Last week, NASA JPL’s Cassini spacecraft imaged the first close-ups of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, including this breathtaking view:
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Wow! Iapetus, of course, was the location of the third monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke marked the occasion with an eloquent video greeting to the NASA JPL team.
I thought for sure that I had seen these icy mountaintops before. Actually, I was recollecting this special effects sequence from the 1984 film version of 2001’s sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact:
In this clip, cosmonauts and astronauts aboard the Leonov, en route to the adrift Discovery, explore Jupiter’s moon Europa with a space probe after detecting possible organic material. 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a visually rich but preachy cold-war revisiting of Kubrick’s classic, with effects accomplished by Richard Edlund’s Boss Films (the firm’s first outing after Edlund left Industrial Light & Magic).
Let me clarify: While Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey placed the monolith on Iapetus, orbiting Saturn, Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation relocated it to Europa, orbiting Jupiter. Why? Because Kubrick wasn’t satisfied with the effects to reproduce Saturn’s rings. So, even though I’m comparing two separate planetary bodies, they share a common creative origin.
Modelmaker Jarek Alfer sculpted a fittingly freezing, rugged, and alien landscape of Europa on a 40 foot wide by 25 foot deep plywood tabletop, built with plaster, styrofoam, and wax.
The most effective shots of this sequence are displayed on video monitors, an effect achieved with a groundbreaking frame-accurate video animation system. The video footage was synchronized with film’s 24 frames per second, fed into monitors on the Leonov set, and shot with practical lighting along with the actors. The low resolution is kind of a cheat: A sharper image would reveal more imperfections in the miniature. Yet in this context, the low-resolution video sells the shot. It looks awfully close to the faint, interlaced images of moons and planets that we’re used to seeing from space probes.
Long shots of Europa’s surface were accomplished with a large-scale model and shot on 65mm VistaVision.
Almost by coincidence, Richard Edlund’s Boss Films showed us in 1984 what we couldn’t actually see until over twenty years later.