Photos: Dive into the enchanting world of multiverse films
We've had parallel universes and alternate dimensions in fiction for decades. And while these ideas were popularised by the mind-bending adventures of comic-book superheroes, there’s a wealth of tales that exist today outside the Marvel and DC multiverses. Take a look.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.(Image Courtesy: A24 )
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The Lego Movie (2014): There’s a world of possibilities in the story starring Lego construction toys. Emmet (Chris Pratt) and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) go dimension-hopping through worlds with names such as Old West, Cloud Cuckoo Land and Middle Zealand, all to stop a tyrannical businessman from freezing our world using a tube of glue.(Image Courtesy: Warner Bros)
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Coherence (2013): The sci-fi/ psychological thriller follows eight friends at a reunion dinner party who experience strange events as a passing comet splits their reality in two. Chaos ensues as everyone must now kill their doppelgängers in order to be the last version standing when the comet moves on.(Image Courtesy: Bellanova Films, Ugly Duckling Films)
Another Earth (2011): A promising MIT astrophysicist, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), distracted by the appearance of another Earth in the night sky, crashes her car, causing a musician to lose his pregnant wife and lapse into a coma. Haunted by guilt and regret, Williams travels to another version of Earth where the accident never occurred.(Image Courtesy: Artists Public Domain)
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Source Code (2011): In this sci-fi film, a US Army Captain named Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trying to prevent a train bombing, using an experimental machine called Source Code that allows him to access parallel universes. As the machine helps him enter each new reality, he must try to track down the bomber before his time runs out.(Image Courtesy: Summit Entertainment)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
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Calcutta Houses was initially an Instagram page run by Manish Golder, Sidhartha Hajra and Sayan Dutta. They scoured the city and archived heritage homes, some dating to the early 1800s, others as recent as the Art Deco trend of the 1960s, many that would not be around much longer. Last year they got their first request to document in details a family home that they had featured on their page. Golder has now been commissioned to archive a 200-year-old ancestral home called Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home; seen here).
