Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Postcard from Earth’ at The Sphere Is a Jaw-Dropping Experience. The Actual Sphere? Less So.
If they really do make a “Twister” sequel, they have to make it for The Sphere.
You’ve likely heard about The Sphere from the surprising number of U2 fans in your social media feeds last week, all of whom seemed to attend the band’s concerts that kicked off its Vegas residency and all of whom captured absolutely bonkers video of Vegas’ latest stab at advancing the use of light and electricity to defeat the natural world.
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In keeping with Vegas’ unrivaled skill at mixing the high and the low, this next weekend it was filmmaking auteur Darren Aronofsky’s turn, with his 50-minute film “Postcard from Earth,” in which narrators explain to two floating space travelers why they were put into a years-long slumber. The story is purposefully slight; it’s a peg upon which to hang some of the most ravishing images in cinema, including a sequence in an opera house that contains a fabulous sight gag (and, according to Aronofsky, many Easter eggs) and a thunderstorm (complete with a brisk breeze inside the theater) that would have storm chasers in ecstasies of extreme weather.
But “Postcard from Earth” is more than just gorgeously crafted images. Aronofsky and his team (including “Oppenheimer” editor Jennifer Lame, who proves a delightful facility with sly jump scares) have created a Trojan horse in the form of a nature film. As Matthew Libatique’s camera cranes and swoops along the Grand Canyon, the sensation is dizzying but not nausea-inducing (take that, 3D!). The scope of the images in front of, on the sides, above and even behind the audience offers an immediacy that is begging to be utilized for a more traditional narrative feature.
And the sound! The sounds of “Postcard from Earth” — thunder, wind, a frog snapping up a snack with its tongue — wallop across the theater while the seats obligingly shake for an extra jolt of immersion. (The vibrating seats felt unnecessary, for what it’s worth, as did those breezes.) When the camera takes us inside the opera house, we’re in it. You look up, and the Sphere’s ceiling is the opera house ceiling. It’s an uncanny experience that feels like new and fertile ground for moviemaking.
The theater’s structure lends some quirks to a movie-viewing experience. Since the screen is outlined by the rear stadium seating on either side, it can give the impression of sitting in high school bleachers that cut off part of the viewing experience. And while the raking of the seats provides incredible sightlines, it’s steep enough to induce vertigo. Even so, the compensations are vast; The Sphere screen offers an exciting glimpse at what could be possible for movies in a way we’ve never seen before.
Which makes The Sphere experience (as opposed to The Sphere Experience, of which “Postcard from Earth” is a part) so puzzling.
The Sphere looms over the Vegas skyline with an odd grace, impossible to miss when driving around the city or past it on I-15. It’s been open for little more than a week, so one must forgive the general air of disarray surrounding rideshare areas.
Except here’s the thing: The Sphere promises to be (and might actually be) the future of entertainment. “Postcard from Earth” projected images in 18k. “No one has ever seen 18k images before,” Aronofsky told the crowd at his film’s premiere. “There’s 500,000 gigabytes of data. We don’t know what that’s going to do to someone’s brain.” All true — ao why is walking into The Sphere reminiscent of a child’s science museum?
Part of it is the cool blues and mobiles used for the enormous lobby, aka the Atrium. It’s a color scheme that is chic in 2023 and will age badly in the next few years. It features a massive mobile comprised of hoops, which reminded me of nothing so much as the work of fictional Yul Ullu in “Auntie Mame.”
And then there are the Atrium’s five Aura robots, each focused on one aspect of human ability (connection, creativity, innovation,longevity, productivity). However, while we live in a post-“M3gan” world, Aura offers an already-dated aesthetic of the future. They’re humanoids, heavy on the -oid, with metallic limbs and cadences that suggest they were synthesized from that enduring classic, “We’re sorry, the number you dialed is not in service.” However, that may well be a choice intended to comfort the tourist hordes: We are obsessed with AI and robots and their promise even as we don’t want them to be too realistic.
The faces and eyes of Aura look human, but the R2D2 aesthetic with its exposed wiring creates a safe distance lest anyone start worrying about losing their jobs to a machine. Movies are already exploring humanistic robots with contemplative films like “After Yang” and “The Creator,” but things remain safely Rosie the Robot robotic in the Sphere’s Atrium, even as Aura is touted as the “world’s most advanced humanoid robot.”
There’s also the disconnect between what The Sphere represents and the inescapable realities of what it is. Within the Atrium, you are lost in a world of possibilities (even if at times you feel like you’re at the bottom of a giant tank, like lobsters at a restaurant).
“Artificial intelligence takes us from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution by optimizing repetitive tasks and informing better decisions,” a sign reads next to the first robot. And yet by the time we’re greeted with this promise of a better, more automated future on our way to see cutting-edge cinema, we’ve all trudged through an all-too-familiar check-in process as weary employees direct us to the correct zones. We’ve stood in line for $7 waffle fries or $6 Twizzlers. For all of its possibilities, The Sphere is very much like any giant event space with all of its limitations and glacially paced entrances and exist. A future free from the burdens of repetitive work has not yet come for The Sphere.
Having seen “Postcard from Earth” in all its glory, there’s little doubt in my mind that the tech will be mined for broader use beyond The Sphere. We’re about to embark on a possibly glorious new age of cinematography.
But in the half hour before the theater doors open, despite The Sphere’s undeniable coolness, despite the ability to create your own avatar, despite the robots that will say hi to your friend over FaceTime, human nature prevailed. People began sitting on the floor, back to the walls, waiting to take their seats. Nothing quite disrupts the spell of the future like the sense of waiting for a delayed flight in an overcrowded airport.
Those waffle fries were really good, though.
The Sphere Experience with Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth” plays several times a day every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Tickets start at $49 — but expect to pay upwards of $89 per ticket.
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