Confirmed: the first movie recorded, literally, in space is already underway

The news comes from NASA, which is in talks with Tom Cruise. Although there are still no estimated dates, nor is it known who the recording team will be, the announcement has already gone around the world: it is a historic project.

Cinema has always felt a special fascination for space. Since its inception, the films set in it have allowed us to discover new worlds, very present in popular culture since the first adventure novels, comics and photographs.

With more or less realism, these films take us from the sofa to innovative spaceships and remote and unknown places, which some companies now aspire to discover and conquer in order to live. Will they finally make it?

What is certain is that cinema is not only a means of entertainment, but also a very important source of motivation and inspiration. And this is what, to a large extent, NASA intends to achieve.

NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality. pic.twitter.com/CaPwfXtfUv

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) May 5, 2020

Jim Bridestine, current administrator of the American agency, recently assured that the new generations need new stimuli and examples to be interested in these topics. His solution to provoke it? A film recorded in space. Not set, like those mentioned, as a set and a context; but shot there. Literally.

Without a doubt, it is a project that will make history: be the first to dare to board a real spaceship to tell a space story. More realism, impossible. In fact, the great difficulty involved in carrying it out is probably the reason why it has not been done so far.

An obvious technical difficulty: astronauts prepare hard for missions. In addition, taking off from our planet, floating on board a rocket and staying for a while in a space station is not free from risks deadly, of course. And who will dare to take these risks?

As Jim Bridestine confirmed, and as Deadline magazine exclusively anticipated, Tom Cruise, who will become the first actor astronaut. Who better than him to do it? It is clear that Few actors or none, except perhaps Jackie Chan have risked as much and as often as he did to make the action scenes so realistic..

Among his most famous and impressive challenges we find that he climbed the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol; he got on a plane just taking off at Rogue Nation; and performed a HALO jump in Fallout.

His willingness to record these scenes, himself and no specialized doubles, have earned him a well deserved reputation for being reckless. For this reason, 15 years ago, director James Cameron proposed a challenge that more than one would have found crazy: to record a film outside of Earth, in space.

This is what the director, responsible for the blockbusters Titanic and Avatar, confessed to Empire magazine two years ago, on the occasion of the publication’s thirtieth anniversary, when he answered several questions from readers.

Then he acknowledged that he had a contract with the Russians to go up to the International Space Station, and that he spoke with Tom Cruise to propose it. To which he replied: “If you have to train as an engineer, I train myself.”

These words speak to us of the determined will of the actor, to whom it seems that no film challenge it can be resisted.

At the moment, the recording studio is not known, nor the dates, nor more data beyond the interpreter’s commitment to NASA and the company Space X for carrying out this interesting project.

Header illustration: Mónica La Mola. Images: movie Oblivion (Xataka).