I don’t think it’s a lack of action that he’s bored by. He calls it “viscerally thrilling.” It’s the stuff in the last line of the quoted passage that he misses–but I found that precise aspect a strength.
Wow, that Richard Brody review was a steaming pile of pretentiousness.
Mind you, it wasn’t as bad as Rex Reed’s, which managed to sound completely clueless while at the same time spoiling the entire movie. No mean feat. Do not read it if you haven’t seen the movie.
Brody’s complaint seems more that Gravity is rooted in the real world: that all the dangers are ones that are actually present in space, and that it never steps beyond that line. He doesn’t like that it left out that fantasy present in, well, pretty much every other movie ever.
I’m a fan of hard science fiction, so Gravity is a breath of fresh air. All art imposes limits on itself, and in this case the limit is hard reality. In my book, an ounce of real danger is worth a ton of invented monsters.
I might posit that those ignorant of science might get a little less out of the movie than others.
? Do not get. It sounded as though [warning: Sam says not to read this if you haven’t seen the movie] Rex Reed was very positive about Gravity.
2 delta v errors for the sake of hollywood drama is a complete and utter failure in hard sci-fi.
Or maybe I am just a nit picky little bitch (A real possibility) the movie reminded me of Avatar, Very very pretty to look at and thats about all.
Which two delta V errors? As has been noted, the fact that the three satellites were in the same orbit was a decision by the director, not a scientific error. And the boosted maneuvering unit was well within the realm of plausibility, even if NASA doesn’t use one.
I’m curious how much astronauts are trained to use other systems. For example would they know how to use a Russian space capsule? Especially someone who is up there for solely scientific purposes. There was an article where an astronaut said that the movie was dead-on with the depiction of space.
I’m glad the plot was “thin.” Don’t gum it up with a bunch of crap. It’s simply a story about a woman trying to survive. That’s it.
Saw it in IMAX 3D yesterday and it was visually stunning (including Ms. Bullock’s legs). I mean, jaw-droppingly beautiful. It was practically a tactile experience. The zero-G movement; the field of stars; the earth looming in the background, the debris impacts, everything looked spectacular.
The story was fine. Pretty straightforward and nothing really clever, but serviceable. Boy it was lucky that the debris field managed not to completely destroy the ISS with its first pass, nor the Chinese station with its first too passes. Everything lasted conveniently long enough for Ryan to get there and get out.
I thought the characters were too trope-y. Clooney is the wise-cracking partner who sacrifices himself just when he was about to retire. Bullock is the scared rookie who has to rise to the occasion and be a hero, while letting go of her tragically dead child. It was a little over the top.
It was a good movie; and as far as movie technology and special effects it is a watershed. I’m sure it will get some Oscar buzz - Cuaron’s vision was impressive and Bullock was also very good - but aside from the visual spectacle it did not live up to my (admittedly high) expectations.
It’s not really delta-V but the debris only works the way it does to make an exciting movie. Specifically, its new orbit must intersect the single orbit used by every other spacecraft in at most two points. It taking out a single other object would be miraculous. But it hits every useful communications satellite and threatens every manned spacecraft on successive orbits.
It’s supposed to be representative of the “Kessler syndrome”. Basically the idea that if space is crowded enough, the debris created by a collision will collide with more objects, creating more debris, colliding with more objects and basically creating a chain reaction effect until Earth orbit is so full of shrapnel that it’s unusable.
IRL the space shuttle and ISS orbit at a couple hundred miles while GPS and communication satellites tend to have orbits from around 16000 miles - 26000 miles (geosynchronous). So chances are it wouldn’t be like “holy shit lets get the fuck out of here now!”
This one received rudimentary Soyuz capsule training. I don’t think it’s that hard if you know how to use the controls and don’t care where on Earth it actually lands. Docking with a space station is another story.
Do those capsules sink like that though? I know one of the old Mercury missions almost lost an astronaut when he blew the hatch on landing in the ocean and the capsule sank. But I thought they deployed some sort of inflatable ring or something.
I did think the frog swimming by in the lake at the end was a nice touch.
Apollo and Dragon capsules are designed to land on water, and have inflatable rings that keep them upright and afloat and let the hatch be opened safely. Soyuz and Shenzhou capsules are designed to land on land. If they land in water they’ll float so long as the hatch stays closed, but opening the hatch risks letting water in and flooding the capsule. Standard procedure if a Soyuz comes down on water is for the crew to stay sealed inside until a rescue helicopter can show up and pull the capsule onto land. This actually happened when Soyuz 23 came down off-course on Lake Tengiz.
I asked this upthread, but I don’t think anyone answered. Was it plausible that Sandra Bullock’s character, a biomedical engineer (according to the Wikipedia write-up), had designed and was installing some sort of upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope? (Well, actually I don’t know for sure that she designed it, but I assumed she did.)
I’m also curious to learn if there’s any reason in the plot or in the moviemaking history why Dr Ryan Stone, the Bullock character, wasn’t written as an optical engineer or some other engineering subfield that would make more sense in the context of the Hubble Space Telescope. Has any real-life researcher with “biomedical” in their job title ever even been near the Hubble, in orbit or otherwise?
This reminds me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson nitpicking the science in this movie through a series of tweets last night. Each tweet was one scientific element that the film got wrong. There were a lot of tweets.
That’s what I was wondering. How useful would a biomedical engineer be? (I could see one doing medical experiments aboard the shuttle or the ISS but the Hubble Space Telescope?)
I don’t remember the exact line in the movie, but she said that she was installing something on the Hubble that she had actually designed for some kind of medical imaging purpose but was going to be useful on the telescope. She didn’t go into any details.
And that makes no sense. What sort of medical imaging would be going on in the Hubble Space Telescope?
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so I’d guess anywhere between zero and one.
Indeed, the initial speculation that the Russians had shot a missile at one of their spy satellites makes it even more suspicious. Spysats are all in Low Earth orbit – the closer to Earth they are, the more resolution their cameras can get on their subjects. There’s no way the debris from a spysat-missile collision could have enough oomph to climb all the way up to Geosynchronous orbit and start playing billiards with Comsats.
EDIT: What I wanna know is, how did this random pile of debris get itself onto a stable 90-minute orbit (90 minutes would be a Low Earth orbit) that managed to circle the earth three times before hitting the atmosphere?
I guess the audience is supposed to think “imaging = telescope” and not worry about it too much.
But it puzzled me because it seemed that it would have required absolutely zero effort on the part of anybody involved to obliterate this apparent implausibility by just making the character Ryan Stone an optical engineer or some such: i.e., someone who actually does design telescope imaging for a living. She could still be a rookie astronaut and play out the whole plotline as written, she’d just have a more believable job title.
I wonder a little bit if the filmmakers decided that viewers simply wouldn’t buy the concept of a female optical engineer but would be more comfortable with a “biomedical” one (along the lines of the “women can be smart and tech-savvy as long as their work carries some tenuous connotation of caring for sick kids” trope).
Or maybe there was some bonafide plot reason why it made more sense for Stone to be a biomedical engineer than any other kind of engineer, and I just haven’t heard about it yet.