Space has always been a big interest and a theme for the art of cinema. In this review, we follow how Space has been transformed in the movies for the last 120 years.
Realism in movies has a long history: in 1902 the director Georges Melies did his movie The trip to the moon and created an illusion of a capsule landing on the moon with two shots: first filming the actor representing the moon and in the second - adding the capsule on his face and combining the two shots. Up until the 50s, cinema producers were limited in scientific knowledge and in technical resources.
Everything changed at the end of the 60s with the famous 2001 Space Odyssey. Thanks to the fact that humans actually went to space at that time, Stanley Cubbrick pushed the limits of the techniques and placed the camera on the floor so the human bodies looked like they were moving naturally in the zero-gravity environment.
The next step in the space movies technology is the Star Wars saga by George Lucas and the extraordinary space battles where the motion cameras made their way to the cinema production and were used widely up until the mid-90s with Apollo 13 where the director put the cast in an actual Zero Gravity environment and made it as realistically as possible shooting in NASA camp KC-135.
The technology continues to develop and in Gravity (2013) the new technology called "Light box" was used: motion cameras in a box covered with LED tools making it possible to see the real Earth reflections in the helmets. "First man" (2018) and "Midnight Sky" (2020) are using a groundbreaking CGI and LED projection to make weightless movement and the light of outer space feel more realistic than ever before.
