“Witness the northern lights in person” is a popular bucket-list item for a reason. This gorgeous phenomenon is so breathtaking, even those who see it in person struggle to believe their own eyes. But have you ever thought about what the northern lights look like in places besides Earth? Lucky for us all, a video from the International Space Station was shared on social media, and it’s giving us a view of this natural phenomenon that’s unlike any other. NASA Astronaut Don Pettit is who we have to thank for this incredible footage. He frequently shares his views from space, but his videos of the northern l,ights are especially popular. According to reports, he was preparing to dock with a spacecraft when he got this priceless footage. Check out his perspective in the video below! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Don Pettit (@astro_pettit) “How fortunate we are to live in an age when we can witness magic like this!” someone wisely points out in reply to Don’s video, another person adding, “Amazing! So jealous you don’t have clouds to contend with!” NASA Astronaut Don Pettit Shares a Breathtaking Video of the Northern Lights, as Seen from the International Space Station That isn’t the only stunning footage Don managed to capture. In the video below, we see the lights from an entirely different angle. This one gives us a better view of Earth as a whole in the distance. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Don Pettit (@astro_pettit) “I thought this was a boat cutting through a bioluminescent bay for a second,” someone admits in the comments, another pointing out, “I bet this is incredible to see in person.” Seeing both the northern lights and Earth from this perspective never ceases to amaze. It’s a great reminder that the universe is far more vast and beautiful than we could ever imagine! You can find the source of this story’s featured image here! The post International Space Station Captures Footage Stunning Natural Phenomenon Like You’ve Never Seen It Before! appeared first on InspireMore.

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Column Science Fiction Film Club The Iron Giant: One of the World’s Few Truly Perfect Movies Born out of grief, the film delivers a timeless, powerful message. By Kali Wallace | Published on April 16, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. The Iron Giant (1999). Directed by Brad Bird. Written by Tim McCanlies and Brad Bird, based on the novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. Starring Eli Marienthal, Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Christopher McDonald, and Vin Diesel. I am being completely earnest when I say The Iron Giant is a perfect movie. Sure, you can disagree, I guess. You’ll be wrong, but that’s fine. I am stalwart in my position: This movie is perfect. I love everything about it, which makes it somewhat difficult to figure out how to write about it in a way that doesn’t involve me alternating keyboard smashing with excessive use of the heart-eyes emoji. So we’ll go back to the beginning—which is, alas, a very dark and tragic beginning. On February 11, 1963, American writer Sylvia Plath died by suicide at her home in London, while her children were asleep elsewhere in the flat. This is not the place to get into the details of her highly publicized personal life, deeply troubled marriage, and death at a much too young age. It’s relevant here because one of the things that happened in the aftermath of her death was that her husband, English poet Ted Hughes, would tell stories to their young children. One of those stories would evolve into the children’s novel The Iron Man: A Children’s Story in Five Nights, which was published in 1968 with illustrations by George Adamson. (It was renamed The Iron Giant when it was published in the United States to avoid being mistaken for the Marvel comics character, who had been introduced in 1962.) The Iron Man is the story of a giant metal man of unknown origin who appears in the English countryside and stomps around eating farm equipment. A local boy befriends the metal man and draws him into the community. All is well until an enormous “Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon” crashes into—and obliterates—Australia, and subsequently demands that humanity feed it. The metal man goes to Australia to battle the space dragon, and somehow this leads to the pair of them having a contest to see who can withstand greater heat, and somehow this leads to the dragon revealing that it is actually a benevolent star spirit that can sing songs to bring peace to humanity. I don’t know if the dragon ever apologizes for what it did to Australia. The astute reader will note that the first half of that book summary matches the film The Iron Giant fairly well, right up until the space dragon appears. The second half only works if you acknowledge the space dragon is a metaphor for the atomic bomb (and if you disregard the destruction of Australia). It was that metaphor that drew interest for the first adaptation of the book. What was the first adaptation, you ask? Well, it was Pete Townshend’s 1989 concept album The Iron Man: The Musical. You can listen to it anywhere you listen to music, but don’t worry, it sounds exactly like what you would expect a late ’80s Pete Townshend concept album based on a ’60s atomic era children’s book to sound like. It took a few more years for the album to actually be staged as a musical, and when it finally premiered in 1993, it was roundly trounced by critics. The musical fizzled, but one of Townshend’s buddies saw possibilities in it anyway. That was Des McAnuff, who was at the time directing Townshend’s much more successful musical The Who’s Tommy, which is based on the 1969 rock opera album Tommy, and now you will have the song “Pinball Wizard” stuck in your heads all day, and I’m not sorry. McAnuff thought that The Iron Man would make a pretty good film, and he was the one who eventually brought the project to Warner Brothers. The mid-’90s was the era of the industry-shaking Disney animated film revival, which had begun in 1989 with The Little Mermaid and showed no signs of slowing down. Everybody in Hollywood wanted in on that juggernaut. Warner Bros. put some animated movies into production, including The Iron Giant. Brad Bird took on the story pretty much right from the start, and the studio brought in Texan theater-kid-turned-police-officer-turned-filmmaker Tim McCanlies to write the script. They took the elements of the book they wanted to keep but also changed quite a lot: they moved the story to rural Maine and steeped it in 1950s Americana, added an antagonist in the form of paranoid government agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), and traded the metaphorical nuclear bomb of the space dragon for an actual nuclear bomb. Most importantly, they focused the emotional core of the film on the giant (voiced by Vin Diesel), his relationship with Hogarth (Eli Marienthal), and the choices he makes because of that friendship. The metal man in Hughes’ book saves the day by volunteering as a weapon to defeat the Australia-destroying space dragon, but the giant in the film chooses a very different path. In interviews over the years, Bird has explained that he wanted to focus the film around the question “What if a gun had a soul?” For Bird, it was a deeply personal question; a few years earlier his sister had been shot and killed by her husband. In the documentary The Giant’s Dream: The Making of the Iron Giant (2016), he talks about how the book resonated with him when Warner Bros. first presented the project to him: “The notion of being in pieces and pulling yourself together again was a poetic way to make sense out of something that was so difficult to withstand.” The film was born of heartbreak and mourning, and it was written to evoke a very particular kind of elegiac nostalgia combined with very real and troubling historical context. None of those things were necessarily in vogue in ’90s children’s feature films. That’s not to say they were absent—children’s media has always grappled with darker adult concepts—but it wasn’t really the focus of the ’90s feature animation boom. Bird and McCanlies have spoken about how the studio did try to persuade them to, well, Disney-fy, the story by making it a musical, or adding a sidekick character or a cute dog, or even changing it to a modern setting to make it more “relatable.” They resisted, and the studio relented, in part because the production was under such a tight timeline that nobody had time to argue. I’m so glad Warner Bros. didn’t insist on any of those changes. There is a lot to criticize about how the studio failed to market The Iron Giant when it was released. That was a mistake they realized on their own from the moment the test audiences came out of early screenings with rave reviews; their severe miscalculation was emphasized when critics greeted the movie with awed admiration and praise. Warner Bros. scrambled but couldn’t put together a proper promotion in time for it to matter, so the film was a box office failure. But before that, during the very rushed production, what they did right—if only by accident—was stay hands-off enough to let Bird make the movie he wanted to make. The film is set in October of 1957, right after the launch of Sputnik 1 sent the United States into a flurry of national fear and paranoia. The small seaside town of Rockwell, Maine, is well aware of the news. When a fisherman (voiced by M. Emmet Walsh) has an alarming encounter in the ocean—in an opening scene reminiscent of the fishing boat attack in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)—everybody assumes it was a delusion, or a Soviet spy machine, or even invaders from outer space, with all of those possibilities being treated with amusement and skepticism rather than genuine fear. The film is managing an incredibly skillful and delicate balancing act here, weighing the Cold War context of the setting with the post-Cold War context of the movie itself, to create a curious sort of nostalgia. It’s not the sort of nostalgia that craves a bygone era, but the sort that creates a vision of a bygone era that the film knows never truly existed. Nor is it snide or judgmental about that vision, unlike a lot of the cynical media that came out of the ’90s. Instead there is a knowing warmth to it. The film is telling us a story that is, in part, about the stories we have told about our own history. The film crew put a lot of work into getting the look and feel of the film just right. Production designer Mark Whiting took members of the production crew to coastal Maine to study and reference the look of real towns in detail, and the film’s art style is reminiscent of mid-century American illustrators and realist artists such as Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, and N.C. Wyeth. They also studied and referenced earlier animated films. Head animator Tony Fucile specifically namechecked Disney’s The 101 Dalmatians (1961) as one source of visual inspiration. But it went even farther than the artistic inspiration. They also employed an old-school division of labor for much of the film. In many modern animated films, individual animators are responsible for a specific character, but the animators of The Iron Giant were assigned to handle entire chunks of the film. Most of the main characters are traditionally illustrated. The one character handled by a single animator is also the one that’s computer animated, and that’s the giant himself, who was animated almost entirely by artist/designer Steve Markowski. There’s one final detail that goes along with making it look and feel like the ’50s, and that is Bird’s decision to shoot the film in the CinemaScope 2.39:1 aspect ratio, even though he was told that was a poor choice for a film with a strong vertical element (i.e., a very tall giant). There is a lot of technical stuff behind this, but the very brief summary is that CinemaScope is a type of anamorphic lens that was used in the ’50s and ’60s, including on Disney’s The 101 Dalmatians. An aspect ratio of 2.39:1 is very wide and not very tall. When filmmakers want to allow for more vertical image on the screen, they might instead use an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Bird references an obvious example: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), which allows the audience to see as much of the dinosaurs as possible, and does so extremely well. But 1.85:1 is also the aspect ratio of the theatrical releases of big Disney renaissance films of the ’90s, such as Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992). So by using the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, Bird was subtly making The Iron Giant look more like an old animated film than a new one, but he was also choosing a curious way of dealing with the visual challenges of the giant’s great height. We don’t often see all of the giant standing upright in the frame, because he is simply too big to fit in the scale of the forests, farms, and small town that make up the film’s setting. We mostly see him bit by bit or partially obscured—those wonderful shots of the giant looming behind trees!—both of which emphasize the child’s-eye view of the story. As we get to know him, we see more of him crouched down, bending over, or in close-up on his hands or face, which visually emphasize his interactions with Hogarth. As I have said before regarding other films, how well a film is made and how good it looks is one thing, but the effectiveness of the story is something else entirely. But in this case it’s all good, because the story is also perfect. The film is lovingly paying homage to atomic era sci fi such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953), but it’s also wryly reiterating, with a distance of forty-some years, that we’ve known all along that those films were always truly about how much humanity fears itself. The contrast between the jaunty duck-and-cover video Hogarth sees at school and the admission at the end that most people know the exercise is pointless is absolutely chilling. (Hogarth’s teacher is voiced by the legendary Cloris Leachman.) Equally chilling are the way the government officials handle the unknown and the ease with which Mansley’s assumptions and lies endanger so many people. As we’ve seen in several movies already, this is the staple question of atomic era science fiction: Will we use the bomb again? But The Iron Giant isn’t atomic era sci fi, although the source novel is. It’s late ’90s sci fi, made after the Cold War ended and people stopped worrying so much about nuclear annihilation, in which the presence of the U.S. military, fueled by paranoia and xenophobia, will always recklessly exacerbate a dangerous situation. It doesn’t shy away from showing the danger of reacting to every threat, real or perceived, with violence. There is so much heavy stuff here, but it’s not a heavy movie, and that is remarkable. It’s bright and warm and very, very funny. It’s beautiful and smart, and it makes use of its setting so well that we are welcomed into this small Maine town at the end of autumn and beginning of winter. The relationship between Hogarth and his mother (voiced by Jennifer Aniston) is wonderful, as is Hogarth’s growing friendships with both the giant and the beatnik junkyard artist Dean (Harry Connick Jr.). And with a complete lack of cynicism, love and the power of friendship save the day. Not because such things are imbued with any special magic, but because love and friendship mean demonstrating to each other with both words and actions that we don’t have to follow the well-trodden paths laid out for us. It plays out simply, sincerely, without any caveat or reservation. If even a programmed killing machine from outer space can make a choice, then anybody can make a choice. That’s the heart of the story. This film is not trying to be more morally complex than a fable; it does not bother engaging with the cynics and pessimists who always show up to sneer that everybody is cruel and selfish at heart. It has no interest in that viewpoint, because it’s a viewpoint that offers nothing to this story. The result is charming, heartfelt, and poignant, but it’s also incredibly powerful. I’ve seen The Iron Giant several times over the years. Every time I take something new away from it, and I never get tired of it. With this most recent watch, in this era when there are so many pathetic, spluttering Kent Mansleys using so much unrestrained xenophobia to justify seemingly limitless cruelty, I find myself thinking mostly about the giant’s point of view. The giant could not control why or how he was made, or where he came from, or why he crashed on Earth. Nor could he stop men from pointing guns at him and, when the situation is over, going off to point those guns at somebody else. There are moments when the giant doesn’t even have control of his own body. What he has are his own actions, his own choices, and the courage to face the consequences. And he has his friends. All of that matters, even in a world gone mad. In conclusion, this movie is perfect. What do you think about The Iron Giant? Have your thoughts on it changed over the past twenty-five years? We all agree this is Vin Diesel’s greatest role, right? The Sci Fi Film Club will be on hiatus for the next three weeks, and will return on May 14! We’ll be watching Alê Abreu’s Boy and the World. You can find it on Amazon, Fandango, or Microsoft.[end-mark] The post <i>The Iron Giant</i>: One of the World’s Few Truly Perfect Movies appeared first on Reactor.