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First off however, I would like to tell those who haven't seen the film, not to read this entry because obviously, it may spoil the movie for you. That being said, I wish to say that if you don't know anything about the movie, the best thing you can do is not to watch any of the trailers! Really, don't watch them. The trailers alone already somewhat spoiled the movie for me--considering what I know about space exploration and space simulations, watching the trailers practically told me half the story.

For me, the biggest problem in the film has something to do with the proximities or the nearness of objects in low earth orbit (LEO) from each other. At the beginning of the movie, you see the Shuttle-plus-Hubble (the shuttle "Explorer" was fixing the Hubble Space Telescope, so the Hubble was docked to it), and surprisingly, the International Space Station (ISS), and the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station, were in somewhat close proximity of each other. Like, really close, to the point that George Clooney's character Matt, can actually point them out in the distance. Now you might say, "What? You call that close? Why, it took Clooney and Bullock a LONG time to get to the ISS during the first escape scene--that seems pretty far!" Err, nope. That was very, very, very close, in fact, they were so close to each other, that if you were watching those three objects FROM THE GROUND, they would appear as "three tiny moving stars close to each other, crossing the sky".

In reality, objects in LEO usually lie in different orbital planes, meaning, their orbits don't even cross each other, so just seeing them in that situation, from someone who knows orbital mechanics, is downright silly. Imagine orbital paths to be "highways"--most objects up in low earth orbit do not have the same, or do not share the same orbits, which is why our situation of Clooney saying "Now, we have the ISS over there, and the Tiangong over there..." is really silly--the ISS and the Tiangong wouldn't have been visible, let alone be reachable.

Ok the next problem is about the time it takes to do certain procedures or tasks in space. When Sandra Bullock's character, Dr. Stone, enters the airlock in the ISS, it only took a few seconds to get the airlock pressurized, so that she could take off her helmet and her suit. In reality, this repressurization usually takes around an hour (or even more), and it takes two or three people to help someone put on or get out of a spacesuit (Dr. Stone does it alone, and with relative ease). And then, it also takes hours to put on the suit, just to check if all the systems are fully functional, then comfort level and physical condition of the astronaut about to go on a lengthy (up to six hours) EVA or extra vehicular activity. Those who watch live NASA spacewalk feeds already know this fact, and were probably shaking their heads or snickering when they saw this scene in the movie. Another questionable point that is related to time issues--there was absolutely no reason for Clooney's character to refuse a rendezvous-rescue via the Soyuz--his air supply wasn't critical (he only ran out of propellant for his Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), and his rate of separation from the ISS wasn't that high (compared to Dr. Frank Poole's in "2001: A Space Odyssey"...now that one was FAST), so Dr. Stone could have really aimed for a rendezvous vector and she could have gotten to him. The excuse given to us was, Dr. Stone didn't know where he was, because he refused to answer Dr. Stone when she attempted to contact him (I assume he could still hear her, but refused to reveal his coordinates or vector so that Dr. Stone will not attempt to rescue him) which was a little too "lazy" in my opinion.

I can mention two scenes which are copies off some other well-known "space exploration movies". The scene in which George Clooney untethered himself from Sandra Bullock, that scene was straight out of "Mission to Mars", only in that movie, it was Connie Nielsen and Tim Robbins in the same situation. What bothered me about the situation in "Gravity" was why did Matt (Clooney) assume that the parachute cords wouldn't hold? By the time they were in that position, there was already a significant amount of slowdown, so that Dr. Stone could actually have indeed pulled Matt back towards the ISS. Again, another point that made me say "What?"

The other copycat scene? Sandra doing a "WALL-E"--using the fire extinguisher as a means to propel onesself through space--too funny that she did that But yes, that procedure CAN actually be done. Newton's third law (for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction).Okay, maybe I am using the term "copycat" in a heavy handed manner. I think the better description is, these scenes were nods to such movies, done to honor those memorable scenes.

Although I enjoyed how the space debris was depicted, I think they were moving far too slow to be believable. We expect them to be travelling at around 28,000 kilometers per hour in low earth orbit--that's around 7.7 kilometers per second--over seven times faster than a bullet!. But even if NASA Mission Control ("houston", voiced by Ed Harris...those who have seen "Apollo 13" would smile, this is another nod) kept saying "24,000 kmh", the speed of the debris could actually be even higher, considering plane-intersecting orbits, and imagining the final (totaled) velocity from the reference point of the structures.

Overheard inside the theater, from a girl on the row in front of us: "Why doesn't she stop spinning?" It's all about Newton's First Law of Motion, which states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. So Dr. Stone kept spinning around when she got detached from the Shuttle and the arm, because there is no external force acting upon her to stop her from spinning. Notice that she only stopped spinning when Clooney managed to drift towards her (remember, he is using an MMU pack, which allows him to "fly" around) and tethers his suit to hers.

Now let's talk about the things I liked about the film.

First, most of the physics depicted in the movie are correct--that is how things behave in space. Some of the people who watched it with me were wondering why the astronauts seemed to have a hard time going around. Well, that's microgravity for you. We human beings are so accustomed to life with gravity (see? see? Hence the movie's title), that without it, we're really 8-month old babies trying desperately to walk, but can only crawl. You see Dr. Stone and Kowalsky trying desperately to literally grasp their surroundings amidst disaster, and they really look helpless as they do it. This for me is important, in conveying to the general public that yes, space exploration IS HARD. This is why it is EXPENSIVE, and this is why WE NEED to KEEP DOING IT, so that we can MASTER it. A baby won't be able to walk if it keeps crawling. At some point, it has to learn to stand up and start walking, even though it will indeed stumble from time to time.

Another thing I liked about the movie is how Cuaron planned the camera movements--it was just simply majestic. I believe his philosophy was this--in space, you cannot have a fixed anchor point for a camera, so you cannot just let a camera appear to be fixed in some point, you have to make the camera dynamic, to convey the impression that space is really the space all around you, and the earth is just one part of that space, a large blue, green and brown ball off one corner of your visual field. So I really was impressed by the cinematography and the angles chosen by Cuaron. One fantastic moment was when the camera actually "penetrated" Dr. Stone's helmet, so we can see the inside of the helmet from her perspective, and then seamlessly the camera pulled back and magically went out of her helmet again. That was superb. And in connection with this helmet dive, the camera sometimes would switch to a highly claustrophobic, nausea-inducing first person view, in which you become Sandra Bullock herself, trying to find handholds, clambering across the superstructure of the the vessel you're trying to get into. Just fantastic.

My favorite part of the movie is towards the end of the film. After re-entry and landing in the water of the Shenzhou, it sank (usually, Russian and Chinese re-entry modules do not land on water--they land on land)! And Sandra Bullock had to swim out of it, get out of her spacesuit and swim towards the surface, and crawled her way back to land (see? Crawling again, the metaphor...and adds to the suspense and thrill of the ending). She was crawling because her body was not yet accustomed to the 1G (one gravity) environment of earth. But she stood up AGAINST gravity, so she can stand tall and proud and walk out of the water. To me, the subliminal message in this scene is, evolution. The hint was the frog that swam up, as seen in the frames after she struggled out of her spacesuit. Her act of emerging on to the dry land, was also a metaphor for the process of how amphibians crawled out of the water millions of years ago, to dry land, and became land dwellers, and eventually led to creatures like us. This ending teared me up--I cried. It's the "Ape With Bone Tool" (in 2001: A Space Odyssey) moment of "Gravity", the shining moment of realization, of where we, humankind come from. She then looks up the sky, not with contempt, but she smiled, knowing that she will explore space again, one day, for all of us, are made of stardust, and we just want to go home, back to the stars.