You could take encouragement in the fact Aronofsky is making movies with hopeful messages like PFE instead of films that end with newborn babies being eaten, but you might just as easily think he’s sugarcoating science the way some have said his previous works warped the book of Genesis.
(This review contains spoilers for Postcard from Earth and mother!)
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Astronauts on the International Space Station agree: Las Vegas is the brightest city on the planet.
And of all the lights shining from the strip, the Sphere is arguably the most famous new building in the United States.
It’s hard to ignore the Sphere. Between appearances on network news showing transformations between basketballs, jack-o-lanterns, the Earth itself and more, its LED panopticon almost seems to be watching the Vegas skyline, sometimes as literal animations of eyeballs and emojis.
What the visitor page for The Sphere Experience describes as “virtual reality without the headset” offers the feeling of transportation anywhere, even if on the outside it feels impossible to get away. Besides U2’s residency for the next year as mainstage act, the regular show up four times daily is the first film designed for the Sphere’s 270-degree interior screen: Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, the highest0resolution movie ever made.
Aronofsky, a director known for making movies where characters destroy themselves in hip, cinematic style – think Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Whale – is either one of the best or worst possible choices of director for an experimental film like PFE. Besides writing characters who double as their own villains, Aronofsky has also consistently implemented new technology throughout his career. Pi, his first feature shot in high-contrast black and white on 16mm film, pioneered streaming as the first movie available to buy through download. But the experiment being conducted in PFE, which used a camera rig that required 12 people to operate, is a technological spectacle nothing like the storytelling the director has relied on in previous films. Not that you would ever go to the Sphere to watch a drama like The Wrestler. If you’re like me, you’ll go because you want to see what a really big screen looks like up close.
Also if you’re like me, you’ll find the experience a lot like IMAX, only bigger, which is to say somehow underwhelming while remaining technically impressive. It’s tough to imagine the world’s biggest screen used for anything besides a high-definition nature documentary, even if giving up complex characters for flashy tech follows a trend in filmmaking Aronofsky himself has criticized.
“I think spectacle becomes less interesting in the same way crazy visual effects in ‘Transformers 10’ doesn’t really move you in the same way just seeing a lightsaber for the first time moved you,” Aronofsky said during an interview on filmmaking in the age of technological revolution at the 2023 Upfront Summit. “You can always blow people away with emotions and stories.”
However, PFE doesn’t have so much story as it has intermeshing walls embedded with 270,000 pixels to illuminate the 18K movie. The camera used for PFE captures 32 GB per second of film, or enough data to record over 60 hours of video in standard 1080p. The final 49-minute cut uses around a half petabyte of data.
Witnessing such high-definition video may be awe-inspiring, but I’m not sure if anyone would really consider the incredible nature of The Sphere Experience anything like actually going to the Grand Canyon or the Bahamas or anywhere else depicted in the film. If we can ignore how gigantic the screen is (which is impossible), PFE would hardly seem experimental at all. The fact that people are building bigger screens than ever before is about as creative as the empire’s plans to build an even bigger Death Star in the new Star Wars movies, capable of wiping out entire solar systems at a time instead of mere planets.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
During construction, locals referred to the Sphere as the Vegas Death Star, which makes it even more appropriate that Aronofsky’s film concerns the destruction of Earth. As you might guess from the title, Postcard from Earth is a nature documentary framed by science fiction. The film begins in rectangular resolution at less than a third of the big screen’s full capacity, with a sphere-shaped craft rocketing through outer space. Soon the ship lands on a barren planet, where we fade inside to a pair of human colonists awakening from a state of suspended animation. A computer program explains their mission, and more importantly, the details of their home. “You come from a place called Earth. On your next breath, remember.”
Earth from space appears before the audience, growing larger as we approach to gradually show off more and more of the Sphere’s interior scale before dramatically cutting to a complete 270-degree view flying over snow-capped mountains. The audience gasps around me at the sudden transition to the Sphere’s full effect, which fills our complete field of vision for the remainder of the film.
“Highlands, woodlands, prairies, plains, rivers, chasms, fjords and gorges,” says one of the narrators, different lines alternating between a male and female voice as we fly through the listed places. “Each unique unto itself. Each grander than the last. A magnificent symphony frozen in time.”
The film somehow contains narration like this throughout – never completely shutting up without ever actually saying anything too substantial. The Sphere Experience is more sensory than it is actually interesting, as was the judgment from an LA Times report from opening night, recommending, “Like so many things Vegas, it’s the sort of thing for which it pays to be lightly toasted.”
Despite being director of Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky somehow makes movies audiences love going to while they’re high. Between the visuals in films like The Fountain, Black Swan, and mother!, the director is known for surreal imagery caught between a dream and an acid trip, as well as some scenes that can be really uncomfortable to watch.
Besides his often Oscar-nominated films, Aronofsky has also made a range of nature documentaries before PFE, with previously successful projects like Black Gold, a three-part miniseries about Exxon’s early knowledge of climate change, as well as The Territory, a film about Indigenous activists protecting the Amazon rainforest. Originally trained as a wildlife biologist in both Kenya and Alaska before turning to film, Aronofsky’s background in environmentalism has informed his work throughout his career. This hasn’t always been popular with audiences.
Of all Aronofsky’s films, mother! (yes, with a lowercase m and an exclamation point) is maybe his most controversial. The film is about a pregnant woman living with her poet husband in a house they’re fixing up together, when a series of absurdly rude guests begin making appearances. One after another, it turns out the guests have all come to tell the poet how great they think his book is, while at the same time ignorantly destroying the house all around them. The drama comes to a peak when everybody begins murdering each other, and ultimately, eat Jennifer Lawrence’s baby when she gives birth at the end of the film. One Observer review questions how anyone could have ever liked mother! and summarizes some of the ending scenes, writing, “Sorry, pal, but a mob that burns a screaming baby and its mother alive, then turns cannibal, eats the baby and rips its heart out to flush down the toilet while Patti Smith sings about the end of the world pretty much fits my definition of both ‘intense’ and ‘disturbing.’ What’s yours?”
mother! is not one of Aronofsky’s more popular films. However, if you’ve seen mother!, it’s clear the author of this review is confused about which character is doing the burning at the end of the film. It isn’t the violent mob that burns the mother alive, but a bloody and enraged Jennifer Lawrence who torches the entire house after witnessing what the crowd has done to her child.
“It started as how to kind of wake people to see what we were doing to Mother Earth,” said Aronofsky at a 2023 conference on science fiction hosted by PioneerWorks, further admitting, “I buried it a little bit too far.”
Just like every part of PFE makes its message as obvious as possible for audiences, mother! is meant to be decoded in order to be understood. Besides Lawrence’s personification of the Earth, the film portrays several characters from the book of Genesis, including God, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, as well as the rise of civilization. While the movie begins by using biblical metaphors, the mother’s decision to burn the house down at the end is meant to represent global warming.
“I wanted to personify the kind of struggle that’s happening on the planet, thinking that if you could turn everything into characters, then maybe it’s a way of grasping this larger problem we were having.”
Aronofsky, an atheist, said during an interview at Austin Film Festival that he often uses biblical inspiration in his storytelling. “The stories of the Bible are really important stories to people in the West, and I think they’re more impressive as mythology,” said Aronofsky, explaining how he incorporates religious texts into his films. “We get more out of the story of Icarus as a myth that none of us believe is true, but we all understand the message.”
Aronofsky has continued his use of mythology with PFE, only now he’s telling a very different story. After showing off the world’s landscapes, animals, and cities, the film takes a darker turn, as the narrators begin commenting on how humans have impacted the environment over footage of shipwrecks and cemeteries.
“Everything of beauty we had made, every song we had sung, every prayer we raised – all would be lost. All pale in comparison to our one true legacy,” narrates a downcast voice. “We destroyed what we had loved.”
Maybe it’s tasteful to avoid showing animal extinction on a screen the size of four football fields, but the destruction in PFE is as scenic as the rest of the film. A mix of storms and floods appear in a grid, with palm trees bending in hurricane winds, giant clouds of black smoke rising from forests, tornadoes, and lightning. The screen goes black before cutting to an exodus of rockets leaving Earth.
“When all was nearly lost, we opened our eyes to her tears, our ears to her moans. Rather than burn our only home down around us, we left of our own accord. We turned off the lights.” Cities glowing orange across the globe go dark as people presumably leave the planet in droves. The use of CGI during space migration scenes clashes with PFE’s otherwise extremely high-definition shots of nature, but the difference in image quality still doesn’t come off as unrealistically as the idea of humanity ending the use of all electricity on Earth while simultaneously leaving the planet. But realism aside, at least Aronofsky seems to have a more optimistic point of view since directing mother!
“I feel like there’s been a switch where people have gone from this kind of blind partying into this kind of desperateness without hope, so I’ve been looking for films that sort of really bring light back into the world,” said Aronofsky during his interview at last year’s Upfront Summit.
You could take encouragement in the fact Aronofsky is making movies with hopeful messages like PFE instead of films that end with newborn babies being eaten, but you might just as easily think he’s sugarcoating science the way some have said his previous works warped the book of Genesis. Movies like PFE might actually dismiss the full impact of climate change by leading audiences to imagine coordinated scientific solutions, when in fact there are no concrete plans in place for seeding new planets with life using yet-to-be-invented technology, depicted in the film as a glowing golden orb that the two space colonists use to terraform their barren planet fresh and green within seconds. The film ends as we zoom out from Earth 2.0. Life is saved. Roll credits (which given the impressive size of screen, appear side by side instead of rolling anywhere).
Although never said directly in the film, there’s a good reason this fantasy technology wasn’t used to save the Earth, at least from a storytelling perspective. If the characters had saved plants and animals currently dying out in real life, the whole framing of the film wouldn’t have worked from the beginning. With a sustainable home planet there would have been no reason to send the space colonists on their mission in the first place, and then they couldn’t have spent so much time in simulated natural wonder while awakening from their ship’s suspended animation system – instead they would have been living as earthlings. In other words, even when it comes to the plot of the film, the entire conflict and resolution is manufactured in order to show off technology. However, the sci-Wfi glowy orb that transforms planets in the movie, which would pretty much be the most useful technology imaginable, is a dark parallel to the Sphere used to tell the story, which instead of creating life uses constant electricity to promote itself. It’s unclear what kind of impact the Sphere has on the environment, but one estimate claims the building uses roughly the amount of electricity that could otherwise be saved by converting almost 50,000 houses to LED lighting.
Las Vegas means “the meadows” in Spanish, named for the wild grasses that once grew in the local desert soil. It is the only place in the world where you can watch PFE, a movie that allows you to see the entire world in less than an hour. Although a recent proposal to build another Sphere in London has been canceled due to concerns over light pollution, CEO James Dolan of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which owns Sphere Studios, has said the company’s plan is “to build more Spheres all over the world.” Now, a year after the Sphere has opened, U2 has plans to recreate their concert appearances in 18K as the next movie available to watch on the biggest screen in the world.
But PFE is not a movie. PFE is an advertisement for the Sphere, which is itself a billboard for Las Vegas. Tickets start at $79, which if nothing else proves audiences are willing to pay a premium to see the outdoors in the middle of a city. Is the Sphere worth it? The best judges will be audiences in the future, if there’s anybody around to watch at all.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are from YouTube trailers and clips of PFE and mother!
