It is still poetic that sand from the Sahara appears on the windowsill of a house in the Bay of Biscay. The phenomenon of the haze that surprises all of Spain these days dyes the light in the atmosphere a reddish twilight, giving our streets a patina of mystery, as if we were before the advent of the Apocalypse. Beyond memes on the Internet, fantastic cinema has used the haze and sandstorms to recreate hostile planets and threatening deserts. Here is a list of eight movies in shades of orange.
In 1982, Ridley Scott directed the most influential science fiction film since ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’. Film noir and metaphysics accompanied by a fascinating production design that reproduced a Los Angeles in 2019 bathed in acid rain and neon. In 2017, Denis Villenueve dared to sign his continuation, placing the action 30 years after the first film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins tinted images of a desert planet Earth orange, where a plant is more rare and valuable than anything else. He envisioned Las Vegas in the future as a misty wasteland dotted with kitsch art, where the desert sand has covered any trace of civilization.
Christopher Nolan has rarely been as ambitious as in ‘Interstellar’. The director who dazzled with ‘Memento’ and revived the Batman saga with his trilogy of ‘The Dark Knight’ entrusted the astronaut played by Matthew McConaughey with nothing less than the salvation of humanity. The film is based on the work of the scientist Kip Thorne, a specialist in the theory of relativity, wormholes and space-time curvatures, with the advice of NASA itself. In the near future, climate change is a reality and the Earth is exhausted and ravaged by dust storms. Precisely in the dust accumulated in his daughter’s room, the protagonist will find the patterns that allow him to travel to the ends of the universe.
David Lynch in his 1984 film and Denis Villeneuve in his version last year recreated the planet Arrakis imagined by the writer Frank Herbert, an inhospitable desert with impossible temperatures inhabited by giant worms that slide under its dunes. However, in the bowels of Arrakis is the Spice, the most desired material in the universe, in the hands of the cruel Harkonnen house. The Liwa desert, in Abu Dhabi, and Wadi Rum or the so-called Valley of the Moon, in Jordan, were the settings chosen by the Canadian filmmaker to film the scenes that took place on Arrakis and where Javier Bardem, who played the leader of The Fremen tribe suffered their own with a suit that, in fiction, recycles all its liquids: saliva, urine, sweat…
George Miller was a surgeon before he was a filmmaker. His staging is effective and synthetic, surgical. When the first two installments of ‘Mad Max’ landed in our theaters at the dawn of the 80s, we discovered that there was an Australian director who shot entirely outdoors, with hardly any dialogue, and with a feverish and nihilistic sense of action. We also met a 21-year-old actor playing a grim but efficient traffic cop, keeping a gang of motorcycle punks at bay: Mel Gibson. The baroqueness of the post-apocalyptic settings was accentuated in the third part, with Tina Turner singing that she didn’t need another hero. The last installment, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, was going to be shot near Sydney, but it rained for the first time in fifteen years and the desert turned into a flower meadow, so they had to go to Namibia. There, thanks to digital effects, an amazing sandstorm that swallows all the cars and helps Max (Tom Hardy) and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) escape from their pursuers. Its author is Tom Wood, from the Australian visual effects studio Iloura, who has spent years designing sandstorms like those in ‘The Prince of Persia’.
For Tom Cruise, aka secret agent Ethan Hunt, it’s not enough to balance on the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper at 828 meters high. In the fourth installment of the ‘Mission Impossible’ saga, he also had to face an incredible sandstorm that chases the protagonist. Armed with glasses specially designed for the occasion to protect the actor’s eyes, a scarf that protects his throat, and a cell phone that serves as a guide in the dark, Cruise runs as hell, gets into the car of the bad guys and escapes by millimeters from being crushed. There were digital effects, of course, but the bulk of the brutal haze was achieved by fans stirring up ground paper pulp.
Within 700 years, humans will have abandoned planet Earth after collapsing it to shit. And we have forgotten a laborious robot, which piles up debris and little by little becomes aware of its loneliness. He entertains himself with the cockroach Hal –a nod to the perfidious computer from ‘2001’– and collects echoes from the past: a Rubik’s cube, a light bulb, cutlery… He must also protect himself from the cyclical dust storms, from which the humans years ago. Wall-E, a hulk designed to compact trash, moves just like an Actor’s Studio star thanks to the magic of Pixar in this original love story with an environmental message that doesn’t understand ages. The appearance of its metallic protagonist is located halfway between Number 5, the hero of ‘Short Circuit’– that eighties fable about another automaton with a soul– and the very famous ET.: Spielberg and the Japanese manga know that the secret of expressiveness lies in big eyes Wall-E has two glasses in his sockets with a tender myopic look and the wordless gestures of Buster Keaton. To design its sounds, they enlisted Ben Burtt, the genius who invented Indiana Jones’s whip crack, Alien’s hiss, and R2-D2’s computerized wails.
In ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ there is only one image shot in a studio: a close-up of the sun, actually a drawing on acetate. Every time David Lean tried to film the real sun in the desert the film would burn up. Beyond psychological approaches to myth, Steven Spielberg’s favorite film stands as a sumptuous spectacle constructed through hypnotic images: Lawrence’s shadow running across the roof of the robbed train, the legendary appearance of El Karish (Omar Sharif) from the horizon –the director of photography Freddie Young dared to film a mirage–, the famous transition that melts a match consuming itself with the desert dawn… Some locations came to appear on the maps after filming in Jordanian, Moroccan, Spanish and Welsh lands , which from the five months planned lasted almost two and a half years. The celluloid was kept in cold rooms in the middle of the desert due to the infernal temperatures. Added to the odyssey of moving the gigantic 70-millimeter cameras was the need to smooth the sand every time a take was repeated. A brilliant note from the script: during a sandstorm, Lawrence loses his compass, warning of the character’s progressive loss of mental orientation.
Year 2085, three decades before the ‘Nostromo’ from ‘Alien’ suffered its unwanted stowaway. A space expedition led by a scientist (Noomi Rapace) responds to the ‘call’ that a supposed civilization has left in pictograms and hieroglyphs on Earth. It tries to reveal nothing less than the origins of humanity. On board, an executive sent by the mega-corporation that pays for the trip (Charlize Theron) and a state-of-the-art android who ends up taking over the show (Michael Fassbender). Ridley Scott returned to the domain of ‘Alien’ in a riotous fest of horrors, including a variation on Jon Hurt’s unforgettable mid-meal ‘delivery’, after hatching the bug in his stomach. And nothing better than a sandstorm to highlight the hostility of the moon LV-223, where the crew of the ship ‘Prometheus’ sent by the Weyland Corporation arrives.
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