I just saw this movie (in 3-D, of course), and I have one big niggling question:
Why did the Chinese space station lose altitude? Why did it lose so much altitude that it hit the atmosphere? Even if it got hit by the first 2 passes of the debris cloud and got some serious holes poked in it, it would still keep orbiting at the same velocity, in the same plane.
I’m not. What, did Clooney’s MMU-like jetpack have a nuclear engine or something? Sheesh!
I wondered that, too. My best hypothesis/rationalization after a few hours of thought was be an intentional deorbiting burn by the Chinese astronauts on board to avoid creating more debris in that orbit. Whether or not the engines on the spaceships attached to it would be powerful enough to do that is something I can’t answer.
To quote Wesley Morris on the movie: “The movie isn’t perfect. But it provides a perfect moviegoing experience, and that’s almost as good.” I saw it last night in IMAX 3D, and I have to agree.
Best not to overthink this one, just relax and enjoy the view and what a view it is. Gives a fresh perspective of being in space. A worthwhile pic. Sandra in her skivvies is an added attraction, for sure.
Sandra Bullock has lovely legs, that’s for sure.
I really enjoyed the movie as did my family. With all the movies that are based upon known quantities, it’s nice to have some original SF stories.
Saw the trailer for Ender’s Game. Hoo-boy… let’s just say that if you’re one who gets upset if a movie doesn’t follow a book, you might want to miss this one…
Hey, I stopped caring about *Ender’s Game *when the books stopped following the book.
Well … enjoying the movie, sure; but I don’t think “relax” is the kind of thing you can do while watching this. It’s basically an hour-and-a-half of “the universe is out to kill Sandra Bullock.” I’m surprised that she didn’t splash down in the middle of the ocean and have to spend the next several days fighting off sharks and swimming after passing freighters.
I think she is in the middle of the Australian outback, tho the voice on the radio said that they had a fix on where she landed…
The real MMU uses compressed N2 and has a delta V of 24 m/s. However, a simple upgrade to a peroxide rocket could easily upgrade that to 300 m/s or so (not to mention even more advanced fuels). He said it was a new pack type, IIRC.
The movie has far fewer nitpicks if you just assume they’re living in a very similar alternate universe where they tweaked the orbits a tad and had some slightly upgraded technology. After all, their shuttle was called Explorer.
The trailer doesn’t get this right, but the movie does. It’s actually really compelling and intense to see stuff explode without making fakey explosion noises.
The fire looked pretty good. There were some scenes with zero-g fire that looked very cool.
I saw this today, or at least most of it. I was seeing in IMAX 3D and the theatre kicked us all out because of a water leak!!
I got up to the point when
Sandra Bullock had unhooked the parachute from the Soyuz and was getting bombarded by the flying debris again.
Then the film paused and we had to all leave. :rolleyes:
Can you please tell me if I missed much and if it’s enough to see it again just to see the end? Or were there only a few minutes left?
The Chinese space station in the movie was also much larger than the actual Tiangong station. I’m assuming this movie took place in an alternate universe where for some reason Hubble, ISS, and Tiangong were all placed in nearly identical orbits.
Did you like what you saw up to that point? There were some pretty dramatic scenes after that, but it was more of the same, so to speak. Maybe another 30 minutes?
I suppose so. But this kind of thing always makes me wonder. Wouldn’t it be possible to come up with an equally compelling story that was also scientifically correct? Why go through all that trouble to get things right, and then go and get just as much wrong on purpose? It’s just annoying to have a movie where the main attraction is to have a realistic experience of being in space, and then be told “oh, by the way, this and this and this doesn’t really work that way in the real world, but just shut up and eat your popcorn”.
Obviously, I would never raise that objection about a movie like, say, Transformers, or whatever, because that never claims to be realistic about anything in the first place. In a case like this movie, however, I’m just not able to immerse myself in it, because I’m just constantly wondering what’s realistic and what isn’t. It just puts me off the whole thing.
My dream is to one day make a movie set in space where every detail is realistic and accurate. Or, more likely, if I ever win the gazillion-dollar lottery jackpot, I’ll pay someone to do it. 
Does it bug you when someone in a movie drinks a brand of beer that doesn’t exist? A minor thing like that is still enough to place a movie in an alternate universe. It’s just that it’s not hard to accept an alternate universe where the brands are different.
IMHO, the same is true for several elements of Gravity. So the orbits are a little different in their universe, and they had a shuttle named Explorer. Also, Sandra Bullock apparently has an identical twin that’s an astronaut. I don’t get too worked up over these details.
Now, actual physical impossibilities distract me more. Gravity had a couple of these, though it might be possible to handwave away most of them. For instance:
The scene with Clooney hanging onto Bullock while caught in the parachute cord doesn’t seem to quite work. They seem to be motionless with respect to the station, and so Clooney shouldn’t be putting any force on Bullock. However (and I’d have to rewatch the movie to see if this is possible or not), they might have been swinging around in an arc. If so, centrifugal force might play into it.
Also, I think Clooney’s character really, really wanted that longest spacewalk, and maybe wanted to die in space. So he may have actually been looking for excuses to let go.
Apollo 13 set the bar for scientifically accurate cinema. But it was basically a documentary, and even then they got a few things wrong. You’d have to be an Apollo geek to really spot them, though.
Of course not. That would be silly. The beer brand isn’t important to the story or my experience of the movie. However, when the story and my experience of the movie is all about a seemingly realistic portrayal of being in space, I want that stuff accurate.
In other words, I don’t care that the shuttle is named “Explorer”. I do care about the orbits, the technology, and, as you say, actual physical impossibilities.
Also, I can forgive mistakes in movies like this. But “Gravity” isn’t making mistakes. It goes out of its way to do thing inaccurately.
No one wants to watch a film that consists of 90 minutes of boring space station chores ending with the ship being vaporized by an errant piece of space debris hitting it at 20000 mph.
Seriously dude. It’s one thing to complain about Armageddon. It’s quite another to complain about the director taking some artistic license with a film like Gravity.
The important thing is not that every single factoid about modern space travel is accurate. It’s that it looks and feels accurate.
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.
I don’t complain about Armageddon. (Well, that is, I do, but for different reasons.) I complain about movies that first go out of their way to do things accurately, and then go out of their way to do other things inaccurately. Why not just get it all right, dammit?
It just bugs me, is all.
They couldn’t have fixed things without totally altering the story, and probably making the movie impossible.
The entire structure of the adventure was based around jumping from station to station in suits or small capsules.
In our universe, the Hubble, ISS, and Tiangong are all in different inclinations. Changing inclination significantly requires massive delta-V, and even the shuttle can’t do it, let alone a beefed up MMU.
So for the story to work, we have to imagine that in this universe, all 3 satellites are in pretty much the same orbit. There’s nothing unphysical about it. It might even make sense to do it that way. It’s not true in *our *universe, but that doesn’t matter to me.
It would have been much worse if they had shown the satellites in their actual inclinations. Then, we’d have to imagine that the suits had some unrealistically good propulsion; far beyond what we could built today. Altering the orbit is a much lesser “evil” than inventing a backpack fusion rocket, let alone simply ignoring the issue.
I saw it a couple of hours ago. I liked it a lot, although for a while after, I was feeling a little nauseous. One question, though:
Where did she land? And were those voices on the radio indicating that Mission Control was aware of her landing and was sending a rescue team?
OK, that was two questions.