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There's a shot in the war movie The Thin Red Line that I can't stop thinking about: soldiers scattered over a distant hill, crouched in the grass, waiting. What happens? Nothing. Or rather, nothing you can type into a shooting script and then stick on the screen. But at the same time, everything happens: the mood shifts, the calm breaks. And all because the light has changed: a cloud moving across the sky, a darkening, a transition.You can see almost anything in films these days - the summer blockbusters are steadily becoming lavish animations - but you rarely see this: nature captured in its restlessness, its formless drift from one thing to another. Terrence Malick could have called in CG artists if he'd wanted. He could have painted the skies with digital aircraft or dazzled us with the bloom of artificial explosions. Instead, he waited. For how long, I have no idea. He rolled film and waited for the light to change.
I suppose Everybody Goes to the Rapture is a bizarre inversion of that: CG imagery - the CryEngine, no less - employed to build nature from scratch, to capture the wind moving through trees, bracken crunching underfoot, a gate creaking on its hinges. This is the video game as landscape - countryside, farmland, a few houses. A place where something has happened, and where you might be able to tease it all out as the light changes, as one strand of thought twists with another, as a cloud moves across the sky. A transition.
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