A Tribute to Outer Space in the Movies

This is a really great supercut of the way outer space has been portrayed in numerous films from “2001: A Space Odyssey” through “Interstellar.” It demonstrates how effective contemporary cinema has been at depicting the beauty of space, even if much of it was imagined and scientifically inaccurate—and even if it was imagined by Michael Bay, as was the case with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” Seeing all these disparate sources from the past several decades, when our ambitions for actually going into space dimmed significantly, underlines how a lot of that imagination was funneled into a sort of alternative, collective dream about what space could be. We gave up on the reality of space and instead dreamed about it at the movies.

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