Obituary: Douglas Trumbull 1942-1922

 

One of the greats of movie effects has died. he was one of my greatest inspirations, just after Ray Harryhausen. Neither of them had super extensive filmographies but what they did changed effects in cinema. 

Trumbull worked on some of the most iconic and visually stunning films of all time. 2001: A space odyssey, Close encounters and Blade runner among them. He pushed the technology of watching movies as well as a long time proponent and researcher into higher frame rates and larger film formats. He never stopped moving ahead and his talents made everything he worked on better than they could have ever been without him. 

Ad Adstra (2019) Directed by James Gray

Ad Astra ("to the stars" in latin) is a film that attempts to tell the story of emotional and physical detachment with Brad Pitt as an exceptional astronaut put on a mission to find his long supposed dead father who was working near Neptune on a project to discover extraterrestrial life but somehow caused some sort of antimatter reaction in the sun causing intense solar flares that are knocking out electronics and communications everywhere humans have settled in the solar system. This problem, though it is never really shown visually or explained adequately, could lead to the possible death of life in the solar system. 

SPOILERS:

Pitt's mission is top secret and in the end he does what all heroes do - he finds his absent father, saves the solar system and himself in the process. If that sounds like a bunch of tropes put together, it is.

Overall, the film is visually stunning with effects that look completely natural, maybe too natural as beautiful as they are, they come off as understated. Brad Pitt's performance is excellent - speaking understated. The other actors, an impressive cast of them including Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones, Live styler and others follow his low key acting style which keeps Pitt's astronaut from becoming unlikable and cold while letting him remain distant. Even in his emotional painful transition from detached, compartmentalized loner to a more humanized version of himself that realizes he does not want to become what his father was and learns to reach out to others he remains calm, and almost monotone. This is not a critique, it works and Pitt show how good an actor he is by pulling it off. 

Where the film falls down is the script. It doesn't seem to know what it is or where it wants to go. It references Kubrick's 2001 Overton enough but throws in elements that distract from what makes that film hypnotizing to watch. A huge problem is the use of voiceover, I am not a fan. It over explains and could have be used sparingly. Instead, we get a constant inner monologue better left to out imaginations and told through visual cues and symbolism. The film and director seem more than capable of succeeding in giving us a purely visual driven story but the script keeps inserting "exciting" diversions like a chase soon the moon and a diversion to another spaceship that has sent out a distress signal. While back of those storylines could have been a film of their own, they come off as attempts to add action and general public pleasing effects and some gore to spice up what should be a much more intellectual and personal journey. They distract rather than add anything useful. 

It's east to forgive some of the handwaving and missing explanations in a movie like that, the visual are stunning and we accept right away that the solar flare thing is a McMuffin to propel the story of a man's search to find himself. I do think that spaceships would be less wasteful and instead of dumping sections into space after launch like the Apollo missions did would be more like the shuttle program reuse as much as possible. In the future building rockets on other planets will require more reusability not less. The time to get from one place to another is really short for a film that wants to depict space travel in a realistic way. What should take many years takes a few months and as a result the dialogue about isolation and the long term effects of that loses some of its impact.

The meeting of father and son near the end is a mess. I really did not get any sense from it at all. There is a deep story there but it's hidden in tropes and cliches. If I were the director/writer I might have replaced that section of the plot with the main character getting to the Neptune station and finding out then, rather than earlier that his father had killed the crew and inadvertently caused the anti-matter catastrophe. The father would be found dead and Pitt's emotional journey would  make more sense. Finding out your dad is the jerk you always thought he was in space is less motivating to me than finding out his obsession and detachment and obsession with his one work goal is a much better reason to change your life around to avoid becoming him.

This is a movie that has all the bits and pieces of greatness in it but fails to go the distance because it plays it too safe and tried to appeal to everyone by including needless action on top of what is a slow personal journey. It relies heavily on well worn tropes when it could have veered off into other more meaningful directions. 

Worth seeing for the visuals and performances but it is a thinking person's film that falls apart if you think about it too deeply. 

2001: A space odyssey Poster series

I had an itch to do something with 2001, one of my favourite films but didn't think doing one of my icon drawings would work. Instead I imagined a new set of posters and used information from the original posters such as the studio logos and the credits. I decided not to use the two tag lines on the 60's posters... too wordy. I wanted to really highlight one element and make it front and centre. I used 3D models - positioned and lit them instead of trying to find and alter images from the film. This way I was able to get exactly what I needed. I felt they needed an insane amount of detail. The star field is real, I took it in Colorado a few years ago.

Not all of these work as well as the others but I decided to show all 4 just for comparison.  The first two are my preferred images. The second are sort of runner ups, but I like them and put a good amount of effort into all of them.

Click any image to see more detail.

  

2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 directed by Stanley Kubrick

2001 is one of the most influential films ever made and will soon get a re-release in 4k for it's 50th anniversary.  It's visuals are striking and 50 years later they still hold up despite being done at time long before digital effects existed. It's non traditional story telling keeps people guessing as to the "true meaning" of certain elements  of the film and the soundtrack, though pretty much all classical music,  has become symbolic of the future we have in outer space. It was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1991.

The story, though told unconventionally, isn't all that complicated in essence. Extraterrestrials have been promoting human evolution and development since they roamed the plains as primitive apes - prodding them to use use tools ( for violence at first) and take the first steps towards intelligence. This is done trough a totally black and smooth monolith which appears out of nowhere. Jumping thousands of of years later in one of the most iconic jump cuts in film history, a group of scientists on the moon have discovered another monolith, deliberately buried there which emits a signal toward Jupiter. A ship is sent to Jupiter where it discovers another monolith near the planet which opens a star gate, apparently taking the astronaut to wherever the aliens are and returning him... or some version of him maybe back to Earth int he form a "star child" who might represent the next stage in human evolution.

Fair to say, the actual plot of the film is secondary to the effect it has on the viewer and how it changed sci-fi and cinema after it's release. Never before had so much care been taken to realistically show the future in space. Some might say no one has ever put that much car into it again. The effort pays off and everything from the way we see travel to the space station, the moon and beyond is still not only believable but pretty accurate for a movie made before man had even set foot on the moon.

The realistic presentation of technology made a huge impact. Spaceships and alien encounters aside, the character of HAL, a super computer that proves to have  mind of it's own, has become the poster child for tech and artificial intelligence gone wrong. This is unfair to HAL, I would argue, as his actions though severe (I think killing almost the entire crew as they sleep counts as severe) are not totally beyond comprehension. HAL has become emotionally unbalanced because he was told to keep information from the crew, something that leads him to think the crew can not be trusted with such an important mission. The sequel 2010 goes into this in more detail, but the seeds are planted here. When HAL tell the last living crew member "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I am not able to do that", it's terrifying.



To be sure, the film goes into complete mind-fuck mode by the end as the sole survivor disconnects HAL and leave the ship to meet up with the monolith. A mind blowing psychedelic display later, he seems to go through the rest of his life in minutes, and solitude, only to be transformed into the star child which heads back to earth. How someone reacts to all this is dependent on each person's personality and beliefs - and possibly what drugs they took before entering the theatre.

Like most Kubrick films , this one had some people loving it while others hated it with a burning passion. It did quite well on release and became not just a cult classic, but a true classic of modern film. It won an Oscar for best special effects but lost to Planet of the Apes for make-up, leading many to think that it was overlooked in the category because the apes in Kubrick's film were so real, academy members thought they were. The techniques uses in the film are revolutionary. On example is the use of font projection over matte work. This meant that instead of tracing an element and adding it to another piece of film (leading to that black line seen in many effects shot of the period) it used a giant super reflective screen that had an image projected on to it so the camera could film both the foreground action and the affects backdrops at the same time with seamless realism. In fact, even the outdoor shots on the African plains were all done in doors. The designs of everything form the ships to the clothing to the zero gravity toilet hold up to this day. Even though we have now been to the moon, have a space station or two and have sent probes to the other planets - none of that seems as real as some of the stuff we see in this movie.