In our continuity.
I thought it was amazing overall, but I did have three quibbles:
(1) the idea that Clooney would have to ask her what she was doing. On any shuttle missions, isn’t everyone on the mission briefed 8 ways from Sunday about every aspect of what every single person is doing? Along those lines, does it really make sense for someone who invented a particular piece of software or hardware to be the one to install it on the Hubble in space? That seems weird
(2) She put on an unfamiliar space suit on the Soyuz in about 2 minutes. Doesn’t putting on a spacesuit take like an hour?
(3) As others have pointed out, the physics of the scene where Clooney sacrificed himself just doesn’t make sense, which is a shame because so many other similar things they got exactly right. (Unless the whole station was spinning FAST, and we didn’t see that at all.)
Still, a damn good movie.
Overly simplistic analysis, stating the obvious, a week after watching the film:
Dr. Stone began as a passive victim, unable to even move on her own. She was taken by her mentor from the first no-longer-safe place, and reached the second with his help and direct effort. The image of the ISS as a womb that she must leave was pretty blatant.
She escapes the second place and almost fails to reach the third except for the assistance of her mentor’s ghost (I know it was a hallucination, but same thing in-story). That’s youth, where you set off on your own with guidance from your forebears.
She negotiates the escape from the third place on her own, and passes through fire and water to finally stand upon her own two feet as an adult
Classic hero’s journey, on a rule-of-three structure. And it looked cool as hell.
Yep - well summarized. And it won the weekend again with relatively little drop-off.
A strong, straightforward hero story - featuring a woman. As I have mentioned upthread, I am curious if the movie will be a touchpoint with girls based on that, or if I am thinking too hard about it 
Well it just cleared $300 million worldwide, but China, the UK and a few other countries haven’t opened yet. So I may have been a bit optimistic, but I bet this movie will generate revenue for a lot longer than most movies. I can see, I dunno, midnight IMAX showings for years.
Oh, and it appears that Cuaron made a complete animated version prior to filming to storyboard the shots.
How Did Gravity Do That? The Secrets Behind Its Groundbreaking Special Effects | Cinemablend.
[QUOTE= Alfonso Cuaron]
“We animated the whole film before. We could have released an animated version with the voices of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.”
[/QUOTE]
That has got to be part of their over-the-top collector’s edition Blu-Ray that will inevitably be coming ;). It would be fascinating to see…
I won’t dwell too much on what the movie got wrong, since Stranger pretty much said it all already. All I’ll add is that while it might make sense to put the ISS and the Hubble in the same orbit, so the one can rescue the other, I had a hard time buying the Chinese station being there, too: They wouldn’t have their own station separate from the ISS if they didn’t want to make a point of going it alone. But as Stranger said, the departures from reality were pretty much all necessary for the story they wanted to tell, so I can forgive that.
It’s also remarkable how much they got right. Like, right at the beginning, when Bullock is knocked away and her suit is spinning wildly, I was convinced that they were going to have her spin dampen out and stabilize… But they didn’t. She kept on spinning uncontrollably until the captain got to her with the jetpack, just as she should have. Which made it both more realistic and a better movie.
I was also a bit surprised that we didn’t see any flashback scenes to fill it out, but reading the other comments, I can see now why we didn’t.
And I’ll confess that I didn’t notice the fetal symbolism. But that’s mostly because, while I was watching that scene, my primary thought was “Damn, she’s hot”. Yet another thing that Cuaron managed to weave in: The story, the visuals, the symbolism, and showing off the star’s great bod.
Oh, since nobody else has mentioned it, I loved the radio chatter at the beginning. “Amazingly, Engineering has not yet heard the Mardi Gras story. Please proceed”. Yeah, they were talking about the mission when they needed to, but in between, it was just this perfectly ordinary BSing between friends.
Clooney was completely believable as the commander. Sure, we first meet him hot-dogging around and telling outrageous tall tales, but he clicks immediately into professional competent mode when everything went pear-shaped.
The problem I had with the tall tales is that I can’t see that type of chatter on the com line while doing EVA work. Sure, a few allusions, some asides, but tall tales? Not gonna happen.
I saw it yesterday. 3-D, not IMAX. I loved it. Having said that, I’ve a question/ nitpick though this may be sheer physics ignorance. I also have a bit of a rant.
When Ryan’s leg/foot was entangled in the thin flat ribbon, and she got ahold of Matt, they were all- the ISS, Ryan, Matt, ribbon, etc- were all moving at exactly the same speed through space. Yes? Let’s say 22,000 mph just for yuks.
If this were the case, how could there have been drag on both of them. If there WAS no drag on them, how did the flat ribbon slowly pull off her leg and eventually become taut? It couldn’t be because the two of them were embroiled, or because he’d pulled her away from the ship. Had he pulled her away from the ship when he grabbed onto her and then latched on mechanically, yes they would have pulled away until that one moment when the flat ribbon went taut, they then would have immediately rebounded towards the ship. Yes? No?
Assuming they were all moving at the same speed, as that sequence unfolded ( for sound -or soundless…heh… - reasons ), the ribbon may or may not have been taut. But when he detached, he should not have fallen behind/away with some small acceleration. Detaching should have meant nothing, assuming he hadn’t pushed away from her as he detached. I believe he did not. Instead, he unlocked the hook and then without pushing at he body, he slid away and her leg- held taut by the flat ribbon- pulled her away with a definite yank.
I call bullshit, right? If I’m moving at 22k mph, we all are. If, OTOH, I am to believe that the ISS ship, and both actors are in non-accelerated geosynchronous orbit, then they’re not moving in relation to the Earth but they are still moving through space at the same rate of speed with which the Earth rotates.
I am feeling that in either case- moving around the Earth or held geosynchronously- his moment of detach should NOT have resulted in what felt to me like an action/reaction based upon both gravity and friction as forces at play.
Thoughts? Is Sir Isaac Newton spinning in his grave?
I also find the use of the ghost late in the game to be a supremely pussy move. Here they are- male and female- complete equals. ( I know, much hay has been made of the fact that her training dictated that she should NOT have been doing board swaps in low orbit. But we set that aside for a moment ). Two equals. Astronauts. Highly trained scientists- with the focus, physical skill set, training and intellectual rigor to allow them to WIND UP IN SPACE in the first place.
She’s dying of hypoxia ( self-induced at that moment, as we see ) and suddenly George Clooney channeling Patrick fuckin’ Swayze apears and gets her back from the brink. Really???. It undermines her as a mature complex character. The Man saved her from death. Left alone, she was dead.
Each and every one of these belongs here: :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Fuckin’ cheap-assed Hollywood ploy. Use some OTHER ploy. Something. She sees a photo of a Chinese astronauts family held to the panel before her, she rips open a Velcro™ flap and withdraws a wrinkled and careworn photo of Dead Blonde Daughter and is inspired by it to live.
Something. Anything but the deification of Clooney into Savior/God as the mechanism of her rebirth.
:dubious:
Cheap. Assed. Ploy.
I saw it alone, my Dearly Beloved is disappointed at this and wishes to see it. So, I’ll be seeing it again. Looking forward to this. Still… the physics.
Every adult is different of course, but might I suggest that after several days of minimal body bathing ( "cat baths " ) and no real hair-washing, her hair would have been so fucking greasy that it’s quite believable that it wouldn’t be waving about a la Sally Ride?
Even if they’d only been up for a day or two ( I cannot remember that detail ), she was in a deep state of panic for quite a while in the beginning, burning up her oxygen. Her body was flooded with hormonal response, and while we saw no sweat pouring down her face, I’d completely believe that her scalp got wet enough that her hair should not have stood up at all.
Must respectfully disagree. As my posts up there show, I’m skeptical re: physics in the film. As a film buff and lover of stories steeped in Very Old Myth story structure, this thing has legs. It has more going on in it than Titanic by a long mile.
Much as I adore Kubrick, I might even venture to say that this film uses the enormous negative space of space every bit as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey did.
That one seemingly innocuous and factual line:
.
Fuck man, 100 km may seem like nothing in space- and look at how much tension and feeling of isolation was built into the approach- and how narrowly she avoided glancing off the skin of the station into space.
The tension (more to the point, the continued tension) in the ribbon-thing they got snared in did bug me, too. Other posters have fanwanked it as a result of rotation. Which is plausible on the face of it, but I’d have to re-watch the scene to judge whether it’s consistent with what we saw.
That also bothered me when I saw the movie. The only way I can think that might have made sense is if the station was rotating, and while they were at the end of the parachute ribbon tangled around her leg there was centripetal force acting upon them.
I didn’t see it as has ghost saving her. He was just a hallucination (likely due to the hypoxia). Her subconscious mind knew that she shouldn’t give up, so she hallucinated someone to come give her a kick in the ass to get her moving again. She thought there was no possible way to get the Soyuz to Tiangong, but her subconscious mind was working on the problem and realized that she could use the soft landing jets. So she hallucinated someone coming to tell her how to fix the problem. It wasn’t The Man coming to save the poor widdle woman - she saved herself, and her brain found a way to tell herself what it had figured out. She hallucinated Kowalsky in particular because he’s really the only person it could have been (everyone else in space being dead, and a rescue mission being impossible) - and also it probably faked out a few people in the audience who maybe thought it actually was him and that he found a way to get back to the Soyuz despite running out of fuel for his jetpack.
It might be a bit of a fanwank, but that was the way I interpreted the scene when I saw it.
That’s not a fanwank - that was clearly intended to be hallucinatory.
The way I remember it (and I could be misremembering) is that the cord wasn’t holding her tight - she was slipping through it, with friction slowing her down but not quickly enough with Clooney’s mass attached to her. So when she let go, the reduced mass allowed the friction from the sliding cord to stop her.
Hmmm. I can easily accept this. Need to see this again, and have to wait to do so. :smack:
Myself, I thought at first that it was real, but I realized that it was a hallucination once she pulled her hand away from her face and we could see that she wasn’t bleeding out her nose. Because she would have been, if her hatch had really been opened on her, and by this point I trusted the movie enough to get details like that right.
Saw it yesterday and really, really liked it. Awesome views of orbital space (glad I saw it in 3D!). One terrifyingly real action sequence after another. Nice dynamic between the Bullock and Clooney characters. A genuine sense of mourning when they see and realize that their fellow astronauts in the shuttle Explorer have all died. A white-knuckle adventure tale as Dr. Stone tries one thing after another to survive. And a nice touch to have Ed Harris (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13) as the voice of Mission Control.
Didn’t recognize his voice- loved seeing the credit at the end. Not for nothing, but Scott Carpenter would have been that much MORE awesome as the voice of Houston, since Scott is the one who said Godspeed, John Glenn.
Scott Carpenter died this autumn but man, the film was shot what- last year? Pity they didn’t go there.