Earlier this summer we got the first trailer for Terrence Malick‘s long-gestating Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience, a 45-minute version narrated by Brad Pitt that features “more awestruck and explanatory” narration. For a different, expanded experience, there’s also the 90-minute cut, titled Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, which is narrated Cate Blanchett, featuring voice-over that is “more searching and poignant, an urgent inquiry from a child of earth to the mother of all.” Today, the gorgeous first trailer for the latter has arrived.
“As a scientist, I saw nothing that seemed wrong; the simulations of the early universe and of star and planet formations are consistent with my understandings,”theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says of the film. “It is beautiful and inspiring … The interweaving of contemporary scenes with the history of the universe seems very appropriate. It raises the question of what we value, and how we decide what we value, against the history of life and our universe.”
Check out the trailer below via Empire, as well as the first poster, and take a deep dive into its making here.
The unfolding of the universe takes place before your eyes, in this experience for the senses, mind and soul.
A labor of passion by director Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life), Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey is an exploration into our planetary past and a search for humanity’s place in the future. Humming with the energy of nature itself, the film melds innovative special effects with awe-inspiring footage from around the globe, in search of what lasts, what endures through time’s changing scenes.
What does it mean, after all those eons, to be us, here, now?
The action traces the scientific chronology of earth, from the birth of the stars to the explosion of new life, to the planet-altering debut of humankind. Malick invites audiences to probe past, present and future in intimate ways. Working with a team of scientific advisors and visual effects artists led by Dan Glass (The Tree of Life, Batman Begins, The Matrix Reloaded) the film shows an array of never-witnessed natural phenomena – celestial and terrestrial, macroscopic and microscopic – in a variety of new ways.
The fierce geology of the early planet. The first cells, growing, dividing, exploring every niche open to them. The coming of fish, forests, dinosaurs and our own species with its need to reckon with everything – all this transforms into a hymn to nature, life and the universe. No two people will have the same experience.
Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey premieres at Venice and TIFF and we’re waiting on word from Broad Green if it will also open on October 7.