Natalie Portman stars in the trailer for Noah Hawley’s feature directorial debut, Lucy in the Sky. For his first time at bat, the Fargo and Legion creator is joining forces with the Oscar-winning Portman on a film that (like Hawley’s FX series) very much dances to the beat of its own drum. Portman stars here as Lucy Cola, an astronaut who begins to lose her connection to her family when she returns to earth after a lengthy mission in space. She then enters an affair with her fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), which only complicates the situation… and that’s before Mark also becomes involved with an astronaut trainee named Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz).
Fox Searchlight is releasing Lucy in the Sky (formerly Pale Blue Dot), but has yet to set an official release date for the movie. As a result, the studio has been slower than previously expected to get the film’s marketing up and going, with no clear release target. Fortunately, that’s starting to change today, thanks to the release of the first full-length trailer
The Lucy in the Sky trailer is now available online, ahead of its release in theaters. It’s possible the preview will start playing on the big screen with Jordan Peele’s Us as soon as Thursday evening. In the meantime, you can watch it here, instead (via Fox Searchlight).
Hawley’s Lucy in the Sky script (which he cowrote with Brian C Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi) was partly based on an incident in 2007 where astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested and then charged with attempting to kidnap Colleen Shipman. The latter, at the time, was an U.S. Air Force Captain romantically involved with one William Oefelein: an astronaut who had entered an affair with Nowak, about two years earlier. Fox’s trailer and plot summary indicate that Lucy in the Sky will deviate from Nowak’s real-life story in certain ways, while at the same time covering many of the broader strokes. Similar to his work on Legion, it appears that Hawley is more interested in exploring Lucy’s deteriorating psychological state and how that impacts her view of the world around her than anything else.
Lucy in the Sky has already drawn controversy over its premise, which is reportedly based on the idea that astronauts start to lose their grip on reality after being in space for long periods of time. Real-world astronaut Marsha Ivans even published an article in Time Magazine in 2017 that refutes the movie’s setup, in a piece titled “What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Female Astronauts and the Reality of Space”. The trailer footage is pretty visually striking (especially the outer space scenes) and, as mentioned, Hawley seems less interested in the tabloid-y elements of the story here, so it’ll be interesting to see if Lucy in the Sky itself attracts similar criticisms or not.
MORE: Long Shot Red Band Trailer Praises Rogen & Theron’s Rom-Com
Source: Fox Searchlight
