Gravity! [open spoilers]

[Maserschmidt]

@Maserschmidt

It’s at 652M but the theater counts are down to about 300…so I don’t think I’m going to be surprised, but it will be close!

ETA: domestic theater counts, that is. the film’s presence in foreign markets is why I think it could still edge close to 700M.

Domestic: $264,802,800 38.1%

• Foreign: $430,000,000 61.9%
  = Worldwide: $694,802,800

I’m on the edge of my seat here.

[Duke_of_Rat]

Late to the party, but I just got the BluRay a bit ago.

My alternate ending:

She re-enters as in the movie, lands in the lake, crawls up to the bank, stands up with the camera on the ground POV - just like in the movie.

Then, as we are looking up, a smoke trail in the sky, moving fast.

ZAP! Another piece of debris impacts her and leaves a smoking hole.

Cut to black.

GRAVITY

[Elendil_s_Heir]

That’s a downer, man.

[blue_infinity]

When she was crawling out of that lake, I half-seriously expected her to be attacked and eaten by a passing bear.

You know when you’re having a really bad day…

[Learjeff]

I finally got a chance to see it, on a 46-in screen at home, 2D, HD. I really enjoyed it. I sure wish I’d have managed to see it in IMAX 3D.

@msmith537

Since it’s not 100% accurate anyway, I’ll just go ahead and spoil the ending for you:

They just hold their breath, swim into the Earth’s atmosphere and land safely in some old couples swimming pool.

Yeah, and the surf ride down is amazing!

Oh wait, that was a different space movie.

@Sam_Stone

In the case of ‘Gravity’, the subtle inaccuracies were all in service to the plot. For example, I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that the shuttle is hit with a debris cloud from an exploded satellite. The debris is going tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to the shuttle. At that speed, you’d never see it. Certainly not like you do in the movie. It would be going 10-20 times faster than a rifle bullet.

But obviously that would make the whole thing less dramatic and more difficult for people to understand. The same goes for the orbital mechanics - sure, they’re simplified. But if you tried to get all those transfer orbits correct they’d feel ‘wrong’ to a lay audience, and they would make the movie confusing so I get it and it didn’t bother me at all.

How about talking about what they got right? For instance, sound. Not just the silence of space, but the muffled sounds that can be heard when you touch something noisy due to acoustic coupling through the space suit. They got that right. Sound fading as atmosphere is depleted, the thrumming of all the little motors and pumps, the mechanical sounds - all of it sounded right. They should win an Oscar for the sound.

Then there’s inertia. They did a great job with that. Things have mass, and can’t be stopped easily. Trying to pull someone with a tether results in a tug, then a stretch of the line, then an acceleration towards the other person, then another tug… All that stuff just seemed perfect.

That’s how I see it.

@Sam_Stone

It’s not just that astronauts have faced danger and death - the whole ‘laid back jock’ attitude is manufactured by training.

A friend’s father worked for MacDonald Douglas. He’d heard the recording of a test pilot who has a failure, and calmly talks his way through a series of countermeasures and emergency procedures, as the plane he’s flying is failing. He descends to a safe altitude and calmly states he’s about to eject. Then “THE FUCKING THING DOESN’T WORK! THE FUCKING THING DOESN’T WORK!”

@Munch

I asked my wife if Bullock’s character was going to get attacked by sharks next.

LOL yeah. I joked about a big croc snapping her up just as she reaches the shore. But I think that debris falling from the sky would be the best “dammit!” ending, as suggested above.
Regarding orbital mechanics, and granting that the three sites are in the same orbit, isn’t it still really tricky to do a single burn to rendezvous?

As I learned here (and is obvious once pointed out), if you get a kick from an orbit (like an impact or short burn), your new orbit will be an ellipse that intersects the point you were kicked from. In addition, we can’t control the Soyuz capsule’s burn: it’s a one shot pre-programmed amount.

So, if we really did have just one fixed burn, and even if the two sites are only 100 km (or whatever) apart on the same orbit, what’s the best you can really do?

But at least it is a case where close is good enough. As we saw, she passed by (looked like beneath) the Chinese station, jumped out, and used the fire extinguisher’s delta-V to get her there.

For me, the worst violation of physics was where Kowalski lets go, but I see why they did it.