>
Las Vegas- a hellish 107° Fahrenheit made to feel even hotter by the heat island effect. The standstill traffic — in the poster child for “non-walkable cities adds insult to injury. We walked along the strip the last quarter mile to complete our 1.5-mile, 30-minute journey.
With Postcard from Earth, director Darren Aronofsky, a Brooklyn born Jewish director, concocted a magnificent beast of a film littered with mixed messaging. Just about a year out from its premiere in October 2023, I went in to see the film in Las Vegas — with my skin nearly bubbling from the heat after walking one-and-a-half miles through standstill traffic in a hellish 107° Fahrenheit — that Aronofsky himself compared the making-of his film to “building the plane while flying it.”
After seeing it, that description makes sense to me. Postcard from Earth flies by the seat of its pants. In one minute, it explores a futuristic vision, and in the next it presents a skewed portrait of present-day reality.
The 50-minute film depicts human life evolving from oceanic organisms, to land-dwelling creatures, to a Wall-E-esque civilization where people need to terraform other planets to survive, with mixed-in tributes to the beauty of the natural world. And, if the premise wasn’t distorting enough, the picture is shown on a curved 270° screen. The screen is only 400 meters wide, about another 300 feet tall. Arronofsky’s film had to be shot in 18K because of the sheer grandeur of the projection. Needless to say, in presentation and subject matter, Postcard from Earth is a highly immersive experience.
Films in the Sphere can be likened to seeing something in IMAX, if IMAX’s budget was injected with an additional billion dollars, and its theaters were even more heavily air-conditioned to combat the sweltering heat.
The curvature of the display at the Sphere truly places you in, below, or above the action. The nature scenes depicted felt remarkably lifelike, even four dimensional. The immersion, which is also thanks to the Sphere’s haptic effects, causes a sensory overload — picture a 200-foot-tall elephant stomping above you, shaking your seat with each step.
The experience reminded me of playing multiplayer first person shooter video games — in which, after you die, you become a hovering spectator gliding through the game still in-progress. The film adopts a similar technique, using it to take you through rice fields, deep into clear blue oceans, and even into the eye of a hurricane. I found myself nervously laughing through all of it. When the story turns darker — as it brings us to the present day — my qualms and questions about the film began.
For example, the notion that, as the film shows, this vagary collective of humans was to blame for climate change confused the hell out of me. The film would have you believe that the primary contributors to the denigration of Earth are not large corporations and politicians, who have deliberately ignored science that has been widely available for more than 80 years. The reality is that these entities have forced the hands of their often low-income or nearly-impoverished constituents and consumers (oil, gas, agricultural and plastic producing companies, I am talking to you). The film, however, portrays the global working class tending to lush tea fields and people wallowing in the slums of an unidentified South Asian country — then, suddenly, the Earth is on fire. The suggestion, whether intended or not, becomes that these everyday people bear the blame, not the brunt, of the harm that has actually been done to Earth.
“We could not return to Earth as we would smother it again,” says the narrator of the film. It was at this moment that steam rose — either from my head, or from the haptic effects produced for the hurricane. Who on God’s once green Earth is “we?” The irony is as rich as the cost of this film — and, considering the majority of the film was shot in 18K with a prototype Big Sky camera, I imagine few expenses were spared. The richest one percent of people on Earth hold nearly two thirds of all wealth, according to a study done by Oxfam in 2023. Oxfam also reported in 2019 that the richest one percent of the world’s population’s carbon emissions is equivalent to that produced by the bottom two thirds of the population (which is more than five billion people). The wealthiest people, these corporations and political leaders, are never shown as the villains of the story, and this lack of portrayal was staggering. The Sphere itself sits in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, where it took over 1 billion dollars’ worth of resources to construct. But Aronofsky would have the viewer believe that the grave future and present he’s depicting is the fault of low-income workers from the global South. Give me a break.
Aronofsky’s message of climate urgency is a vitally important one, but his inexplicable exclusions from the picture he was painting would make any educated person on the climate crisis rip their hair out. Let’s ignore the similarly questionable decision to glamorize a select few religions, before later showing his own religion in the form of a gravestone at the very end of the film. There is also an unbelievable romance between two actors who free themselves via space travel with the goal of procreating a new human race on another planet — which I am also willing to ignore. But the film’s attempt to put a ribbon on this monstrous issue of human impact on being a good steward of the earth, when key players were inexplicably left out of it, was bewildering. My note to Aronofsky would be to stick to fiction or fact for an issue as direly important as sustaining life on earth. The medium and messaging were sobering in the in the face of legal and potent weed. Do better Darren.