Indeed! You don’t want those hooligans from the ISS barging into the Chinese space station uninvited.
I don’t need no stinkin’ plot. I want to see people placed in a dangerous situation use the limited resources at hand to overcome the obstacles and survive.
I was greatly amused by Neil Degrasse Tyson’s dissection of the science mistakes in the film.
It pains me to see that Neil has both missed the point and failed at pedantry (calling for a “Zero Gravity” title, for example, when there is no such condition in the movie).
At the orbital speed of the ISS, if the debris cloud were inclined at ~4 degrees to the orbit of the ISS the resulting speed difference would be about 2000 km/h or about 1800 ft/s, which is as fast as many rifle rounds and certainly too fast to see passing by you. Of course, this wouldn’t be very interesting visually (and as previously noted, the microscale debris would have absolutely shredded Stone) so it was presented as moving roughly 1/10th of that speed and mostly in large chunks.
There are movies that literally have no plot–avant garde movies like The Monkeys Head or Linklater’s Dazed and Confused–but Gravity does not fall in that category. It does have a plot, albeit a minimalist one, which can be summarized as, “Rookie astronaut experiences catastrophic loss of vehicle and crew, must improvise her way back to Earth despite hazards and her own internal turmoil.” Certainly the Cuaróns could have added more plot; perhaps a training montage, some flashback scenes to the death of Stone’s daughter, perhaps a terrorist attack from North Korean uju bihaengsa, or any number of other elements which would really only served as a distraction from the essential story, which was one person trying desperately to survive against the uncaring and indifferent deadliness of the space environment. The story was exactly what it needed to be to give Bullock’s character a credible, panicked, desperate woman trying to survive. Adding on additional plot elements would have been gilding the lily in this case. The film doesn’t need interpersonal conflict.
And yes, Clooney played a fairly cliched, fighter jock type character that is pretty much a variation on the characters he plays in almost every film (The American and his roles in various Coen brothers movies excepted) but the cliche exists for a reason; most of the pilots and mission commanders, having largely been drawn from the ranks of test pilots who have faced danger and death multiple times, are pretty blasé about hazards. To have fleshed his character out more would have been unnecessary, as this isn’t really his story.
It doesn’t seem like Tyson watched the film very closely. Unless I am mistaken about the orientation of the Earth, the debris field was moving roughly west to east. He complains that Bullock’s hair isn’t freely floating, but if you notice her hair is cut short and matted with sweat. He says complains “Astronaut Clooney informs medical doctor Bullock what happens medically during oxygen deprivation,” but it is clear that what Kowalski is doing isn’t done for information so much as trying to provide a narrative to calm Stone from panic, which is a very standard rescue technique. The points about the relative orbits of the HST and space stations, and the probability that the debris field would interact with both LEO and satellites in GEO almost simultaneously are certainly true but clearly done for dramatic effect.
And for all we know (in the alternate universe of this film), this may not have been some kind of accidental cascade, but the opening move of an attack by Russia against the US or China, which started by taking out all of the communications, navigation, and observation satellites upon which modern military response is almost utterly dependent, so it may be that a separate attack took out GPS and TDRSS at GEO, with the side effect of leaving Stone and Kowalski stranded and incommunicado.
Stranger
Someone commented upthread that the characters are “too tropey,” but that misses the mark by not going far enough.
Clooney’s role is entirely device.
Bullock’s role is a person, but an archetypal one, not a specific. When she finally emerges, primally from the water, struggles to her bare feet on the shore, Stands Alive on Earth–that’s for all of us. I expect any real individual would have lain there a while after such exertions, but we need the totemic moment.
This is not a character drama. This is a myth.
And a redemption myth at that. She goes from not being able to let go and being unable to pray, to being reborn from the capsule-womb minutes after “letting go” of her daughter and praying for Kowalski to say hi to her.
The film had plenty of plot. What some people seem to be arguing is that the film didn’t have a traditional ‘dramatic’ plot - and thank God it didn’t. In fact, the weakest parts of the movie were those in which that sort of plot was tacked on - the story of the dead daughter, for instance.
I suppose some people would have been happier if Bullock had a huband on the ground calling out to her, and scenes of the family huddled around a TV set watching the drama. Maybe for good measure Bullock could have been having an affair with Clooney? Or perhaps there could have been a political element and breathless scenes in the White House of a President trying to work the problem.
God save us from that kind of plot.
Why is it that a courtroom procedural or a police procedural or a story of a doctor trying to save someone is considered a valid ‘plot’, but solving engineering problems in a life or death emergency isn’t?
The best parts of Apollo 13 were the scenes where the engineers and astronauts were going to heroic efforts to come up with engineering solutions to a bad problem. The weakest parts of the movie were the traditional ‘plot’ elements involving rebellious daughters, scared wives, and obnoxious reporters. Likewise, “The Right Stuff” was made weaker when Ridley Scott decided he had to work some weird Aboriginal tribal mumbo-jumbo into the story to make it ‘deep’.
Thank God this director didn’t subject us to more ‘plot’.
I’m thinking that another ‘flaw’ in the movie is that they greatly compressed the time scale for this event to fully destroy the constellation of satellites in LEO. I don’t know what the estimate is for how long it would take the Kessler Syndrome to fully develop, but my gut tells me this would be a multi-year event - as satellites are destroyed, the rate of collisions starts to rise, and keeps rising after each subsequent collision, but we’re still talking days. weeks, months between collisions at the beginning of the process. We might not even know the process had started until the number of satellite losses reaches the point where we can rule out random chance.
It’s not like a bomb going off affecting everything in orbit in hours, but more like a gradual decay of the environment over a much longer period, until eventually there’s so much debris that any space mission would have a high collision risk - not certain, but high enough that permanent presence is impossible (i.e. satellites might survive a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months, but are guaranteed to be destroyed if they stay up long enough).
The Kessler Syndrome describes a cascade or chain reaction, but one which plays out over a fairly long period of time - at least compared to the time scale in this movie.
If we’re being nitpicky, we could also say that if the debris cloud is moving fast relative to the ISS, it’s not in the same orbit, and won’t be likely to intersect the ISS again the next time it comes around the planet.
Exactly. It didn’t lack plot - it had a tight plot. Refreshingly so.
It’s not just that astronauts have faced danger and death - the whole ‘laid back jock’ attitude is manufactured by training. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in “The Right Stuff”, there’s a reason that even airplane pilots sound that way. It’s a product of being trained in emergencies so thoroughly that you fall into a sort of laid-back ‘solve the problem’ mode when confronted with one. Anyone with extensive training will do that.
When Capt. Al Haynes was trying to land a DC-10 in Sioux City with no control systems left, the tower controller told him he was cleared to land on any runway. His response was a laid back chuckle, “Oh, you want me to land on a runway?” His task was nearly impossible and looked about as hopeless as what Clooney and Bullock were faced with in Gravity, but he acted just like Clooney’s character in the movie despite possibly never having faced death before. It was all about the training. So in that sense, the Clooney character was far more realistic than if they had portrayed him as panicky or visibly afraid.
Yeah, when she took off her helmet the first thing I thought of was, “Oh, that was clever of the filmmakers to have her hair be very short. That way they don’t have to CGI floating hair in every frame of the movie”. I’m surprised Tyson went for that ‘mistake’. I guess he went into the movie hoping to write some material about the science errors in it. The fact that he had to reach like this is a good sign that the filmmakers did an excellent job with the science - especially if we’re grading on the Hollywood Science Curve. In that case, they get an A+++.
Absolutely. She may know that intellectually, but when you’re panicking and gasping, sometimes it helps to have a calm voice remind you of what you already know.
This was actually my biggest problem with the movie. Space is BIG. LEO is a volume many times the surface area of the Earth. To have the Hubble, ISS, and another station all be within visual range of each other was ridiculous. I understand why it was the way it was and accept it as a narrative sacrifice, but I kind of wish the filmmakers had come up with a slightly different plot that could have emphasized just how vast even LEO is.
Depends how long it takes and how much it lets the characters develop. No point blaming modern movie critics for this, either: ever since Aristotle, it has been argued that plots that concentrate on suspense about the characters’ external circumstances and actions are artistically inferior to ones that focus on what the circumstances and actions reveal about the characters as individuals.
In other words, “traditional ‘dramatic’ plot” is what most people mean by “plot” when describing a narrative work. As E. M. Forster immortally put it in Aspects of the Novel,
Now, it is perfectly okay for anyone to enjoy a story with little or no plot, and I agree with you that an essentially plotless tale of adventure in which characters cope with their circumstances without any traditional “dramatic” or “artistic” depth can be very enjoyable.
But there’s no point in demanding that people who like “plot” as traditionally defined for narrative works of art should be willing to call a story a plot.
Damn, so you guys are going full spoiler here, huh?
No biggie, I guess. I’ll still check it out.
Don’t know how far you read before posting this. Sorry? I wouldn’t have said anything like what I did, certainly not without spoiler boxes, if the thread hadn’t already moved into open discussion among people who had all seen it.
No big deal. I knew it started way before the movie came out, so I expected spoiler boxes.
I honestly don’t mind, though.
It’s a good callout to ask a mod to put [open spoilers] in the thread title. I’ll report it.
First, let me be clear: for me this was a movie with spectacular visuals and a good story, and it’s definitely worth seeing - if you think in terms of Metacritic scoring, I gave it about an 80%. My main complaint however was essentially what you’re getting at above - it had too much “plot” for me, and from my perspective all that redemption/prayer/daughter noise could have been tossed for something even more stripped down, like Apollo 13 (and I agree completely about what the best parts of that were). The most gripping parts of Gravity were the serial action scenes, and I didn’t need that other stuff.
I actually agree with you about all of this. I didn’t mind the backstory and extra dialogue, and I understand why a major studio movie feels the need to have all that, but I would have loved to have seen an even leaner, tighter story, with only the action left to carry the movie.
Maserschmidt, if you’re in the U.S., you should check out All is Lost when it comes out in a few weeks. I haven’t seen it yet, but from what I understand, it’s just a one-character survival story, with no backstory, no three-act plot structure, only a few words of dialogue, etc. I’m really looking forward to it myself.
Whoa!!! I am SO going to see that. Was just rereading Riddle of the Sands and wishing I still owned my copy of Gipsy Moth Circles the World for more salt-water hijinks.
Still am not feeling tempted to see Gravity, but not because of any lack of plot. I just like my disaster movies a little wetter.
(I guess this is where I have to look clueless by revealing that I hadn’t really known that Robert Redford was still alive, much less making solo disaster movies. Can’t wait!)
Most simulatons of Kessler syndrome I’ve seen assume relatively low rate and small volume impacts, but it is possible that a high energy impact of a satellite in a highly inclined and/or highly elliptical orbit could produce enough spread to start a fairly rapid cascade. Even though orbital space is mostly empty, when a single impact can produce thousands of fragments which themselves will cross the orbits of other objects and other debris fields the growth of impacts could potentially be cubic in growth since the rate is essentially a function of the effective volume of the debris cloud versus the volume of orbital space it traverses.
Note that when Ground Control first reported the impact they did not recommend sheltering, but then a couple of minutes later, as the scale of the debris cloud expanded and was observed to be moving toward the HST and Explorer’s orbital trajectory they alerted the crew to shelter immediately, so clearly the effect was larger than initially anticipated. And the fact that it struck both HST and the Russian and Chinese stations (which all appear, in the story of this film, to be in relatively close orbit) indicates that the debris field was spread out. As every intercept will produce more debris and an even wider spread, it is not implausible that this could rapidly affect large swaths of orbital space rapidly. That it could also affect the GPS and TDRSS satellites in GEO is far more implausble, and although it may not have been intended by the filmmakers it makes me believe that the intercept was not accidential but deliberate with follow-on attacks which deliberately targetted satellite communications and navigation as a precursor to war or threat of war. (This is purely speculative on my part since we have no insight into what is going on Earthside and not germane to the essential story, but it would resolve why nav and comm, both required for modern coordinated military action, are down.)
Stranger
Small nitpick: The Apollo capsule has some inflatable balloon-like things on the top of the capsule to right it if it’s floating in the water upside-down. The ring buoy thing is brought & attached by the Navy SEALs when they reach the spacecraft. Unless there was an emergency inside the capsule (fire) I don’t think they would ever open the hatch until that stabilizing ring is attached…
That’s what he said! Oh, wait. He didn’t say plot. He said, twat.
I loved this movie. I thought Bullock’s acting was great. I forgive her for the abortion that is The Blind Side, because she shined so hard in this movie.
I don’t know enough about the science to nitpick anything. I just thought the movie was gripping, stunning and…tight. I noticed the simplicity of the story, but savored it and even wished they had left out some of that dead daughter drama. I despise 3D but my theater was only playing it in 3D when I got out of work, so I had to suck it up. I didn’t wear the glasses, but the movie was still beautiful to look at.
Yes, Clooney’s character was a bit cavalier about his death, but folks have been known to be very accepting of death when comforting others who may be facing it too. So I bought that. Great film.