FILM 1747: THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX

FILM 1747: THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX

TRIVIA: The first trailer was released during Super Bowl LII (2018) the same night the actual film was released on Netflix.

A small figurine with the word Slusho can be seen in the first half of the movie. Slusho is a brand subtly featured in both of the earlier Cloverfield movies, as well as J.J. Abrams' earlier TV series Alias (2001). The viral online campaign for the first Cloverfield (2008), indicated that Slusho is a subsidiary of Tagruato Inc., the company behind the deep ocean drilling (and potential explosion) that woke up the monster in that movie.

John Krasinski was in talks to join the cast, but dropped out to lead Jack Ryan (2018).

FILM 1232: OBLIVION

TRIVIA: A full-sized bubble ship was created with doors that opened on their own and the cockpit controls were built with input from Tom Cruise, who is a licensed pilot.

Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda didn't like the extensive use of blue screen mattes in TRON: Legacy (2010) to such an extent, that for this film, they wanted to use real glass, mirrors and shiny surfaces for the glass tower set. The sky footage was projected on a 500 by 45 feet screen consisting of 21 monitors taken from three weeks of footage of a volcano in Hawaii. The monitors took 10 technician weeks to install and fine tuning with floor-level rig support. In the end it had the actors complimenting the production team for that set design that as such Tom Cruise declared that the glass tower was one of his favorite film sets.

Jack Harper sitting on a precipice watering a small plant, was filmed on Earl's Peak in Iceland, 2000 feet high. The crew had to use helicopters to get people and equipment to the filming location.

The painting on the wall showing a woman in a wheat field is titled "Christina's World" and was painted by the American artist Andrew Wyeth in 1948. The woman is based upon a real person who had been partially paralyzed due to polio. Wyeth was inspired to create this art when he saw her crawling across the field.

At Jack's house by the lake, he flips through a vinyl record collection and displays the following albums in order: Next in Line by Conway Twitty (1968), Rio by Duran Duran (1982), Some Enchanted Evening by Blue Öyster Cult (1978), Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones (1972), The Wall by Pink Floyd (1979), and Asia by Asia (1982).

In his review of Oblivion for the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," David Edelstein admitted he had such a hard time following the plot of this movie, he had to resort to reading the summary on the movie's Wikipedia entry, and checking the IMDb Message Boards for the answers to some of his questions: "Confused? Everything will be made clear. Not in the movie itself, which is the most incoherent piece of storytelling in years, and had me crying what, what over the din of the explosions. It was Wikipedia's "Oblivion" entry that spelled out what was going on in the final flashback. And a few, but not all my complaints, were answered on an IMDB board in which posters argued over whether the problem was our lack of attention spans or atrocious screenwriting."

Film 1041: Gravity

Trivia: The film's space debris cascade is a very real possibility. This scenario is known as the Kessler syndrome, named after NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler who first proposed the theory in 1978. A cascading Kessler syndrome involving an object the size of the International Space Station would trigger a catastrophic debris chain-reaction. The orbiting debris field would make it impossible to launch space exploration missions or satellites for many decades.

Various mechanical sounds made by the spacecraft are heard on the soundtrack as a result of conduction through the astronauts' bodies while they are in contact with the station. For example, when Sandra Bullock's character is frantically trying to grab the handholds as she flies by the station, the sounds of the station are heard while she is holding a handle, and they cease when she lets go. On the actual moon missions the sounds of astronauts hitting their hammers on core sample tubes were conducted through their bodies and transmitted through their microphones.

Aningaaq, the man Dr. Stone talks to on the shortwave radio, is the main character of the short film Aningaaq (2013) directed by Jonás Cuarón. In that movie he is an Inuit fisherman with a dog sled and a baby daughter, camping on the ice over a frozen fjord.

Alfonso Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber decided they couldn't make the film they wanted using traditional methods. For the spacewalk scenes, says Webber, "We decided to shoot (the actors') faces and create everything else digitally." To do that, Lubezki decided he needed to light the actors' faces to match the all-digital environment. Whether the characters were floating gently, changing direction or tumbling in space, the facial light would have to perfectly match the Earth, sun and stars in the background. "That can break easily," explains Lubezki, "if the light is not moving at the speed that it has to move, if the position of the light is not right, if the contrast or density on the faces is wrong." Lubezki suggested folding an LED screen into a box, putting the actor inside, and using the light from the screen to light the actor. That way, instead of moving either Bullock or Clooney in the middle of static lights, the projected image could move while they stayed still. The "light box", key to the spacewalk scenes was a nine-foot cube just big enough for one actor.

Angelina Jolie was originally cast, but dropped out later. Natalie Portman turned down the role shortly before she announced her pregnancy. Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish, Carey Mulligan, Sienna Miller, Scarlett Johansson, Blake Lively, Rebecca Hall and Olivia Wilde were all subsequently tested or approached for the lead role.

The spacesuit that Dr. Stone puts on in the Russian Soyuz capsule has the number 42 on the patch. In the novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" 42 is "the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything"

Although the film has received acclaim for its realism of its premises and its overall adherence to physical principles, director Alfonso Cuarón has admitted that the film is not always scientifically accurate and that some liberties were needed to sustain the story.