The Sphere’s Miracle of Tech Showcases the Earth’s Miracle of Life | PRO Insight
“There are 500,000 gigabytes of data that we’re about to flood you with in the next 50 minutes. We don’t know what that’s going to do to someone’s brain.”
With those opening words to the 5,000-plus in attendance this past Friday night, acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky unveiled his new film “Postcard From Earth” at the new Las Vegas venue, the Sphere.
“Film” is the wrong word, of course, for this awe inspiring, spherical $2.3 billion new canvas that stands 366 feet tall and features the highest resolution LED screens on the planet, both inside and out. Rather, “Postcard From Earth” is a multi-sensory cinematic experience that breaks not just new ground, but every ground possible — just as the Sphere itself did when construction first began in 2019.
Aronofsky piloting the Sphere’s first “film” makes sense. After all, the auteur has made his deeply respected directorial name with bold experimentation and an artistic ethos showcased in some of the greatest films of the past couple decades, including “Black Swan” and “Requiem For A Dream.” It’s no surprise, then, that “Postcard From Earth” leaves the existing universe of moviemaking to go boldly where no other film has ever gone before. The end result? A triumph in all respects – and a “must see” (“must experience,” really) for the rest of us. Even Aronofsky was blown away at the premiere. “This is awesome!” he gushed to the audience in his opening remarks just before the first frames filled our senses.
“Postcard From Earth” starts rather “small” comparatively amidst the massive size of this venue. We see an IMAX-like screen before us – in traditional letterbox format – massively oversized to be sure but leaving us in the dark about whether the rest of this 360 degree-space will be fully utilized. I’ve followed the Sphere story from its beginning (always a believer, as I wrote previously), but I too wondered whether its fully immersive space could work for film or instead be best served for U2 and other immersive live acts.
Those questions were soon answered as Aronofsky delivered his first postcards – an ongoing series of vignettes of Earth’s natural magnificence. As the visuals first expanded to fully engulf the audience in near-360 degrees, we all wildly applauded, hooted and hollered. We all knew we were experiencing a historic moment in cinema.
I subsequently sat down with Aronofsky and asked him what it felt like to see his creation appear inside this new planet of a screen. “It’s very exciting watching it with audiences, because I never saw so many jaws drop in my life,” he told me. “I didn’t know that was a real thing. That’s a cool experience as a filmmaker.”
To be clear, this is not your father’s IMAX nature film or earthly tour. As magnificent and powerful as the scenes of nature are here – shot in cinematic 18K resolution and displayed at a previously unfathomable scale – this is an Aronofsky film, so you know that happy endings are few and far between. And so, we dart back and forth between what nature brought, back to the planetary destruction and chaos that humans have wrought. It is, in the words of Aronofsky, a “sober” experience. But although “Postcard From Earth” is to a certain extent a meditation on a planet lost and a love letter to a bygone past epoch from a distant future generation of space travelers, it is not hopeless.
And that was intentional on the part of Aronofsky. “I do think there is an illness in Hollywood of dystopian film,” he told me. “Stories that are helpless and hopeless and dark.” But Aronofsky sees a lot of hope and thinking about the future in his conversations with young and old alike. ”It’s important as a storyteller to start telling stories about protopia,” he said. Stories not of “a perfect future, or a future not based in any truths or reality,” but rather “stories that show a great future for humanity and for the planet and for our home.” It is this narrative that serves as the emotional hook that, together with the pioneering tech at work here, elevate the end result to something lasting.
We may have seen some of these lessons before in other films. But we’ve never seen them delivered like this. This was an evening of firsts, as we flew through mountains and dived through grand canyons as if we were star troopers on our own spaceship. In one scene, an elephant steps ever closer to the camera, and then proceeds to essentially walk over it – and you, the audience, are right in the middle of it all.
The sense of awe and immersion is magnified by seats that rumble and shake evermore with every step closer. We are experiencing haptics and the first real 4D cinema as well. The magic continues as we experience a desert storm. As we watch, wind touches your face inside the Sphere. We are no longer merely watching. We are in the storm, and we are there together. This is virtual reality without clumsy VR headsets, and ground-breaking new sound that delivers headphone sound without the headphones. The result is a shared, lasting experience, rather than further isolating technology. Special shout-out to the film’s score, which is a wonder in and of itself.
No one, not even Aronofsky, knows whether more “traditional” Hollywood narratives will work within this entirely new kind of landscape. Aronofsky likened the process to “building an airplane while we were flying it” because much of the technology came online months after he and the crew had already commenced production. But he certainly doesn’t rule it out.
Asked whether “smaller,” more traditional films still can play a role amidst the continuing parade of accelerating technology encapsulated by the Sphere and generative AI —which promises to rock Hollywood in the years to come — Aronofsky reflected on his own experiences. “Absolutely,” he tells me. “Independent films are where so much of invention happens.”
For those of you interested in learning more, visit Peter’s firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz and follow him on Twitter/X @pcsathy.
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