Nah – she was caught on the rope and he claimed he was pulling at her – not the case. That this pivotal thing, that they could have written accurately and gotten the same result, was wrong bugs the shit out of me. And the aforementioned “Where are you from?” to someone you’ve been with for at least a week and probably a lot longer. And the fact that there is Oscar buzz about a performance that didn’t require much acting. And that complete silence would have been so much better than manipulative music…
Late to the party…3D IMAX.
– Do all of the entry hatched maintain a positive pressure within in reality? I think at least three separate times a flinging hatch sent someone flopping about.
– The heads-up display within her helmet was cool, I didn’t know current NASA suits had that (…do they?). However, the focal point of the HUD image looked completely wrong, when looking out the helmet from Sandra’s perspective, the image should have been in focus “floating” out in space from her viewpoint. Instead, the in-helmet perspective had the HUD image blurry.
– The fetus pose scene, to me, seemed like a direct shout-out to 2001, as if the director was shouting “The next generation of space movie effects is now here!”
– My personal biggest fear is drowning, I wasn’t truly gripping my seat until the final minutes of water flooding the capsule.
It is still going pretty strong a few weeks out. I think it is close to $250mm in US Domestic box office. It is looking like I overprojected - I was saying it should clear $1 billion, but it is at $425 million at this point. Still a nice run and clearly this movie’s approach and tech will be used going forward…
But it should still keep making money for a bit; and I suspect the Oscar announcements may build on that…
Positive compared to vacuum, you mean?
In space, no one can hear you scream
May be GRAVITY’s chilling meme
But longing for Earth,
Symbolic rebirth
Is more than a casual theme.
NASA airlocks are inwards-opening, so it is impossible to open the hatch before first depressurizing the chamber. Any significant pressure inside will make it physically impossible to open the hatch. I think some of the older Russian airlocks were outward-opening, at least on Mir. Not sure if the Russian airlock on the ISS is inward or outward opening. With the outward-opening hatches it’s usually important to make sure the chamber is depressurized for safety reasons, letting the pressure blow the door open can bend the door and make it impossible to seal closed again.
Nope. That was a movie invention.
This opened today in the UK, so I went to see it. In 3D, because apparently it doesn’t work in 2D. I’m going to write the following as an essay, because I’ve come to the conclusion that I only work in longform and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to stress that I wrote this exclusively for The Straight Dope, and I’m not trying to advertise some awful cinema blog review rubbish. I shall try to avoid spoilers (e.g. liberal use of “the astronaut” and “a space station” instead of names). I realise that Straight Dope’s layout makes this post look like a mass of text; it’s a lot more readable if you narrow your browser, trust me.
My impression is that the third poster was spot-on; it’s essentially a modern-day update of Destination Moon, Rocketship XM, Twelve to the Moon etc, but with far higher production values and a much smaller cast. Those old films tended to have a cast of several stock characters drawn from war films or westerns - the bookish nerd who might be a spy, the cook who represents the working classes, the hysterical lady scientist who has defied God by putting her career before her family, the square-jawed manly man who has to grab the lady scientist and shake some sense into her, etc - whereas Gravity has a cast of just two. In this case it has the lady scientist who has defied God etc and the square-jawed manly man who has to grab etc.
So, plus one for economy. There are a few other characters, but we never get attached to them, and from what I remember we never even see them speak.* I am surprised to learn that Ed Harris was the voice of Mission Control! I assumed from the trailer that a Russian cosmonaut would appear, but in fact that’s just Sandra Bullock’s character wearing a Russian spacesuit.
- I thought long and hard about that phraseology. We see their faces; and we see one chap’s head, but not his face.
Just like Rocketship XM and so forth Gravity masquerades as science fiction but at heart it’s a survival adventure with a space backdrop. The plot, characterisation, and dialogue could have been transposed to a number of other settings without losing anything. With a few tweaks it could have been a mountain-climbing drama about a couple trapped in a snowstorm, dangling from ropes; or it could have been set beneath the waves, or on an oil rig. The mark of true science fiction is that the theme and plot are inseparable from the medium, which is used to tell a story that could not be told otherwise. And so although some of the reviewers have compared Gravity with 2001, the two films really have very little in common. 2001 has a philosophical point to make, and the plot for the most part exists to make this point, whereas Gravity is a straightforward survival adventure film that happens to be set in space.
But is it a good survival adventure? Hmm? Tricky question. It reminded me of a mish-mash of Mission to Mars, Red Planet, Space Cowboys, even Space Camp, but much better than that sounds. It has a generally serious tone and aspires to the level of serious emotional drama, although the characterisation is really too weak to support this. But film is a visual medium, and on that level Gravity is superb. There’s one sequence that everybody will remember, in which a space station disintegrates silently in the background whilst an astronaut struggles to untie a cable in the foreground, that’s simultaneously a clever use of 3D, a superb effect on a technical level - the CGI people must have got hold of some clever physics modelling software - and visually beautiful. A second shot of an astronaut as a speck in the blackness of space sticks with me. And there’s a long, slow shot quite early on in which the camera imperceptibly tracks towards an astronaut’s face, through the glass of the space helmet, eventually ending up sharing the astronaut’s point of view, that aims and hits a level of visual storytelling rare in modern Hollywood.
On a tangent, 2001 is one of my favourite films, and I’ve always been disappointed that there are so few space exploration films that treat space exploration as the main event. Apollo 13 and 2010 are really only the two I can think of.
I have two theories as to why this is so. Firstly, most films in general are character or action dramas that treat their environment as a backdrop; cowboy films never went into the nitty-gritty of working on a farm, war films very rarely deal with logistics or tactical planning, spy dramas generally have the barest minimum of espionage. So it is with films set in space.
And secondly there aren’t all that many tales that can be told within the context of real-life space exploration. A mission goes wrong; the crew are saved. I’m trying to think of a second plot. Gravity suffers from this problem. It’s only 90 minutes long but full of padding. There’s a difference between tuning the audience to the stately rhythms of orbital mechanics and padding, and Gravity has lots of padding. The script runs out of plot quite early on, and essentially just repeats itself; our heroes flee a damaged space shuttle for the safety of a space station, which is damaged, so they flee to a second space station which is also damaged. We get to see the Soyuz craft break into its constituent modules twice, and I had the feeling that the film originally began as an IMAX short subject - presumably with less death - but was padded out to feature length.
So, as an adventure film it just doesn’t have enough plot. The visuals make up for this but, even so, I can’t see it attracting much repeat business. And yet it appear to be a smashing successful, so what do I know? What do I know? I know the word “countervailing”, I know that. The soundtrack is very spartan and overshadowed by the environmental sounds, particularly the characters’ heartbeats. I wonder if the director toyed with the idea of having no soundtrack at all, but was overruled by the producers. I learn from the IMDB that almost all of the film is CGI, including in many shots the actors’ bodies - they shot the actors’ faces, and created the illusion of weightlessness by simply pasting the faces onto rendering spacesuits. But there are several sequences in which Sandra Bullock’s character floats around in her underwear, so is her body CGI in those sequences as well? Is a detailed 3D model of Sandra Bullock’s body on a computer somewhere? Why can’t Wikileaks get hold of that, eh?
On the level of characterisation George Clooney plays himself again. There’s an old saying that when men leave the cinema after watching a James Bond film, they leave the cinema walking tall. Speaking as a heterosexual man I can attest that George Clooney has that effect, albeit that there’s a certain smug smarminess to him. His character seems to fade into the background, though, because he doesn’t have an “arc”. He’s fair but firm at the start and remains so throughout, and we learn very little about his character. He seems to chatter a lot in order to mask his nervousness, but that barely comes across. I learn from the IMDB that the two leads were cast quite late in the process, and the script wasn’t written for them, it was originally written for Angelina Jolie and Robert Downey Jr. In my opinion Clooney works better for this type of character than Downey Jr.
Sandra Bullock carries most of the film. She has two things going against her; she has to panic a lot and hyperventilate, and she has a very simple character arc that’s just sketched out and feels perfunctory. In fact her characterisation is no more advanced than the 1950s lady scientist I mentioned in the first paragraph. But on the other hand Bullock herself is extremely charismatic, and I was always on her side. Within the limits of her characterisation she works very well. I kept wondering why she was so keen on taking her helmet off, and her big emotional scene feels forced. Will she get an Academy Award? Probably not. I believe that if Angelina Jolie had been given the role she would have done just as well, and might have won an Academy Award for it, but the Academy would have given her the award out of pity for her recent health problems. That would not be Angelina Jolie’s fault, it would be the fault of the Academy.
On the other, other hand, this is a film made in 2013 in which the sole substantive male character is the voice of reason, and the female lead is a panicking hyperventilating mess, a technical klutz who has an emotional breakdown, who reverts to an infantile state whilst in mortal peril, and only snaps out of her funk when a big strong man gives her a pep talk. It’s not really a feminist film. Bullock strips down to her underwear a couple of times. The first time feels as if the director was trying to make a parallel between her emotional retreat and a retreat into the womb (she assumes a foetal position) and it doesn’t feel particularly exploitive, but I felt sorry for the female audience, because George Clooney never once strips down to his long johns.
So in summary general audiences might be bored, anybody with even a passing interest in sci-fi will want to see it, and it’s the kind of film you’ll get to show off your 4K television. The 3D is simple and effective, there are two great scenes, one good scene, a couple of scenes that stick with you, no bad scenes. I haven’t mentioned one sequence in which Bullock appears to communicate with a chap on Earth - it’s not clear if she’s actually having a dialogue with the man, or eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation, or indeed if it’s a hallucination brought on by stress - but I remember it. The plot relies on ludicrous coincidences, but that’s not unusual in the movies. The science is a bit like the science of Space: 1999, e.g. some of the small picky things are accurate, the big obvious things are handwaved.
Post-Script: Science
Technically the film should be called Momentum (or possibly Friction); that seems to be the most significant force acting on the characters. On both a literal and metaphorical level it is the force that Sandra Bullock’s character plucks up the courage to defeat. The tendency of an object to continue moving in the absence of a countervailing force.
The shuttle mission in the film is STS-157. NASA’s numbering system began with STS-1 in 1981, and then incremented by one, except for a brief period when they used a system based on the fiscal year and a letter code. To complicate matters the later missions were numbered in schedule order, but schedule slippages meant that (for example) STS-29 launched after STS-30. The last real-life shuttle mission was STS-135, which was the 135th mission. With a launch rate of 3-5 missions a year in the final years, STS-157 would presumably had launched five or six years from now, in a future where China has a large manned space station in orbit. Perhaps it’s set in a parallel universe where the shuttle was more successful and NASA had more money.
The orbital mechanics are, as far as I can tell, wrong, but understandably so for the sake of drama. At one point Sandra Bullock’s character catches up with a space station by pointing her capsule directly at it and firing its thrusters; in reality this would have pushed her into a higher orbit, which would have had the paradoxical effect of slowing her down. As I understand it she would have to fire the thrusters away from the space station, dip into a lower orbit, and then attempt to “bob up” at just the right point to dock with it. In practice she whizzes past the station and jumps out of the hatch! But it’s exciting to watch and of course this is not a documentary.
The airlock opening procedure in the film seems incredibly dangerous. And yet the character does it twice, so perhaps it was safer than it looked.
On a tangent, the shuttle is still a great-looking piece of hardware. Even broken into bits, as happens in Gravity, it looks like a spaceship. Not like the ugly bug-like Soyuz which (grits teeth) is far more successful than the shuttle, and has killed no-one since 1971 - and that would have been survivable if the crew had been able to wear suits. Overall Gravity is a good advert for the Soyuz spacecraft; two separate Soyuz are shown to undergo terrible damage but they both work fine afterwards.
I’ll say in passing that, like you, I grew up with science fiction and books about space travel, and as a consequence I learned to live with disappointment. I’ve come to accept that our destiny probably doesn’t lie in the stars; perhaps it’s good to have something forever beyond our grasp. But Columbia haunts me. I remember it from when I was very young, and there was only one space shuttle. Then there was a second shuttle, Challenger. The rest came later. Challenger was gone in a flash; it was a shock but it passed. Columbia haunts me. For a week the astronauts smiled for the cameras in a spaceship that was going to kill them. If only we could reach into the screen and warn them. And if someone at NASA had said dear sweet jesus oh lord please for the love of God please just check the tiles dear God please, they might have lived. We would remember STS-107 as NASA’s finest hour. There would be a film about the heroic orbital rescue, or perhaps the clever deorbiting manoeuvre they used to mask the shuttle’s left wing from the worst of the friction heat, or the hairy belly landing the pilot had to make with a melted undercarriage and jammed ailerons. Even without special measures the wing survived the worst of the heat; the shuttle was only nine minutes from landing.
So many what-ifs. But for ever what-if that results in a positive outcome there is a what-if that leads to disaster, that might have happened instead. STS-27 sustained similar damage to its tiles, and it was only the second mission after the Challenger disaster; if STS-27 had burned up on re-entry the shuttle programme would have probably ended then and there. NASA would have killed twelve people in the space of three shuttle missions, and would have been left with two remaining shuttles - one of which was too heavy to carry the more massive payloads. But if the shuttle system had died in 1988, would NASA be worse or better off today? We’ll never know.
I think that scene was mostly ok. It’s true that burning prograde would put her in a higher orbit (well, just her apoapsis), and that a half orbit later she would be quite far away from the other station. But in the short term the deviation won’t be too much, and she’ll catch up with the other station. She could also offset her direction by a slight amount to account for the deviation. She’s fine as long as she completes the rendezvous in that time.
You’re right that a more efficient transfer would have her drop into a lower orbit, and then wait a full orbit to catch up with the station, but maximum fuel efficiency wasn’t first on her mind.
Enough oxygen to make that orbit? Not that we’re talking about 100% factual accuracy ANYWAY, but wouldn’t she have suffocated waiting to complete that full orbit?
At that point she’s in the Soyuz, and although we see her evacuate most of the oxygen I assume that the vessel has enough in the tanks to last for an indefinite amount of Hollywood time (the ship it was originally built to sustain three men for a couple of days). Do women need less oxygen then men? Apparently so.
Whilst watching the film I assumed that the act of venting out the oxygen would have given the Soyuz a push, and Bullock’s character would have had a “Eureka” moment and used the capsule’s oxygen reserves to catch up with the Chinese station. It would have taken ages, though. And I assume that the capsule’s thrusters automatically compensate for any venting oxygen. And this is assuming that the oxygen actually is chucked into space, and not stored in an overflow tank. The Soyuz 11 disaster occurred when a broken valve vented the atmosphere into space, and given that the capsule landed automatically without incident I have to assume - I’m making a lot of assumptions here - that the force of evacuating air isn’t enough to push a six-tonne capsule anywhere quickly.
Incidentally, I owned a Space: 1999 annual when I was a kid, and there was a comic story in which Commander Koenig finds himself stranded in space outside a damaged Eagle without his helmet. It reminded me of Gravity, and I wonder if the director had read it when he was young. In fact, here it is. It’s called “Flotsam”.
“At least, this close to a star, Koenig has the small relief of knowing there is enough heat to keep the moisture on his eye from freezing. He will not be blind for the rest of his life, although that is a span which can now be measured in seconds”
He ends up using the air in his oxygen tank to push him towards his helmet, which fortunately is only a few feet away. I assume that the basic idea is an ancient cliché of sci-fi (it seems unlikely that the writers of a Space: 1999 comic were sci-fi visionaries).
In my opinion an accurate orbital manoeuvre would have worked pretty well on the screen - imagine an aeroplane diving down to build up speed, and then pulling up just in time to catch up with something as it passes overhead - but explaining it to the audience would have been awkward without an Obi-Wan Kenobi-style voiceover from Clooney’s character. The sequence that immediately follows - in which Bullock pushes herself through space with a fire extinguisher - hit the right balance between awesomeness and silliness, and of course it’s supposed to show us that Bullock’s character has finally pulled herself together.
In fact the fire extinguisher sequence is really the key to a successful reading of the film, which is essentially the tale of a single female parent learning to accept and indeed enjoy sexual satisfaction via mechanical means, without the man that she can no longer have. In that respect Gravity might be far more of a feminist classic than I at first assumed, but then again it takes a pep-talk from George Clooney before Bullock has “permission” to use the fire extinguisher - which is a substitute for George Clooney’s manned manoeuvring unit e.g his lingam, so perhaps it’s not a feminist classic at all. The undeniably phallic extinguisher is shown to be more powerful but much more erratic than the curiously feminine MMU. Clooney has no trouble harnessing the MMU’s power, whereas Bullock is overwhelmed by the extinguisher and can’t control it.
In fact Bullock is presented as an avatar of chaos throughout the film - she brings destruction wherever she goes - so perhaps the director has deep-seated issues stemming from his upbringing. Children of Men presented a world in which women have decided to exterminate the human race by ceasing to reproduce, and I’m sure that with enough time I could find something in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to hang him with. In contrast, Y Tu Mamá También is actually a very clever metaphor for the US space programme, and after watching it for the first time I found it hard to think of Wernher von Braun in quite the same way.
Erm. I expected Bullock’s character to get tangled up in those weeds at the end. Where did she land? Herself, that’s where.
Okay, in reality she would probably have landed in the middle of the Pacific ocean, 'cause there’s no way the capsule made a controlled descent, and the oceans make up the majority of the Earth’s surface. But that would have been a bleak ending. I like to imagine that she takes a few strides onwards and then finds the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. And as she stares at it, she drops her tape recorder and the camera pans around and we see that behind the statue there’s a huge ringed planet rising in the distance - and then we learn that the chase has been called off, because it went over budget.
Her character repeated the long saga of bacteria crashing to Earth on a meteorite, evolving in soup, becoming a fish, making it to the surface and finally crawling onto land.
Why, it’s obvious!
I had the pleasure of seeing this film in 3D yesterday afternoon. The visuals were stunning and I found the story engaging and moving.
Those represent her Fallopian tubes.
Holy symbolism, did you totally nap through all of 1st Semester of Freudian Tautologies In Modern Fiction ???
I finally got to see this yesterday and I really enjoyed it.
I wish they had written a few things slightly differently, like Clooney’s maneuvering pack. I didn’t know anything about them but as he was zipping around while they were working on the Hubble, common sense told me that he should already have been out of fuel. They should have shown him refueling at the shuttle before they set off for the ISS, and he should have mentioned to Sandy that he had to refuel before he retrieved her. I’m sure it’s not realistic, but they could have him drop a cylinder and pop in another and I’d have bought it.
I couldn’t figure out why he had to let go of the tether, she could have pulled it and he’d have floated toward the ISS. It was obviously his wish to die in space, so after she got in the capsule, I would have bought him saying “Since the capsule is damaged, there’s only enough oxygen for one. I’m just gonna stay out here, it’s where I belong…”
The debris’ 90 minute orbit thing confused me. I didn’t brush up on orbits, but I knew the shuttle flies on a 90 minute orbit, which indicated that the debris was more or less stationary and they were flying through it?
None of this ruined it for me, I still liked the movie, but they did make me go “hmm” as I was watching it.
They were both on 90 minute orbits, but not quite the same 90 minute orbit, which means that they intersect at only one or two points. With one point of intersection, they would meet whenever they both pass through that point, about once every 90 minutes.
The only problem I had with that part was the unjustified precision. When your clock has ticked off 89 minutes and 55 seconds, it doesn’t mean that the debris is going to hit in exactly 5 seconds.
I saw the movie last night and have only gotten through the first half of these posts. But I haven’t seen anyone talk about the part of the plot that bothered me the most: Stone survives against impossible odds. Not challenging, not heroic, impossible. The Challenger crew were all doomed from an O-ring failure. The Columbia crew all died because of a loose heat shield tile. But she makes it through three spacecraft that are all nearly destroyed by massive debris traveling over Mach 25 and somehow gets home safely in a Chinese vehicle that she’s had no experience with. Even though she crashed the Soyuz in the simulator. Every time.
I can suspend disbelief as well as the next guy but when she overcomes one massive disaster after another they lost me. It started to look like “Jane Bond in Space.”
I think a poignant, tragic ending would have made a better piece of literature. Courageous woman perishes after defying all odds and doesn’t give up until the bitter end. But probably wouldn’t have gone over well with the marketing focus groups.
Already answered (no) but just to add I read something by a NASA engineer/scientist (maybe linked elsewhere in this thread) on this and he said that it was too difficult to do that kind of display on the curved glass.
I know next to nothing about orbital mechanics but just based on basic geometry, if the orbits are in different planes, even if the orbital paths intersect, that doesn’t mean that the objects will intersect at those points at the same time.
Not necessarily, no. But if they have close to the same period, then if they collide once, then they’l probably collide repeatedly. It also helps that the debris field is rather extended: They need not be hitting the exact same portion of the debris field on every pass.
Not a hallucination - there’s even a short film about it: http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/20/gravity-spinoff-could-be-oscars-contender-too/
I had the same thought. There’s never been a Space Shuttle Explorer in our time.