'Oblivion' and Tom Cruise: A closer look at the Bubble Ship design
April 10, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.
The Bubble Ship rests on its launchpad at Skytower in "Oblivion." The spacecraft was inspired, in part, by the Bell 47 helicopter. (Universal Pictures)
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The Bubble Ship concept design, by Daniel Simon, for "Oblivion," which is set in an apocalyptic vision of the year 2073. (Daniel Simon / Universal Pictures)
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Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) pilots the Bubble Ship in a scene from "Oblivion." (Universal Pictures)
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Jack (Tom Cruise) is interrogated by Beech (Morgan Freeman) in "Oblivion." (David James / Universal Pictures)
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The U.S.S. Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, the Nostromo in the best science-fiction movies, the spaceship is an iconic character unto itself.
So when Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski set about designing a spacecraft for Tom Cruise to pilot in his next film, the sci-fi thriller Oblivion, due in theaters April 19, he knew the stakes were high.
Based on a 2010 graphic novel Kosinski penned with comic book writer Arvid Nelson, Oblivion takes place in a not-so-distant future when Earth has been decimated by an alien invasion, and former Marine Jack Harper (Cruise) is one of a few people left on the planet to mop up after the war.
The movie, written by William Monahan, Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt, also stars Morgan Freeman as a 102-year-old insurgency leader, Melissa Leo as Jacks authoritarian boss and Olga Kurylenko as a mysterious woman who stirs Jacks memories.
Kosinski found inspiration for Jacks craft the so-called Bubble Ship in an unlikely place, the lobby of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. Thats where the Bell 47 helicopter, a utilitarian 1947 helicopter with a transparent round canopy, hangs from the ceiling. The Bell 47 already holds a prominent place in the annals of vehicle design it has served as a Korean War ambulance and a Batcopter in the 1966 Batman movie, among other jobs.
It looks like a dragonfly, said Kosinski, who was trained as an architect. I love that. But its very functional, a helicopter stripped down to its essential parts.
Working with Daniel Simon, the lead vehicle designer on Tron: Legacy, Kosinski took the inspiration of the Bell 47 and merged it with an advanced fighter! jet to c! reate the Bubble Ship. The aim was to build a vehicle as practical as it was pretty, a lesson he took from the utilitarian design of the ships in Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When Kubrick made 2001, rather than going to the hotshot concept designers of the day, he hired NASA engineers, Kosinski said. I believe form follows function. Im not a fan of excessive decoration, of putting fins on something because it looks cool.
The Bubble Ship concept design, by Daniel Simon, for Oblivion, which is set in an apocalyptic vision of the year 2073. (Daniel Simon / Universal Pictures)
The Bubble Ship is a physical prop, not a digital one. A Camarillo concept car company called Wild Factory built the mostly aluminum vehicle, which is 25 feet long and weighs 4,000 to 5,000 pounds.
We knew the Bubble Ship was gonna be in a lot of shots, Kosinski said. So economically it made sense to actually build this thing. But its not some flimsy movie prop. It was built solid so it feels like Tom could really fly it.
Tom Cruise stars as Jack Harper in Oblivion. (David James / Universal Pictures)
The Bubble Ships designers customized the craft for Cruises body, including where the joystick sits and the placement of the pedals. Since the actor is a pilot in real life, he had certain input into the design as well, Kosinski said.
The ship needed to be easy to assemble and disassemble, so the crew could transport it from California to the movies Iceland set, and mount it on a gimbal for flying scenes.
Drones unmanned aerial vehicles left over from Earths war play a key role in the film, too, and Kosinski sought to keep them in the same design family as the Bubble Ship, with its light and functional aesthetic.
By shooting Oblivion in Iceland in June, when there is near-continuous daylight and the warm, waning light known as magic hour lasts from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m., Kosinski sought to take his vehicle designs out into a bold and revolutionary place for sci-fi: the sunshine.
My idea with this movie was bringing sci-fi out into the daylight, Kosinski said, drawing a contrast to Ridley Scotts seminal 1979 sci-fi film, Alien. Alien put sci-fi into the darkness in the hulls of ships, dark planets, always seeming to be night. I was interested in inverting that, shooting a daylight film. I wanted there to be a beauty in this kind of desolation, in clean technology set against the primordial world of Iceland.
Rebecca Keegan
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