(Spoiler alert. This post reveals the ending.)
The art of filmmaking affects us like no other medium. Combinations of sight, sound, and editing elicit responses similar to the wonder we experienced as children. Innovations continue to enhance these alternate realities with stunning clarity.
This is certainly true of Postcard from the Earth. If you’re a wonk about specs, here they are. The production employed 2000 crew members from around the world, shooting footage with an 18K resolution camera. The resulting film is half a petabyte in size and plays back at 60 frames per second. This means that viewers observe 32 gigabytes of data per second on the dome, nearly 2,000 gigabytes per minute.
During the opening moments, we see only a portion of the screen. This is it? I thought to myself. Not much different from IMAX, and with a much steeper admission fee! Then, at a pivotal point in the story, the sphere explodes visually as we sail over earth’s fields, mountains, oceans, volcanos, canyons, savannahs, and tundra.
It is mind-blowing!
Far less spectacular is the narrative arc. It begins as two space travelers, a man and woman, awaken from cryogenic sleep to the gentle female voice of an onboard computer. She urges them to return to consciousness gradually as they remember their home planet. She prods their recall by explaining the history of life on Earth, from single-cell organisms to humankind in the Anthropocene era. We are immersed in Edenic images that celebrate the splendor and diversity of our planet, from both micro and macro perspectives.
As the narrator moves to human beings, she details our search for meaning in holy places, our building of cities, our expanding technologies. We see the delightful faces of people from many tribes and cultures, their eyes reflecting our common humanity.
So far, so good. But then the images shift to a distressingly familiar theme—the degradation of our sphere through pollution, overpopulation, and the gouging of natural resources. We see strip mining, denuded forests, landfills whose mountains of refuse boggle the mind.
The narrator says that Earth, desperate to rid herself of our species, tries to “scape us off her back.” Violent storms sweep overhead, a grim reminder of the hurricanes, tornados, and wildfires caused by unchecked global warming.
But alas, says the narrator; Earth couldn’t cope. So, what do human beings do in the film? We leave our world. We board space stations that hover in the upper atmosphere, giving Earth a chance to heal. Then we go a step further, sending pairs of cosmonauts – an Adam and Eve – to other habitable planets throughout our galaxy. Their goal is to propagate new life. The film ends with our two awakened space travelers planting some kind of power source into the ground of their adopted desert home, emitting waves of greenery that ripple to the horizon.
Really? I had two visceral reactions.
The first was captured perfectly by a Google review. “There’s nothing like going to the gaudiest city in the world and entering the brightest building in the world, an electronic marvel costing north of $3 billion, and then getting lectured on how humans have ruined the pristine Earth. Beautiful images on the sphere surface for half of this 50 minute “film,” and then 25 minutes of lecturing us on how we should just leave the Earth. It reminded me of climate change activists who fly private jets across the world to tell us why we shouldn’t drive gas cars.”
Amen! I did a deep dive into how much electricity The Sphere uses at peak operation on a daily basis. 28 megawatts! That’s enough power for 21,000 homes!
My second reaction is philosophical. I believe that when we fail to learn necessary lessons, we repeat the tragedies that plague human history. Call it cause and effect or karma, but either way, you know it’s true! We see it in our personal lives; painfully repetitive behaviors that drag us down until we change. We see it in our collective lives as intolerance, war, and rampant consumerism fail to galvanize the collective willpower we need to save both Earth and each other.
Albert Einstein said it succinctly: “The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.”
Here’s the rub. The two astronauts sent to create a new Eden have no memory of how human beings reversed their rapacious greed and domination of all that they saw. If you fast forwarded the history of the fictional planet on which they stand, I’m afraid you would see the same tragic consequences. As we say in Twelve Step groups, wherever you go, there you are.
Will we ever be better than this? Postcard from the Earth seems to say NO, and it does so by participating in the gross consumption it criticizes.
What if, instead, this bloated production had used its bully pulpit to call for solutions? What if it ended with scenes of humanity overcoming its divisions, joining hands and hearts, focusing its brainpower and resources on restoring this precious vessel sailing through the cosmos?
What a missed opportunity! What a reminder of lessons not learned!
Krin Van Tatenhove - Words & Images 