Every now and then you come across an image that literally takes your breath away, that hits you so hard you skip a breath. This one did that for me today. (Definitely click for full-size.)

It was taken in 2008 by a camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The obvious, dominant element in the main image—that’s a crater 6 miles across, the scar of an ancient meteor impact. And that tiny speck drifting against this incredible landscape—that!—that is NASA’s Phoenix lander, a probe sent by humanity to explore that alien world. I’m still blown away by the sheer drama of this image—a tiny speck of humanity journeying across the solar system to another planet, its final, triumphant steps recorded by another such feat.

*     *     *

I saw this picture today for the first time today (I must have missed it when it was first released) in a seminar talk by Michael Hecht, who headed the design and construction of an instrument onboard Phoenix that served as the lander’s chemistry lab, analyzing soil samples for signs of life or water. He proudly showed us images of his creation in the lab, called the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer. It was an unassuming box, with four soil collection bins waiting for the little backhoe installed on Phoenix to dump in samples.

And then he showed us a picture taken from the Phoenix lander of that little, modest box on the surface of Mars, where its analysis provided humanity with our first knowledge of the chemistry of the soil of an alien world.

A murmur went through the crowd of scientists and students. “I always get a little emotional whenever I see this picture,” Hecht said (as I recall from memory). “It’s an incredible feeling to see something that you’ve built, from your own hands and sweat and tears, sitting on the surface of an alien world.”

I talked to Hecht afterwards and thanked him for including the HiRISE image. “It’s absolutely stunning, isn’t it?” he said. He went on to say that the bar had been set by the Phoenix team—and now the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is trying to 1-up them when their next Mars rover, Curiosity, arrives on Mars this August.

It was then that I started to appreciate the image on another level—how much effort went into planning it. Any photographer will tell you about the lengths they have to go to in order to do a location shoot, and how much planning it can take to turn an image in their mind into a photograph. Now imagine doing a location shoot but doing it from 230 million miles away, shooting a subject floating through the Martian atmosphere on a trajectory that can only be calculated, and shooting from a dolly rig orbiting the planet from 500 miles away from the subject. The work and forethought that went into realizing this image—ensuring that Phoenix would be suspended in front of the dramatic backdrop of the crater and that the orbiting MRO would be just in the right position to capture the intended composition—is amazing.

*     *     *

I looked at Mars through a telescope tonight. I could see a red, circular disk, the image shimmering like a car on the horizon on a hot summer day. If I squinted hard enough and watched it shiver in and out of focus, I could almost convince myself I could see some surface detail, black patches here and there. I tried to imagine the plucky Phoenix probe, hurtling through Mars’ atmosphere of carbon dioxide in a fiery streak of plasma, and then parachuting gently over an utterly alien landscape—a machine wrought by human hands in a strange world.

I stepped back from the telescope, blinked, and looked back at Mars with my naked eye. Just a reddish point, suspended in the night sky over the Boston skyline.

It’s moments like these when I can hardly believe that we humans send things out there.

But we do. We are a spacefaring species. Pat yourself on the back.

I never got into Transformers, the toy line, as a kid. It’s not that I wasn’t into fast cars or giant robots; I just wasn’t allowed to have them. As a result, I had no interest in seeing the first movie; I didn’t see it until a summer Movies in the Park outdoor screening, and even then, I didn’t pay it much attention.

I thought the second one was godawful. I saw it a week or two after I arrived in Korea. I had been traveling in China and Cambodia the month before and was dying to sit in an air conditioned theater and veg out, and with nothing else in Korean theaters in English or with English subtitles, I went to it somewhat enthusiastically.

I hated it, as did everyone else.

But I just saw Dark of the Moon, and I have belatedly realized one thing about Michael Bay:

He is a terribly inventive visual artist.

The first Transformers film was an exercise in boyhood fantasy fulfilment. Tasked with creating a universe out of a line of action figures, Michael Bay’s approach was to bring to life the stories a boy might create as he plays with his toys. The sense of visual wonder that accompanied the transformations of mundane vehicles into anthropomorphized figures was palpable, each one a wonder of graphic and imaginative mechanical design, photographed with swooping cinematography and over-the-top score.

The third film of the franchise, Dark of the Moon, is no longer about the joy of the creation of worlds; it is its own firmly established sci-fi action franchise, and so far removed from the line of toys that spawned it that I found the “Presented in association with Hasbro” title in the opening credits momentarily puzzling. Having created this world, Michael Bay treats it as his own visual playground, and instead of filling it with an affecting plot or character drama he fills it with his own action-movie fantasies. Luckily, they are visually astounding.

With “Dark of the Moon,” he pushes the dumbass summer popcorn-movie formula to the max, and then pushes beyond that into an incoherent, purely symbolic realm that’s closer to experimental cinema than to Hollywood: sunsets and helicopters and vertical plunges through space and aircraft crashing to the ground and images of apocalyptic destruction and male bodies in motion and female bodies at rest […]
—Andrew O’Hehir, Salon film critic

That [film musicals] class was important to him, because he realized that you’re not bound by reality in film if you don’t want to be. And his work is about color and movement and a kind of abstraction and unreality that is found in musicals.
—Janine Basinger, Wesleyan University Film Studies Department, Chair

“[T]here is almost a level of near-operatic abstraction to Michael Bay’s images when he is directing a really slam-bang, in-your-face action sequence. It almost becomes divorced from narrative, even.”
—Justin Chang, Variety film critic

[T]he marriage of your technical filmmaking and action, and the lucidity of the shot design that you create—these long, evolving shots that just go and go until your jaw’s dropping—I thought, “I’ve got to see that in 3D.”
—James Cameron to Michael Bay

He is so adroit at composition, blocking, camera movement, color and tone […] [Y]ou can either look at his imagery as assaultive, transformative, or deliriously entertaining.
—Steven Spielberg

I guess I ought to give Michael Bay his due. He does more with the 3D format than anyone since James Cameron. I thought Avatar’s use of 3D was at times awkward, with a self-defeating overuse of shallow depth of field that prevented the eye from roaming the third dimension. Bay, having learned from the missteps of others, has a better sense of 3D composition. Filming (and animating the robots) in deep focus, he creates scenes of real depth—stages for his characters to act out their duels.

He’s admitted that 3D has forced him to change his shooting style to avoid disorienting the audience with quick cuts or pans, and I think that works very much to his advantage. In DotM, his camera typically moves slowly and always deliberately, with plenty of wide shots regarding the scenes of mayhem almost dispassionately. Movement in the scene is often accomplished by the blocking of the characters themselves, rather than relying on an overactive camera. This is smart, as it emphasizes the scale of the robots—it would be an unnaturally fast camera that could swoop around them quickly.

But even the robots need a big enough playground to play in, and here Bay makes another good choice in his setting of the film’s final act and climactic battle. In the brick and steel canyons of Chicago, he has finally found an environment big enough for his robots to inhabit, rather than tower over.

There is a virtuoso 3D shot early in the film that lasts only for a moment. A guard stands at a checkpoint in an unnamed Middle East desert. In a medium-close semi-profile shot, we see the road that he is staring down into the distance reflected in his sunglasses. A clichéd shot, not particularly imaginative composition as an image. But in a 3D space, the scene reflected in the guard’s glasses has real depth. It appears as a gaping wormhole: the road disappears into the recesses of a space that exists only in his eye, a literal portal to another dimension. It’s a masterstroke of an image that I’m guessing will be copied ad nausem. It’s a shame that the imagery doesn’t serve a better constructed, more thoughtful story, but so it goes.

The last hour of the film is a self-contained war movie exclusively following the action of the main characters on the ground in the desolate ruins of Chicago, as they are mostly cut off from the A-list supporting cast (John Tuturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich among them). Bay’s accomplishment is to create a visual landscape that portrays an American city not under attack but occupied. Decepticons cling silently to the sides of skyscrapers, curled up like bats, constant reminders of the overwhelming force of the aggressor and falling away at a moment’s notice to investigate any disturbance.

Bay cares little for buildup, for tension, or for evoking what he can simply show you—and he can show you a lot. If nothing else, this is honest filmmaking—rather than cheaply constructing a sense of false mystery by concealing spooky beings with conveniently placed obstacles as if crudely censoring the human body (JJ Abrams and Super 8, I’m looking at you), Bay never hides from you what is visible to his characters.

Nor does he waste time showing what others have already shown you. When Sam Witwicky informs NSA Director Frances McDormand of the impending, climactic attack that the Decepticons will unleash upon Chicago within hours, a different filmmaker might play with the big reveal, showing you Chicagoans gazing upwards in wonder and fear at machines materializing out of thin air, or crowds of unsuspecting citizens at play on Navy Pier as robotic spacecraft approach across Lake Michigan, the way crowds tend to do in alien invasion sci-fi flicks. But with a dash of showmanship and the vigor of an auteur, Bay economically cuts from phone conversation to black for a long beat, then deploys a smash cut to destruction in media res, a single, static wide shot of explosions, laser fire, and smoking skyscrapers along the Chicago River.

And let’s not mince words: the Autobots are triumphs of imagination, animation, and character design—human, organic to their environments, and even, at times, soulful. Bumblebee is the most human, and no wonder, for he speaks to us in our own language, our own words. The pathos he evokes by speaking in clips of the pop culture that he has absorbed as a character (and in the real world represents) is astonishing. He reflects us back at ourselves. In its way, he represents an accomplishment equal with Ben Burtt’s work on Wall•E or R2-D2. And in his relationship with Sam, he succeeds in making us believe that he cares for Shia LeBeouf more than we care for Shia LeBeouf.

Transformers is not about very much most of the time, but it is also—at times—about America’s love affair with space. The film’s main narrative conceit, as the trailer told us, offers an alternate historical timeline of the Space Race that explains why “we haven’t been back since 1972” (as its characters frequently reminds us). It involves a combination of Decepticon infiltration, human weakness, and bureaucracy—and it is two-thirds correct.

While its tribute to NASA may not exactly rise to the level of high art, it is nevertheless a timely and fitting one, opening one week before the final scheduled space shuttle launch. Bay’s reverent photography of the Kennedy Space Center scenes is both a love letter to the space program and a eulogy. When the Decepticons destroy the shuttle Discovery a minute after liftoff, the visual evocation of the Challenger disaster is undeniably unsettling.

Bay has already put his NASA-worship to celluloid explicitly:

“For 30 years they questioned the need for NASA,” Billy Bob Thornton crows in Armageddon. “Today we’re gonna give ‘em the answer!

In GC’s oral history, he reiterates it with a story from the KSC shoot and an argument with Shia LeBeouf on the shot order (emphasis added):

So Shia’s gonna do his emotional scene. He gets out of his car and says, “Michael, you’re gonna start with me first.” And I said, “No, we’re gonna start this way. This is a space shuttle! The United States of America! The last one to be launched!”

That’s right; instead of explaining to his actor that he needs the shot while they have the light, or that the crew is already in place, or for any myriad of technical or artistic reasons, Bay instead shuts him down by essentially screaming “SPACE SHUTTLE! U-S-A!”

For all its primitivity, I find that sentiment quite endearing.

“How many of you read the main Nature article?” Dan Fabrycky asked this morning. He’s a charismatic speaker and one of the lead authors on the scientific paper that announced the discovery of Kepler-11, a six-planet star system, splashed on the cover of Nature the first week of this past February. Hands went up all around the dim lecture hall, many of them belonging to scientists who study astronomy and exoplanets for a living.

“And how many of you read and understood all of the supplemental materials?” he continued, referring to the paper’s appendices in which the nitty-gritty, mathematical details of the techniques used to discover and analyze them were outlined.

Only a handful of…well, hands, stood above a sea of silent scientists. “A few of the co-authors,” Fabrycky dryly noted, and the audience roared with laughter.

These are strange and exciting times for astronomers studying exoplanets. As an outside observer, it’s thrilling to watch, for the tools they’re bringing to bear on Kepler’s data are not tried-and-true algorithms that can be dug up out of textbooks like numerical recipes. Nor are they techniques that scientists have learned to do as students and perfected and polished throughout their careers until they’re like second nature. Instead, we have the pleasure of watching scientists in the prime of their careers doing brilliant work and writing the textbook on these techniques as they invent them—literally. No, really, I mean, literally. Here it is:

Published only last December, it’s a collaborative effort from the elite group of planet hunters to bring their techniques to the scientific masses. Remarkably, it sells for a mere $26 at Amazon, a price point subsidized by NASA in an attempt to get the book into the hands of as many students—and scientists—as possible.

The point is that this is a fast-moving field, and even professional astronomers are unfamiliar with many of its newly-minted tools. Fabrycky sensed this and told the crowd that his goal in his talk was to “get you feeling comfortable with these techniques”.

The specific technique Fabrycky was referring to in this morning’s session on the architecture of exoplanetary systems at AAS—and one of the buzzphrases for the entire conference—was “transit timing variations“, or TTVs, a phenomenon that arises in multiplanet systems.
Continue reading →