Friday, July 24, 2009

A 40 year old vision of the future?

I watched "Moon" today. This film is fantastic - true to form, hard science fiction, literary...yeah, this is one of the very rare ones. Kudos to director/co-writer Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son, no less, who should know a thing or two about existential astronauts.)

While watching this film, I noticed something; from a production design standpoint, the "future" hasn't changed much in the past 40 years. There are exceptions to point to, no doubt, but take a look at these images from various space based films of the last 40 years and you tell me, is this progress?

2001 (1968)
Solaris (1972)


Alien (1979)

Mission to Mars (2000)

Solaris (2002)

Moon (2009)

The most striking vision of the future seems to be "padded walls" - perhaps we will need them due to the high cost of health insurance, or due to a propensity for beating our heads against them.

Speaking of which; I've been doing a lot of thinking about how the "future" we are envisioning in Stardance should be described, especially the space habitat and space factory and the like. I'm thinking perhaps we should be a little more vague...leave those thoughts up to a very talented art department during pre-production.

Oh well, back to the asteroid mines.

3 comments:

Auntie M said...

The walls are always padded because most of us are not as graceful as you are and will go crashing into them for some time until we get used to the weightlessness of space. Though I often wonder what my three waist long braids would do if not weighted down by gravity. Not to mention these grandmother tits I seem to have acquired in the last 15 years.
Lisa Harrigan aka Auntie M - Mom to my daughter also on Blogger

Watch Movies Online said...

We are all about to know our future. Is not it? Moon is a very advantaged movie. I like this type of movie.
Thanks for your nice blog post.
bye

Ember said...

Another of the reasons is because in the microgravity of space, things that aren't tied down become "jack-in-the-boxes" when the door/drawer is opened.

So, somewhat like a naval vessel, neat stowage helps to keep things where they're supposed to be... instead of in your face, or migrating towards the air intakes on the ventilation system.

My mom's cancer was biliary.