You still have the similes, Dave.
Towards the end of the movie, Gravity just flat-out tells you what it’s about – no metaphor, no simile, it just baldly states the theme.
The movie would have been more powerful if some skilled script doctor had toned that part of the dialog down. Themes have more power if the audience believes that they discovered them themselves.
… But harping over the dialog is more or less besides the point. Dialog is almost entirely secondary with this movie, as it was with one of its main influences, 2001.
Gravity’s strengths lie elsewhere - the meticulously planned visuals (I’m not surprised to learn it’s basically an animated movie; you could tell every frame had been carefully storyboarded), the beautiful pacing, the great sound design. It’s pure cinema, and not just the filmed stage play a lot of critics (and the Oscars) confuse with great filmmaking.
Kerbal Space Program is awesome to play after this movie :)
Now I’m just picturing Clooney and Bullock in a little window in the bottom right flailing around in bug-eyed, open-mouthed panic.
Your post was like a warm day in October.
I see what you did there!
From the forthcoming “Gravity 2: To the Mun”
Most of your complaints regarding the script are largely based on revisions squeezed in after focus group and executive viewings. thaaat’s hollwood
OMG awesome!!
I love the mental image of Neil Armstrong as Comic Book Guy: “Worst - scifi - film - ever.”
According to the Empire movie review, there is a “Planet of the Apes” easter egg in the movie. Anybody pick up on that?
I’m guessing they mean that the lake at end is the same as in Planet of the Apes.
uhh yeah, I guess? Only thing I can think of. And… which Planet of the Apes movie?
— Alan
Thwe original and the remake, apparently.
yeah, the original lake was just as arid as you see in the maps, before the digi-plants went in and made it look more hospitable (post-shoot decisions ftw). Also there are less frogs in the real lake.
I’ve been avoiding reading this thread until I saw the film, and it looks like I missed a lot of cool space-tech shop talk. Pity.
Saw it last night, loved it like everyone else. I regret that I waited so long to see it that there were no IMAX showings near me any more.
You know, I’ve (now) read some of those articles like everyone else, and I think that Cuaron might have gotten it right while the real astronaut and the Naked Scientist, etc. might be off-base here. Geeky crap follows:
While the movie sort of ignores orbital mechanics in favor of easy-to-understand navigation, the real-world orbital mechanics of the ISS are pretty interesting and tricky. First off, although you are in free-fall in orbit, you’re not “weightless” at all… you’re just going around the planet at an angular velocity that pushes you out just as much as the Earth is pulling you in. If you have a reasonably large structure, only the center of mass is actually in free-fall; the part of the structure that is “above” the planet actually has some tidal forces pulling out away from the planet, and the part of the structure closer to the planet has some tidal forces pulling “down”.
In something like the ISS, the engineers try and make the main portion of the station (especially the part where experiments are done) sit exactly at this center-of-mass so that these tidal forces are minimized (the NASA term for it is “microgravity”). No human is really able to detect the tidal force, even in the modules of the ISS that stick up or down, but small objects left floating will eventually “settle” to top or bottom of these modules, and of course cool materials-science experiments like trying to grow crystalline structures in free-fall can get screwed up if the microgravity environment isn’t as close to zero as you can get it.
OK, back to the movie. Though the tidal effects of being at a higher or lower point than the center-of-mass is orbiting at are basically not noticeable at the macro-level within something as small as the cramped interior of the ISS, the effects would be a lot larger if you were suspended at the end of a hundred-meter rope below the station. There would in fact be a tension on that line because you (the astronaut) are actually at a lower orbit than the space station above you and thus should be traveling at a different rotational speed relative to the station. That delta means that the station would be trying to “pull” you back up into its orbit while the Earth is trying to pull you down into your “proper” orbit. You would, incidentally, be screwing up any cool materials-science experiments because the center-of-mass of the station would have moved down towards you and you would have changed the microgravity of the laboratory module. Do you know how much it costs to get one of those experiments up there? You’re a monster of the highest order.
So yes, there would realistically be a force pulling Clooney and Bullock away from the station, and those parachute lines would indeed have been under tension and probably would have sprung back somewhat when Clooney released himself. Would that force really have been strong enough to justify Clooney sacrificing himself, or would it have just been a small amount of pressure? I’m not sure, really, and it’s too late at night for me to go digging through my old books. If someone wants to Google “orbital tether” and start the process, you are more of a geek than I, and that’s really saying something.
Heh. Thanks for the grin. And the explanation!
Excellent post, Tin!
-Tom
Gravity certainly wins on the technical aspects and contains interesting themes, but I stop short of loving it do to the questionable plot and poor characters. The scenes of destruction in space are more than worth the ticket price and truly amazed me to a degree that I haven’t been since I first saw Jurassic Park as a kid. Even the little touches, like when Bullock gets on the ISS and we briefly see small balls of fire coming out of a hatch are well done. It certainly captures the sense of what I imagine it’s like to be in space.
Unfortunately the plot seemed to merge two sorts of movies together and I think falls rather flat doing it. On the one hand it’s a processes movie. What is done and the order actions are taken are important. But it’s a process movie that wants a happy ending in a situation that shouldn’t provide one. When Bullock goes space station hoping it really started to stretch credulity for me. I didn’t mind the ‘one missile causes chain reaction that ends global communications as we know it’ but once the movies starts creating these outs for Bullock I was brought out of the movie every time.
While the characters weren’t horrible, I didn’t buy either Bullock or Clooney as an astronaut. Maybe it’s because Clooney is playing the same cocksure swarmy character he is usually cast as while Bullock is such a one note character.
One of the things I really like about Apollo 13 is that it shows the danger of space not as a giant cloud of floating debri but as a small problem with a CO2 fan that causes a cascade of failures. It gave this sense of really hanging by a thin thread by being in space that I just didn’t get from Gravity. In Gravity everything works as it’s supposed to and even goes above and beyond what might be expected. I was hoping the plot might do a better job of aligning with the movies themes on human fragility.
As someone who thinks Clooney is the bee’s knees, I don’t disagree. :)
-Tom