Entertainment

Watch Natalie Portman Play An Astronaut In The Deeply Emotional 'Lucy In The Sky' Trailer

by Taylor Ferber

Space is already a mind-blowing concept, especially when brought to the big screen. But the upcoming film, Lucy in the Sky, will give a whole new, emotional take on space that perhaps viewers have yet to experience. The movie, starring Natalie Portman, had its first trailer debut on Tuesday. Although it's just two-and-a-half minutes, the preview is already so complex it'll not only make viewers intrigued, it'll have them contemplating the meaning of life.

In the film, Natalie Portman plays Lucy Cola, an astronaut who returns to Earth after a "transcendent experience" during a space mission. The mind-bending experience (for both Lucy and viewers, it seems), leads to a life-changing perspective, not only on space, but existence. After getting a surreal, larger-than-life view of the world, Lucy's experience on Earth becomes less based in reality as nothing can quite amount to how she felt and what she saw among the stars.

The trailer opens with a close-up of Lucy's eyes, a fixated gaze, in pure astonishment and nearly in tears as she looks out and soaks in the galaxy while on the mission. It then flashes between Lucy's experience in space, preparations leading to it, and executions, with the contrast of her mundane daily reality like sitting at the dinner table, bowling, and kissing her husband who's going to work goodbye. Soon enough, though, nothing is quite as it seems.

"Just feel a little off. You go up there, you see the whole universe," Lucy explains to a small group over beers at a bar. "And everything here looks so small." In the trailer, not only does Lucy seem depressed by the reality Earth has to offer, but her reality and time in space become intertwined and it's almost difficult (for Lucy and viewers) to separate one from the other.

Lucy is significantly changed because of her experience, a sentiment which Jon Hamm's character, who's also in the space ship with her at one point, expresses. "You got to see the vast celestial everything," he says to her. "And it blew your mind. So now nothing makes sense." Unlike many other films that take place in space or center on an astronaut, Lucy in the Sky seems deeply-rooted in the human experience verses chronicling exploration of planets or extraterrestrials.

Movies about space are nothing new, but since 2013 specifically, there's been a significant rise in such films. The 2013 action-drama Gravity really put the space movie back on the map, as it followed a woman's (Sandra Bullock) intense journey to return home after her spacecraft endures malfunctions. The following year, the mystery-drama Interstellar premiered about a quest to find mankind's new home in the galaxy. 2015's The Martian chronicled a man stranded on Mars (and was even categorized as a comedy) and there's also been space biopics like First Man (2018) and Apollo 13 (1995).

Still, it seems there's nothing out there quite like Lucy in the Sky. Given its complex first preview, it'll certainly be a film people are talking, and thinking, about.