The Farthest
Director: Emer Reynolds
Talent: Frank Drake, Carolyn Porco, John Casani, Lawrence Krauss
Released: 28th July
In 1977 the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched two robotic probes, Voyager One and Voyager Two, for the purpose of studying in never-before-imaginable detail the outermost planets of our Solar System. Capitalising on a particularly rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the space probes were able to slingshot from one planet to the next, in a journey that lasted 12 years, following a trajectory precisely mapped out by scientists and mathematicians on Earth.
You might reasonably have expected that the probes returned to NASA once their unprecedented mission of data collection was accomplished, or otherwise, that obsolescence and cosmic wear quickly deteriorated the pair. You would be wrong. Incredibly, both of these probes are still travelling through space, and in 2012 Voyager One became the first man-made object to ever exit our Solar System, piercing the magnetic bubble known as the heliosheath, and entering into interstellar space.
Thus comes the concept behind the film’s title, and while it may not immediately strike you as particularly evocative, watching this documentary will open your eyes to the breath-taking scale it implies. Emer Reynolds, one half of the directorial team responsible for producing 2013’s excellent documentary Here Was Cuba, masterfully brings together a plethora of interviews with all of the major players of the Voyager Programme, interweaving their personal accounts with imagery of the probes’ journey through space, both real and digitally imagined.
While the format may sound somewhat predictable, the pacing and narrative of the film are far too engrossing for anyone to become bored. Watching the recorded footage, captured by the space probes as they incrementally approached their planetary targets – seeing what had hitherto never been seen by human eyes before – is a deeply affecting experience, and heightened by the scientists’ first-hand statements.
In an era consumed with the deterioration of our own planet, the outward gaze of this film is a powerful reminder that the future looked very different only one generation ago.
Words – Tom Lordan
