'Hubble': Heavenly Ticket to Space

NASA/Warner Bros. - The Butterfly Nebula, gas escaping from a dying star at 600,000 miles per hour, as seen in 'IMAX: Hubble 3D.'

* FILM REVIEW
* MARCH 26, 2010

'Hubble': Heavenly Ticket to Space
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If you go to the excellent Web site for "IMAX: Hubble 3D" (www.imax.com/hubble) you'll find lots of information on this documentary about the Hubble Space Telescope and where it's playing—40 locations at present, more than 100 theaters by summer. And you'll get some sense of the film from the trailer—about as much as looking at a maple leaf will give you a sense of autumn in New England. On my computer screen the trailer plays in a nine-inch box, measured diagonally. In an IMAX theater the film—43 minutes long and light years deep—plays on a 100-foot screen, supported by as much as 18,000 watts of audio power and dramatically enhanced by the 3-D process. All of that is enough to give you a sense of the soul-filling grandeur the Hubble reveals, and of the space-based observatory itself, one of the glories of our scientific age.

Shortly after the Hubble was launched in 1993 it was famously diagnosed with, and subsequently cured of, an extremely inconvenient case of astigmatism. "Hubble 3D," narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, revisits that first repair mission, which was followed by several on-site service calls over the years, but the documentary concentrates on a final visit by the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009—the end of the line for Hubble repairs and upgrades, a mission that fortunately made room for a 3-D IMAX camera on board.

The launch alone is worth the price of admission. I've been to two launches, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, and "Hubble 3D" is the first film I've seen—and felt—that does more than hint at the skeleton-rattling power of those stupendous rockets. In orbit, the astronauts of mission STS-125 float off on their extravehicular tasks while the camera tracks their work and, not incidentally, studies the blue planet floating below or above but always beyond them. The spectacle, which puts Hollywood thrillers in the shade, has its own moments of high drama. When failed circuit boards defy all efforts to remove them, the astronauts must take a Zen approach—unscrewing one tiny screw at a time—to what's described as performing brain surgery while wearing oven mitts.

The most spectacular images come, as they should, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos via the Hubble's various sensors. This is a perfect match of medium and subject—or, indeed, of medium and message, since the film tells us bright and clear that there's no limit to what science can do when it's fueled by audacity and a quest for pure knowledge. Our scientific age is also becoming a small-screen age, when people settle willingly for dinky little images like those on YouTube. Yet the heavens defy compression, and here's an irresistible chance to see them as they've not been seen before.

The Hubble provides imagery so dense with data that scientists have been able to put us inside the images on computer-generated fly-throughs. The film's itinerary takes us past Saturn's aurora, past the Helix Nebula in the constellation of Aquarius and the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula. Andromeda looms, a star-packed Frisbee. Gaseous clouds billow while million-mile-an-hour stellar winds blow through a cloud canyon 90 trillion miles across. Ad astra per silica: Computer travel may not be the real thing, but IMAX makes this an astonishing trip all the same.

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