The shot took me by surprise too. I can’t say why. It didn’t seem odd or ominous for Honey Gong to have the rifle, but clearly he put the dog down, and now it seems fairly obvious that’s why the gun was out.
Jeeze, just spoil the whole short, why don’t you?
Seriously though, nice post, Dave.
-Tom
The hell? What a lame short. It actually makes Bullock’s dialogue worse. Is it normal to start babbling about your dog to foreigners over the radio? Or to pull out your baby and hang out with someone on the radio? The whole thing seemed so staged and silly.
God. Yes.
I just saw Gravity tonight, and I’m enough of a physics nerd that I noticed the orbital mechanics problems right away. You can’t just point yourself at a distant object in another orbit and go; it takes enormous energy to make a plane-shift like that, because neither of you is actually motionless, you’re both traveling at 27,000 km/h in different directions. The further apart the planes of your orbits, the greater your difference in vectors, and the more energy you need to match orbits.
This, incidentally, also applies to the debris. If the shuttle and the Hubble telescope are in the debris path, it’s highly unlikely that the ISS or the Chinese station are also in the debris path. The movie treats the debris as an if it were filling all of nearby space, which is ridiculous. It’s like assuming that a small explosion would produce enough debris to cover all of Los Angeles, and then some, given the stated distances between the objects.
I also found it slightly annoying that prior to the impact of the debris, Houston found it necessary to be explicit about the velocity difference between the debris and shuttle. I know most of the audience probably needed that, but they did it a couple of times in a very clumsy manner that didn’t sound at all authentic. They were too obviously talking to the audience.
It’s a tense, involving movie with groundbreaking visuals and great treatment of many freefall issues, but it’s not 1/10th the movie that Apollo 13 was, either in plot or in accuracy.
Do some people not realize that Gravity is not a documentary?
-TomMy world is shattered.
Apollo 13 wasn’t a documentary either. Nor was Moon.
Asshole comments aside, Gravity tries to pretend that it’s being realistic in a great number of ways, and yet it makes some really huge gaffs. Really, Gravity doesn’t have a lot going for it other than the verisimilitude it tries for and the moments of tension. If there were more plot, or more interesting things going on with the characters, the mistakes wouldn’t stand out so much. Not for everyone of course - whether it fails the suspension of disbelief depends entirely on how instinctive your grasp of orbits is.
Gravity does do the action sequences very, very well. It’s just that there’s not a whole lot more to it than the action sequences, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Can’t say I agree with you. Considering an astronaut with a background in engineering is on my side despite what the movie got wrong, I think the “instinctive grasp of orbits” hypothesis is likely out the window. Probably just a matter of personal taste.
Please. I know a fair bit about computers, for instance, and I’ve never once been incapable of enjoying a movie on its own terms when it has some dopey representation of computer interfaces.
-Tom
“This is Unix! I know this!”
The action is great. The score is sublime. The filming is…well breathtaking. I don’t mind the science because I don’t expect realistic science in a movie, but my I wish they had given poor Sandra Bullock some material to work with. Millions for cinematography and they couldn’t spring a couple ten thousand for a writer to give her a believable story on the human level?
Wait a minute. That wasn’t a normal Unix interface? DAMN YOU SPIELBERG!
Actually, this is probably the worst example because indeed, that interface did exist. Not normal, obviously.
It’s also not “Star Wars” - what’s your point?
Suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing: you either buy into the movie’s version of reality or you don’t; and I don’t think it depends on how knowledgeable you are, but how much slack you’re willing to cut the filmmakers. Garrett Reisman, former astronaut, can point out the major faults in Gravity’s science and still say, “Who cares? The movie’s awesome!” Though I’m no science guru, I work for NASA too and have some idea what liberties “Gravity” takes with gravity, but I’ll still high-five Garrett. Meanwhile, Gus Smedstad, Internet physics nerd, is like, “Oh please.” ;)
I view “Gravity” in contrast to “Children of Men.” Both films are about middle-aged protagonists whose lives were ruined by the sudden deaths of their children. Both films are about these protagonists finding renewed purpose in life by overcoming enormous challenges (and, in Theo’s case, making an enormous sacrifice). And both undergo metaphorical transformations during their physical ordeals.
In particular, if you view Gravity’s finale in strictly literal terms, you’re just scratching the surface. A woman overcomes not just the void of space but the void in her soul, plummets in fire to the Earth like the phoenix, plunges into the waters and crawls out like life’s beginnings staggering out of the primordial muck…if you watch that and all you can think about is how she should’ve burned up on re-entry, well, I feel kinda bad for you, actually. :)
I don’t disagree with this but I think with Gravity it’s like watching an entire movie of dopey representation of computer interfaces for people who know the stuff. Usually a dopey computer interface is the 8 seconds of plot handwaving to let the actors move onto the next bit. Here, the whole movie is about traversing an orbit.
Truth be told, I don’t know jack about orbits and the physics and the what not, but I left the theater a little disappointed because the whole movie felt like “we just need to make it right over there and things will be okay… wait, I mean we just need to make it to over there… wait, I mean over there and bring the fire extinguisher.” So even without any knowledge of the actual science or orbits or whatever, I started to believe this whole thing feels pretty convenient all things considered.
edit: so I can imagine someone who knows the stuff and is constantly getting peppered with it might be put off.
If a movie presents itself as hard science fiction (by Hollywood standards anyway), it’s going to be judged by that standard.
If this movie were being judged using Hollywood’s “hard science fiction” standards, there’d be absolutely no debate. ;D
I agree with unbongwah’s everything.
I have yet to hear anyone attack the storyline of Gravity beyond saying it’s shallow or trite or eyerolling. I’d like to hear some substance, so we can talk about it. Don’t think I missed a post in this thread where that happened, but I may have.
I can’t speak for this thread, but we talked a fair bit about it on that episode of the movie podcast. Gravity is an amazingly poetic movie about the thin line between extremes of fire and cold, speed and stillness, isolation and companionship, land and sky, struggle and resignation, and life and death. It’s mind-boggling to me that Cuaron was able to write into a Hollywood blockbuster so much poetry and meaning.
-Tom