Review: SPACE EXPLORERS: THE ISS EXPERIENCE, Eclipso
Do look down: this VR-enabled trip through the International Space Station is as much about the humanity as the science
The most common question people ask me about immersive theatre — right after “do I need to wear a costume?” and “is there a bar?” — is usually something along the lines of “What does ‘immersive’ mean and isn’t everything immersive?” To cover the second part first: yes, everything is immersive, and everything is also theatre, opera and dance from a particular viewpoint. An art form is more than a stage and its performers; it is also what its audience demands of it.
When it comes to what I demand from immersive theatre, there is only really only one request: to feel transported. And it is hard (very, very hard) not to feel transported when — post the obligatory health-and-safety induction and thirty seconds after strapping on an HTC Vive VR headset — my senses tell me that I am stood in the middle of inky black space looking at a huge blue and green planet in crystal clear 8K resolution. No sounds, no distractions, just a brilliantly shimmering globe that I could have watched all day and all night. Then, when I turn around, an equally gobsmackingly enormous space station shimmering with vague light.
Anyone who has been to show at Eclipso or its Shepherd's Bush competitor Excurio like Colosseum: The Legendary Arena or The Last Stronghold should know Space Explorers is far from their standard fare. Normally at the initial stage, we would be introduced to a chatty virtual guide who shepherds us along a fixed track through worlds rendered with the fidelity of a 2000s-era PlayStation game. Shuffling along in obedient single file, we would go down into dark subterranean spaces, be lifted up to via a platform to indulge in far-as-the-eye-can-see vistas, meet a character here, take in a set-piece there and then be confronted by a stampeding dinosaur or a fiery dragon. This latest slice of VR throws all that away for much more and a little less.
The footage we see comes with a serious pedigree. Montreal's Felix & Paul Studios spent two years filming for roughly 250 hours (the largest production ever shot in orbit) aboard the International Space Station with cameras hardened by Nanoracks to survive the vacuum, the radiation and a temperature swing of some 500 degrees. Two episodes of the resulting series brought home a Primetime Emmy in 2021. PHI Studio then built the material into THE INFINITE, a walkable full-scale ISS that toured Houston, Singapore and beyond and pulled in more than half a million visitors. What has landed in Eclipso’s Camden basement is the trimmed-down, free-roaming heir to all that.
Importantly, this is portraiture and not plot. Rather than trail a host, you drift among a scattering of green orbs suspended midair; approach one and it blooms into an all-encompassing film clip. There is deliberately not enough time to reach them all, and — for once at one of these things — that scarcity works in the show's favour, turning a forty-minute slot into a set of choices rather than a conveyor belt.
What the green orbs contain is life aboard the station. More Earth, at different hours of its turning. Astronauts at work, at exercise, throwing a ball to each down a corridor, out on a spacewalk. The science itself registers less as spectacle than as slow accretion: every day these bodies spend in orbit is itself an experiment, telemetry on what space does to the handful of humans reckless enough to stay a while. There are neat toys to go with it all: virtual balls left drifting in the corridors can be nudged along or scooped up, virtual buttons can be jabbed for a response. This is a 360-degree world that invites us to explore it and never fails our curiosity; something to consider maybe next time a musical calls itself “immersive”.
And yet — and this was the biggest surprise — it is not the tech, nor the views but the humanity that hits hardest. One sequence catches a crew reaching the end of their tour, filing towards the airlock, pausing for a round of long hugs and a few not-so-hidden tears. The comradeship is real and it travels.
It is also, watched from the summer of 2026, quietly moving: NASA intends to begin lowering the ISS in 2028 and drop what remains into the Pacific by early 2031. This is a home movie of an already condemned house. Two of the faces we meet, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, have since flown round the Moon. The station has a demolition date, its crew already left off to expand our understanding of the next frontier.
Felix and Paul do the simplest and hardest thing: point their cameras at people doing something impossibly hard in an unforgiving environment, then trust what comes out to carry itself. This mostly works with the cinematography, editing and quiet direction conjuring moments that are genuinely moving.
This is a rare show that earns the “immersive” tag almost immediately and stays with you for hours after. The source material is not just a designer's fever dream but a genuine record of one of the species' better ideas, shot by the people living inside it. You come for the cosmos and the curiosity; you stay, unexpectedly, for the company of eight people being decent to one another a very long way from home and by the knowledge that the place they did it in will soon be ash over the ocean.
Space Explorers: The ISS Experience continues at Eclipso
Image Credit: Courtesy of Production
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