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Seeing it in 3D made it no less of a snooze fest. As Kontakt mentions there was nothing new to the story and I was miles ahead of the script.


Wheels

One can intend cinema to be art. Francis Ford Coppola once produced a work of art and he said as much at the time of release. I thought the movie Apocalypse Now was a friggin' work of art. A friggin' masterpiece. That doesn't mean it was the greatest "movie" ever made. But it was a work of friggin' genius. Whereas the movie that captured the Best Picture Oscar that year, The Deer Hunter, was just a movie. In my opinion, it wasn't even that good a movie, but the cast, and it's anti-Vietnam War sentiments, made it impossible for the Hollywood crowd - the Oscar voters - to ignore. The Deer Hunter is a movie. Apocalypse Now is a work of art.

I don't care about the characters looks. I care about their situation and likability which for me has nothing to do with looks. I found the film engrossing because I put myself in Bullock's situation. Would I do as well? Would I survive? How well would I be able to think under the exact same circumstances?

I'm pretty hard to please sci-fi wise but I enjoyed it a great deal, it strayed enough from Hollywood norms to keep me interested. I don't think the romance/chemistry, for want of better words, as it really wasn't, was at all over-played and nor did I immediately see through Clooney's reappearance.

LOVED the fact that everything went South in the first five minutes and kept falling apart for the rest of the film with no flashbacks, pace-changes, pre-ambles, all the usual back-story gimmicks you see in sci-fi (plenty in the recent Elysium disappointment, for example). Just one continuous story in "real time".

LOVED the fact that largely due to the above it was only 1.5hrs, no padding.

A few lines of character development floating on a tether whilst George was trying to keep her focused and talking easily forgivable, to me.

Pulled in 13m last weekend in the US (week five!) with worldwide takings edging toward 440,000,000.

Best space movie I've seen for several years, easy.

Sandra on set during filming.

Saw it today, and I really like it!

Did anyone catch Ed Harris as Houston? A nice nod to him having played Gene Krantz in Apollo 13, and John Glenn in TRS

I couldn't connect with these scenes- something about it was either too goofy (Clooney) or too gooey (Bullock). I could not buy into these characters, not for a moment did ever think I was watching anything but a very slickly made but shallow film. Put the visuals and subject matter aside (I know the crowd at SimHQ of course will be very enthusiastic about space), this to me was like Titanic in space, but not as good as Titanic, story wise. If it took place in a cave where they were trapped, this would be more a lame 'chick film,' probably males would not be into it as much.

Clooney hitting on Bullock while she's emoting personal tragedy in space while they're supposedly a desperate situation for survival which they probably would not have survived, this is in my view is not a good story. It's as if NASA didn't vet these people and check their backgrounds, or they would have discovered some skeletons in the closet. Bullock with her issues, and Clooney, who would probably be accident and risk prone- this is after all the guy who still jokes on the way to his own death about trying to break the spacewalk record. Not a real character. This is just a bad script. To be sure a couple of years ago there was that strange pair of real life astronauts who had an affair, but I doubt this would have been something that came out during a spacewalk or something.

Something else that kind of seemed overlooked- why does the second space station even exist? They debris field rips apart the first one and then comes back around to wipe out the second one- the second one should have been destroyed the first time around with the first one. It appears to be in line to get hit during the second revolution, but why not the first?


I just watched All is Lost, another survival tale, and I found it much more personal and less bizarre. Rather than spend time having Redford act like a larger than life fraternity psychopath or have to tell you about dead children to get you to identify with him, you watch him struggle to survive. And it seems much more real, to me anyway.

I know a lot of people that use humor as a self-defense mechanism - most perform highly dangerous jobs at that. In fact I've met quite a few astronauts in my time and I can say they all have a great sense of humor. If I were floating away to my death, I'd be cracking jokes all the way to my grave.

WTF are you talking about?!!?

He wasn't actually hitting on her...he was trying everything he could do, to distract her from panic due to the dire situation, so that she could be just distracted enough to calm to a level where her ox reserves might be enough. It's basically the same sort of principles a doctor uses as bedside manner for a patient who's in severe trauma and not certain to survive the night. Give them encouragement, distract them from just how severe their situation is, and do your best to calm them down. For their own survival.

As for vetting and issues...sorry, but guess what? EVERYONE has "issues". EVERYONE. Even you and I. NASA has it's own criteria for what it likes in astronaughts and what would cause them to reject an applicant...but "issues" won't be the issue, because everyone has 'em.

Accident prone?!? How on earth did you conclude that?!

Clooney isn't really joking about his impending death. He's a realist, he's an experienced professional who knew years, even decades before that a spacewalk that goes bad is a guarantee of death. Failing to arrest his inertia from the station, he knew before even arriving that would result in his death. He'd have come to terms with his mortality minutes BEFORE, hours before, even years or decades before he drifted past the station.

When I arrived in the warzone for the first time, for a short period i had a little bit of a minor panic attack. And then I focused on the notion that if I died there during my tour, it wasn't as big a deal as other events in my life...it would just be the end of it. I concluded that if I died, it was ok, and maybe I might just get lucky and live through that war. I got calm within minutes...and that served me for the entire tour. I came to grips with my own death long before I might actually get killed, and suddenly I could joke about it. Grim humor became actually amusing and funny. THAT is what Clooney's character was going through.

And much like soldiers in war, even when he knew his own life was within an hour of expiring, he focused on doing what little he could, to help save the life of his fellow comrade, Bullock, simply by pretending his own situation was ok with himself, that she couldn't grieve for him or it would cost her her life too, get her focused on her own survival, itself hanging by a thread. Or in this case a parachute strand! In a way, it was a little like the soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his buddies, although a bit different since his own fate was sealed already.

Him talking about breaking spacewalk records after drifting past to his death, was simply trying to get Bullock to get calm and focused, by forcing himself to be calm and talk about useless trivia, instead of crying that he wouldn't see his wife/kids (not sure he had any, I don't recall mention of his personal situation) again.




Well...actual orbital mechanics seems to be rather lacking in this movie, probably it's most unrealistic feature. The Hubble, shuttle, ISS and Chinese station all seem to be orbiting on the same plane just 20km appart...which is just rediculous. They'd all be a drastically different altitudes, and likely thousands of KM appart. Which, might offer a plausible explanation why the other station hadn't got hit yet. Except that wasn't what was shown in the movie!

I just chalked it all up to the notion that space is big, and debris and stations are tiny in comparison. In reality, such a debris field might take months or years of orbits to eventually hit another station. By contrast, the movie depicted something more resembling the Indonesian tsunami or something, wiping out nearly everything in it's path.

You missed the part he was hitting on her- consider yourself lucky. Let me ask you this: have you ever consoled a hot chick who told you that her child had died and whom you now find yourselves in a life or death situation with a compliment like telling her she's cute? I'll bet you haven't. There's a reason for that, it's off- a sociopath might hit on someone at a funeral, because they lack a certain social awareness that most other people understand.




There are issues and then there are issues- in my time in the military and in my careers after, I've held various clearances or have had certain assignments that required background checks. I couldn't tell you why I never failed anything, because as a kid when I did wild things that I wouldn't do now, but it created no trail of itself- this was back before everything you did was recorded and put up on the Internet or indexed in an electronic database somewhere. But then there's another difference, I never applied for a job that required me to be sealed up in a tube and put into space, either. You can't just quit, you can't just be recalled, you can't just be the kind of person who is an individual and doesn't play well with others. You're stuck up there with the slimmest margin for error. I don't know exactly everything that NASA would do to screen people who make it into the astronaut program, but there's usually a reason why people in the program are just generally very cerebral and clean cut- much more than I ever would be on both accounts. Less cowboys and more engineers and scientists. I knew a colonel who was supposed to be an astronaut- I forget his story, he was either supposed to be on the next mission after the Challenger, but they canceled his mission or he washed out, basically a boring guy otherwise. Air Force Academy grad, nothing on his record. Kind of eccentric and a story teller, a bit egotistical but that might be the reason why he didn't make it.




I don't think you are really reading my comments- you're kind of reacting with your trademark tirades and exaggerated use of punctuation!!??? WTF!!!???

Really, it gets old. When you punctuate every sentence the way you do, it loses any sense of the importance you are trying to portend.

You'll have to see below to get my meaning- the character is sort of a story telling cowboy, right? People like that are either embellishers or they are the real thing- which are sort of contrary to the personality type to what you'd want as an astronaut. Probably makes for a good fictional character though, but generally everything about space is risk management, people like these would probably be tended to weeded out. Or as I said the character is just full of sh_t and it's just sort of like a stereotypical goofball romantic comedy sketch- as I said before. If Clooney would have lived, she would have found out the stories were half truths and exaggerations, but hey, by that time she would have fallen in love like they all do.




You've failed to really pay attention to his death scene, I take it. One of his parting shots is how he's going to break the spacewalking record, that's a joke. It's also highly unlikely that someone would do that- that's even rare for a psychopath to do that.



This is still different, and not what Clooney is going through. Let me repeat again since you've missed it- Clooney is dying, it's not a matter of if, he's not speculating, he's drifting off into space, he made the decision to die. As he's dying there's not much difference to the way he lives, either- his character is fairly typical of some romantic kind of trope. Humor is used to take the edge off things in dangerous situations, but this is used to move the audience to sentiment. It doesn't get much gooier than this. It's no coincidence that they used male and female leads, and at that A listers typically considered some of the most beautiful people in the business. Think of this story if Clooney looked like a typical bald guy for his age, and Bullock didn't have model looks or was another male astronaut- which would more likely to be the case. That certainly would change the dynamics of the story quite a bit without that male-female tension that so many films force into a story. It would be a different story, one that might have to rely on something else- perhaps more technical or scientific fidelity.




In the end, you have to accept certain premises, granted- you wind up having to accept the premise that they used a lot of theatre to set up the situation that they were in, but that includes the character dialogue and interactions. And that's what I saw this film as- a visual treat, I'm not arguing against that. Not much more than that, in my opinion. This wasn't a 'realistic' type of drama, this is popcorn cinema, I don't really know what else to compare it to, I'd have to think about it. That's not to say those movies can't be successful, they obviously can- but I am explaining why I found this boring. It's trying to make you care about these cardboard people, I just couldn't get into their story.

It's not a normal reaction to laugh about your own immediate death, no matter how much the movies try to convince audiences how common and how easy that as to do. In some situations, probably war, men may become so traumatized or so desensitized they lose hope (pretty much lost themselves and are emotional wrecks), and in those situations some might joke very grimly or nightmarishly about their fates, but that's not the same thing as joking while you're dying at the same time. It's still not normal for someone on the way to their own untimely deaths to joke and be so calm about it. Even when they know ahead of time that it is certain they are going to be executed- many of the hardest, most desensitize condemned prisoners get colder feet than you can imagine and have to be carried to the execution chamber. Fear is the normal reaction. Dying medical patients may reach an acceptance phase, but that's after they've had time to go through denial and fear first. Pilots crashing aren't going to be telling jokes on the way down. It's not a choice to do that. That's something that they do in the movies.

On a tangent, the execution episode in the most recent season of The Killing was the most compelling hour of TV drama I've seen in a long, long time. Just incredible performances.

On a tangent to that tangent, I can't believe Joel Kinnaman is the new Robocop. Actually, I'll just leave it as I can't believe they're remaking Robocop.

Yeah, I doubt there will be anything about that one to go see. Probably better if a local theatre screens the original, even though I must have seen it a dozen times already.

Bill Murray did it really well in Zombieland, I have to say. We got to laugh with him as he perished and be faux sad at the same time. Good stuff.

That movie was over the top and meant for laughs.

Odd thing about Clooney in Gravity is that you don't really get his story- you sort of get into Bullock's head about her daughter, but nothing about where Clooney comes from- his family or anything like that, he seems like a bachelor.

His fatal scene he doesn't invoke any emotion I could believe- not even a whimper about his own family and his fate (which would have totally changed the emotional impact of that scene), just a charmer right going out to the end. His part was written for the females in the audience and their tendency to be manipulated by these sorts of smooth, charming, psychopathic type characters. No matter what's going on he's pretty much immune to stress or fear, he flirts with Sandra Bullock during this ordeal in space and after she revealed her issues, he's not deep at all, he is emotionally shallow, he's superficially charming, he has psychopathic characteristics, although I'm sure the screen writers are really not that deep to realize that- they've just designed a light hearted character for a supposedly serious situation, it's so unhuman and contrived however, it's bizarre. If it weren't for the awesome visuals and they weren't in space or they were trapped on a boat or in Alaska wilderness, this film would have been a real turkey. I have to go watch Alien just to wash this stuff out of my system, in Gravity I was lured into watching a third rate romantic comedy I didn't want to see.

I caught the movie last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. Sandra Bullock did a good job (considering I was complaining about her in the trailer). 3D works well with this film.

Yeah wouldn't mind seeing it again but movies are exorbitantly expensive these days. Shame as I'm sure it'll be a lot less impactful on a home screen with no 3D.

Out of curiosity, how much is a movie ticket in Vancouver for an evening showing? It's $11.00 in Miami. That's the non 3D price of course.

$5.50 here in College Station - and no that's not matinee prices!

5.50, wow.

$19 for IMAX at the top end down to $12.50 for non 3D standard around these parts. I admit I've got used to being spoiled with the nice seats and huge screen at the IMAX though!