on his one-way mission when Roy was a teenager.

Mars base supervisor Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga, just as good here as she was in British indie outing Iona, Scott Graham, 2015) later delivers him to the launchpad for the final leg of his journey after he fails a psychiatric evaluation.

The spectacular, opening action set piece has an interplanetary pulse cause an explosion on a huge man-made structure in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Roy falls off, perilously plummets towards and ultimately parachutes down to the planet’s surface. The threat facing the Earth and our hero’s ability to perform calmly under extreme pressure are both clearly discernible.

That tension is felt throughout the film which, as lovingly lensed by Hoyte Van Hoytema the cinematographer of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), varies between vast shots of space, ships and interiors that you’d expect in a film like this and intense close ups of Pitt plumbing the psychological depths of his own inner space and spirituality. On a digital IMAX screen, which is highly recommended for full appreciation of this particular movie, both sets of Ad Astra’s images prove spectacular.

It’s light years away from superficially similar space travel sci-fi which recently played cinemas Aniara (Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja, 2018), about an enclosed society coming to terms with the vastness of space rather than a single individual doing so.

Ad Astra delivers further full blown action sequences for those who want that sort of thing – a multiple Moon buggy battle inspired by the Mad Max franchise (George Miller, 1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), a distress call from a seemingly lifeless vessel complete with subsequent shocks comparable to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) – although the film seems both more on track and more original when, for example, lone hero Roy must negotiate a series of underground tunnels to perilously board from below via its rocket thrusters a NASA style space rocket on its Martian launch pad. There’s even a passing nod to Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) when he travels through an asteroid belt in nothing but a spacesuit and a makeshift, handheld shield.

Further originality can be heard in Max Richter’s eerie, atmospheric score – a very different proposition from either the classical music selection in 2001 or Hans Zimmer’s pounding electronics in Interstellar – which perfectly fits the film’s double themes of the vast emptiness of space and the dark depths of the human soul.

There are many reasons why you should watch this fascinating sci-fi flick. Leaving aside the considerable twin pleasures of seeing ageing legends Sutherland and Jones acting on separate occasions in close up on an IMAX screen, not to mention Negga’s impressive turn, there’s also Pitt’s impressive portrayal of an isolated individual coming to terms with his absent father. At the same time, as a space exploration epic it compares favourably to both 2001 and Interstellar with special effects, cinematography and score to match. Altogether, a magnificent piece of work.

Ad Astra is out in the UK on Wednesday, September 18th. On VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

Aniara

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

An elevator to the stratosphere winches passengers up from Earth to the docked spaceship Aniara. The interplanetary passenger liner is effectively a gigantic shuttle taking people to Mars to begin a new life. As the journey can be mentally traumatic, Aniara has an on board facility called Mima, a room / interface into which users plug themselves to relive old memories. Both interface and its human client group are looked after by a facilitator called the Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson). The clients lie down with their heads resting on something that looks like a neck brace and experience, say, a forest in Spring with a fresh brook running through it, “the Earth as it used to be”.

Early in the journey to Mars, Aniara hits space’s equivalent of an air pocket: the ship tilts and, for a short time, everything on board is total chaos. Then things return to normal. Only, they don’t.

Eventually, the captain announces over the ship’s large screen video, public address system that Aniara swerved to avoid a fatal collision with an asteroid. The passengers and crew are very lucky to be still alive. The manoeuvre also involved jettisoning all the ship’s fuel. Now Aniara is drifting having been knocked off course – not a problem since once it approaches a nearby planet or other celestial body, the crew can use the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot themselves back on course. However as the Mimaroben’s world-weary, astronomer room mate (Anneli Martini) points out to her, the ship isn’t going anywhere near any such planets or bodies. So they’re just drifting through space with little likelihood of either reaching Mars or being rescued.

What follows, unusually and refreshingly for an sci-fi film ostensibly about space travel, is a study of a self-enclosed society in crisis as it moves from a consumerist passenger liner model to something much more prescriptive and co-operative. Food production shifts to algae-based crops which may provide a less pleasant diet but nevertheless ensures all the ship’s the population are adequately and healthily fed.

As more and more people want to use Mima as a form of temporary respite from the ship’s seemingly hopeless predicament, the facility eventually reaches a point where it can no longer cope with the client numbers and breaks under the strain. Accused of shutting down the now inoperable system, the Mimaroben is moved to more menial tasks.

Despite her initiating the occasional unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a male pickup, the Mimaroben’s main romantic interest is to be found in a pilot named Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) with whom she eventually moves in and forms a household. This works for the two of them, at least for a while, but elsewhere on the ship the social tension becomes more and more strained. Fundamentalist quasi-religious cults arise, their dubious practices involving gathering for mass orgiastic rituals, partly for the purposes of procreation. Meanwhile, the marginalised Mimaroben may have a long term solution to all the unrest: she harbours a dream of building a VR display of sorts outside the ship to show images to the population in order to help them cope with their situation.

It’s never discussed exactly what has befallen planet Earth, but images of conflagration jostle with Mima’s ‘past’ imagery of healthy woodlands and fresh running water suggesting global warming has taken its toll. Crew notwithstanding, the implication is that everyone on the ship possesses sufficient financial resources to buy their way out. When disaster occurs, their bubble of self-preservation is burst and they enter into a sort of social free-fall where anything goes. Perhaps the piece overreaches itself a little with its religious orgies which play out as compelling spectacle even as you half wonder exactly what they’re doing in the narrative. Otherwise, though, it’s impressive as a piece of sci-fi, refreshingly intelligent as a portrait of a society in crisis. Overall, it’s wholly fascinating.

Aniara is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

2001: A Space Odyssey (50th anniversary, 70mm)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is back in a brand new 70mm print struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative. Like known champion of physical celluloid over digital print Christopher Nolan who was involved in the process, I saw the film in a cinema as a boy with my father, although in my case I saw one of its many reruns in the seventies. Nevertheless, I relish the chance to go back and see this brand new ‘unrestored’ 70mm print because it recreates what audiences saw on release, no remastering, re-edits or redone effects.

The film absolutely holds up against present day efforts (one of the few remotely like it is Nolan’s Interstellar/2014). In its day, 2001’s visual effects were far superior to anything previously seen in science fiction and although cinema effects technology has moved on considerably, this aspect of the film remains convincing.

However, the visual effects are far from being the strongest aspect of the film which was conceived by director Kubrick with SF author Arthur C.Clarke. The plot is deceptively simple. (Skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid spoilers if you’ve never seen the film.) A monolith (sides ratio: 1:4:9) appears on Earth and inspires primitive apes to make weapons, it reappears thousands of years later in the Tycho crater on the Moon and after being excavated unexpectedly sends a one-off transmission to Jupiter. So mankind sends a space mission to Jupiter, but the ship’s on board computer malfunctions and attempts to kill the crew. The one surviving astronaut undergoes a journey which culminates in his going through the door of the monolith and emerging as a gigantic star child.

Considering the magnitude of the themes involved here, it’s surprising how dull or banal much of the movie is. If this sounds like negative criticism, I don’t mean it in that sense. The film’s execution is never dull or banal, rather much of its subject matter is dullness or banality. Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out”; Kubrick’s genius in 2001 is that he forces us to watch these dull bits. And they make for compelling viewing.

Thus there are scenes of apes gathering at a watering hole or huddling underneath rock ledges at night against the cold. There are scenes of a flight to the moon via an intermediary space station when a jump cut could have taken us straight there in terms of plot. There’s a briefing in a conference room at Tycho where Dr Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester) addresses fellow scientists about cover stories and the need for secrecy from which the film cuts away just before telling us (a scene we never see) what he knows about the object excavated in the crater. There are hours of the two man crew Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) – there are actually five crew, but three are in hibernation – and the HAL 9000 computer (voice: Douglas Rain) going about their daily routines aboard the Discovery One spaceship to Jupiter. There is the weird interstellar journey which plays out like an incomprehensible drug trip and, finally, the surviving astronaut’s emergence into a world of rooms in which eighteenth century furniture sits upon a grid of white squares lit up from below. It’s hard to find anything like any of this elsewhere in cinema, science fiction or otherwise.

Set against these scenes are moments of great import: an ape trying out as a club a bone found on the ground, a group of spacesuited astronauts on the moon overcome by sudden, unbearable noise from the monolith, a spacewalking Jupiter Mission astronaut struggling frantically after his breathing line has been cut and the heartbreaking disconnection of HAL one memory terminal at a time.

The wider panorama here contains unforgettable moments predicting the minutiae of space travel which may not have come true in the year 2001 but still feel like they could be just around the corner in 2018, the date of the film’s title notwithstanding. Take the celebrated sequence travelling to the space station. A sleeping Pan Am passenger’s pen floats in zero gravity, an air-hostess (or space-hostess) enters shot right way up and walks in a circle until her feet are above and her head below to walk out of shot upside-down, a rotating space ship slowly docks with a space station with which its rotation is in sync – all to the strains of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz. And as testament to the incredible detail in the notoriously obsessive Kubrick’s intensive research, widescreen TVs on the backs of the seats inside the passenger cabin. Unremarkable today, but possibly little more than an idea on a drawing board somewhere in the TV manufacturing industry when the director built them into his film as something of a major coup.

If 2001 remains unchallenged as the greatest SF film of all time, there is however one aspect in which it has aged badly overall. Aside from the group of four Russian scientists with whom Dr. Floyd has a conversation, three of whom are women, it’s notable that women aren’t given any real position of prominence in 2001 – hostesses and receptionists plus a handful of minor/secondary scientists characters – and that’s it. If Kubrick and Clarke were alive and writing the film today, I’d like to think that’s something they might change. Otherwise, though, 2001 could have been made yesterday and seeing it in this brand new 70mm print is a real treat.

2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) is back out in the UK on Friday, May 18th. Watch the film trailer below: