Word: skies
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From the surface of Mars--where the sky is salmon and Earth is a blue morning star--you probably would have noticed the spaceship coming. It may have been the noise the thing made that caught your attention; although the Martian atmosphere is spent and shredded, it's not too tenuous to carry sound. And it's certainly not too tenuous to make anything that tries to punch through it pay the price, causing the interloper to glow like a meteor as it plunged toward a touchdown somewhere on the ancient world. That you couldn't have missed...
...night of the Fourth, when we landed on Mars, I walk the beach and watch the fireworks compete with the stars in the enormous black sky. This is Independence Day, and I am alone. So are we all. This is what we discover at times like these--the first flight around the moon, the moon walk, the probe of Jupiter, the Viking missions, and now this amazing, take-your-breath-away event. Errands into space lift us out of ourselves and return us to ourselves. They tell us that we are alone in the universe, and how terrible and wonderful...
Mapped here under the big bold sky is America's Geography of Conspiracy. If Disney were to create a theme park celebrating American paranoia (Suspicionland U.S.A.), it might want to base the design on central Nevada. Tumbleweed stretches of empty highway roller-coaster over mountain ranges and down into salt flats, past ghost towns, federal prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides...
Back in Austin, surrounded by rusty mining tools and curling 1950s girlie calendars, Wolfers sweeps up the last few splinters of glass. "This is their playground." He looks up at the sky. "They come in here from out East, all full of beans, and do their loop-the-loops and smash things up, and then their superiors cover up for them. They don't want bad news to get out. We locals know, though." Presumably Wolfers is talking about the Navy again, although he never specifies who "they" are. In central Nevada, "they" might be anyone...
This is a bright movie, in both senses of the word. The visual style, inspired by the pointy illustrations of Gerald Scarfe (who served as production designer), challenges the eye: blink, and you'll miss the sign in the sky indicating that Marilyn Monroe isn't just a star, she's a whole constellation. The script by Musker, Clements, Bob Shaw, Donald McEnery and Irene Mecchi is rife with Oedipus riffs, Achilles spiels, Zeus zingers and roman-numeral jokes--"Somebody call IX-I-I." The Greeks had a word for it: shtick...