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A Trippy Cosmic History Lesson: SA Editors Discuss Terrence Malick’s “Voyage of Time”

A still from “Voyage of Time” uses droplets to illustrate the formation of membranes prior to the beginnings of life on Earth.

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Part science documentary, part meditation on the meaning of life, director Terrence Malik’s (“The Tree of Life,” “The Thin Red Line”) new IMAX movie “Voyage of Time” is hard to categorize. Scientific American editors Clara Moskowitz and Seth Fletcher caught an early screening in New York last week. A few days later, they G-chatted their impressions of the film. A lightly edited transcript of that conversation follows.

Clara Moskowitz What did you make of this movie?

Seth Fletcher It's the first art-house planetarium movie I've seen, so I'm not sure what to compare it to. In some ways, I loved it. Visually, it was astonishing. I liked the huge sweep of it. The history of the universe from the beginning of time to the death of the sun, covered in 45 minutes. And yet, weirdly, it dragged a bit in the middle. There's a line in a Saul Bellow novel, I think Herzog, to the effect that the history of our planet and the evolution of life—all those billions of years of nothing happening—must have been, in the moment, so boring. After watching life crawl out of the oceans I was ready to move on. 


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I know you had strong opinions about the voice-over narration.    Clara Moskowitz To me the narration was so silly as to be distracting. Hearing Brad Pitt solemnly wonder, "Death, when did it first appear? Did it lead life forward?" or declare, "What binds us together makes us one. Love," made me laugh. If you didn't already know the basics about how stars and planets form and how scientists think life evolved, I don't think the narration would help you out much. 

Seth Fletcher They were obviously going for poetry over narration. But the poetry was pretty mediocre. 

Clara Moskowitz The clichés and "profundities" were coming on thick. But I do agree wholeheartedly on the gorgeous visuals. They were mesmerizing, and it's hard to complain about sitting and watching pure beauty for 45 minutes. I often found it hard to tell where the real footage ended and the special effects began. How much of a challenge do you think it was to achieve those effects?

Seth Fletcher I have done zero research on the special effects, so I can't say, but they struck me as fresh and artful. Some of the cosmic stuff could have been footage of ink floating around in oil, for all I know, but it worked. Have you read the production notes they gave us, which probably explain how they did all this, but which I have been too lazy to read? 

Clara Moskowitz Yeah, I did take a peek, and you're not far off! They used things like "marmalade suspended in glycerin" and flow tables with poured milk and dyes and paints. They even shot "lit road flares dropping into boiling water."

Seth Fletcher NAILED IT. Those scenes were my favorite part of the film. 

Clara Moskowitz You make a good point about the abstract imagery working better than attempts at realism. Which makes me wonder, do you think of this as a science film? Is the audience likely to learn anything about the origins and evolution of the cosmos, or was that not even the goal?

Seth Fletcher That's a really interesting question. On one hand, audiences are going to see a compelling rendering of the history of the world according to our best scientific understanding. That is a pretty ambitious story to try to tell in a 45-minute IMAX movie! It starts with the big bang, and as far as I can tell, unfolds according to the standard model of cosmology. The solar system forms. Life emerges and evolves. Even if you only absorb the general arc of that story, you're learning a lot. But you're not going to learn many specifics. Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn't there dropping wondrous facts every 30 seconds. That might bother some people. What did you think? 

Clara Moskowitz At first I was expecting more explanation and elucidation. But there is also an argument to be made for letting the imagery wash over you and absorbing some of these ideas through osmosis, I suppose.

In the production notes there's an interesting quote from Harvard professor Andrew Knoll, the film's chief scientific advisor, saying basically that if he was in charge of making the film, it would have explained "what we know, how we know it and when it happened—but that's not Terry's mission," he says, referring to Malick. “His film asks something else entirely: how do we, as the products of this long evolutionary process, think about that process?"

Seth Fletcher That's a pretty good explanation of what makes this an art-house planetarium film. And it makes me even more curious what's in the other version of this film—the one that is twice as long, narrated by Cate Blanchett, and that neither of us has seen. What do you know about that version? 

Clara Moskowitz I hear that the longer version is more overtly religious, where I think you could say the cut we saw was going for "meditative." Cate Blanchett apparently directly spoke to a god figure, wondering about how god made the universe. It also sounds like there were much heavier moral undertones—the nature and cosmic footage was interspersed with shots of present-day people around the world, including homeless people in the U.S. and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, meant to make you think about how we're treating this world we've inherited and these other people that evolution has produced.

Seth Fletcher Hmm. That doesn't sound promising. But I'll withhold judgment. When do the two versions come out? 

Clara Moskowitz The IMAX version that we saw comes out today in theaters around the country. The longer cut was apparently shown at the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, but I haven’t heard about it getting a wide release. I’ll be curious to see what our readers think of the movie, because it’s definitely one where the viewer’s perspective, mood and expectations will play a big role in whether they come out satisfied or not.

Clara Moskowitz is a senior editor at Scientific American, where she covers astronomy, space, physics and mathematics. She has been at Scientific American for a decade; previously she worked at Space.com. Moskowitz has reported live from rocket launches, space shuttle liftoffs and landings, suborbital spaceflight training, mountaintop observatories, and more. She has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University and a graduate degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Seth Fletcher is chief features editor at Scientific American. His book Einstein's Shadow (Ecco, 2018), on the Event Horizon Telescope and the quest to take the first picture of a black hole, was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine and named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His book Bottled Lightning (2011) was the first definitive account of the invention of the lithium-ion battery and the 21st century rebirth of the electric car. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times op-ed page, Popular Science, Fortune, Men's Journal, Outside and other publications. His television and radio appearances have included CBS's Face the Nation, NPR's Fresh Air, the BBC World Service, and NPR's Morning Edition, Science Friday, Marketplace and The Takeaway. He has a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism and bachelor's degrees in English and philosophy from the University of Missouri.

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