Noah Hawley’s existential astronaut drama looks like it’s going to take some of Legion’s penchant for mental trippiness and turn it into something that’s a little more down to earth for Natalie Portman…as much as her character doesn’t want it to be.
Fox Searchlight has just dropped our first look at Lucy in the Sky — formerly known as Pale Blue Dot. Hawley’s feature directorial debut is about an astronaut named Lucy (Portman) who returns to Earth after a long-term space mission, but struggles to accept a painfully small world after being shown the majesty of the cosmos. So, naturally, she starts sleeping with a fellow astronaut (Jon Hamm) and letting her humdrum married life get left by the wayside.
There are some really gorgeous shots in here, not just of the space mission moments, but the way Hawley presents Lucy’s romanticized remembrance of her time in the stars and her increasingly destabilized life on Earth. It might not get as weird as Legion could at its apex—somehow I don’t see Portman and Hamm breaking out into a mental dance-off at any point in this film — but it’s definitely taking some of that trippy exploration and applying it to a story that’s a bit more rooted in our own world than that of comic book heroes and villains.
Lucy in the Sky is set for a currently undisclosed release sometime this year.