Alec Marsh

Do we really need to send actors to space?

  • From Spectator Life
Image: Shutterstock

The news that Russia has beaten Tom Cruise and NASA in the latest bout of the space race – by sending actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station to film a movie – almost certainly heralds a pointless new low in cinema.

Just like the difference between erotica and pornography, we all know that you don’t need to go in to space to shoot a film about it. In fact, it’s almost certainly better if you don’t.

I’m all in favour of method acting ­– whether it’s Timothy Spall sporting a paintbrush for his role in Mr Turner or Adrien Brody getting to grips with Chopin for The Pianist – but propelling actors into space defies the principal purpose of the space movie. There’s artistry to be found in the gap between our idea of space and its reality. Think of the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s pure poetry.

In the same way that P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin have together filled a mortuary with fictional stiffs, none of them actually had to kill someone to establish the necessary verisimilitude in their work. Crime fiction is a form of escape – into a world where the chaos of a killing is made sense of through the clinical logic of a detective and the ordering force of plot. Real life offers no such reassurance and that’s why we turn to fiction.

The same is true of our attitude towards space; it signifies the daring of the unknown – humanity’s pioneering instincts. And these qualities are often best conveyed in fictional flights of fancy rather than in stark realities. Sandra Bullock glancing at a flimsy painting of Saint Christopher – the patron saint of travellers – in Gravity before she begins her treacherous return to earth says more than the scratchy audio of billionaire Jeff Bezos blasting off in his Blue Origin rocket.

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