The Synthesis: Gravity (Episode 2)

On the topic of the blockbuster hit Gravity starring Sandra Bullock, Lacey Hannan thinks you should get a load of this guy (Alexander Winn) talking about how George Clooney should have been liquefied in a dramatic sonic boom.

𝕋𝕙𝕖 π•Šπ•ͺπ•Ÿπ•₯π•™π•–π•€π•šπ•€ is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken. Join us!

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Hey, folks, this is Alexander Winn. Hi, and I’m Lacey Hannan.

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We are the co-founders of Edgeworks Entertainment. And you are watching the synthesis episode two.

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Yes. It’s good to be back. It’s good to be back.

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We hope you’re excited. Yep. So what is the synthesis? Tell us, Alex. So you’re more concise. So there’s something some days. Not always. Not always true.

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So the synthesis is the new show from Hedrick’s Entertainment, where we’re going to be taking a look at movies and TV shows, video games and books and all sorts of stuff, and talk about not only how did they do as popular entertainment, but also how did they represent real science and real history as part of the entertainment.

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Yes, that’s that that is that is that is the thing Hedrick’s entertainment for those who don’t know, we are the makers of terror Genesis, which is your dark horse. Once upon a time, it was an indeed.

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Can we do we still call it. We’re still in Eddie. I mean, we’ve just gotten a lot of downloads. Yeah. So I was I was going with 20 million downloads. And so based on real science. Based on real science, we do. We like it.

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I mean, he loves it. I like it.

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All right, be sure to give us a follow if you haven’t already so you can see new episodes as they come out. We’re going to be doing these weekly.

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So, yeah, we’re doing I mean, weekly except for next week. Yes. Listen, I don’t. For those of you who aren’t in the U.S., next Thursday is Thanksgiving major holiday. So we won’t be here now. We’re going to be in a cabin in the woods.

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We’ll be back way to make its own gravy. We’ll be back right after this. Oh, yeah. Real quick, we’re married. So, like, just this isn’t very important. Delacey that everyone knows.

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Listen, I just feel like when people are going to be like, what is this relationship. It’s, I don’t know, it just probably helps people to have that understanding, that base level of knowledge. Yeah. Real history.

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All right. So this week we’re going to be talking about gravity, which is a space disaster movie from 2013. We’re coming hot off the heels of our last episode about Apollo 13, which was a real space disaster. And now we’re going to be talking about a fictional space

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disaster. And for those of you who don’t know, Lacey is terrified of space disasters. So, Lace, how did you feel about watching gravity?

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Oh, gravity tried to give me a heart attack until. Until I started watching it, just for the real science of it all, yeah, and then it mostly just made me mad. All right. So that’s that’s where we’re coming in. The music that we have that like introduces the show so gentle. And I feel bad because I am not feeling very gentle about this movie. So it’s all right. So false advertising from the intro. Yes.

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So some quick background notes before we get started. Directed by and I’m going to butcher this pronunciation. Maybe you know how. No, I don’t. Alfonso CuarΓ³n, maybe. Yeah, that’s what I’m going to direct. Written by Alfonso and his son Jonas Onis. Yeah, written by Father and Son, which is the title. I assumed it’d be like brothers. Yeah. Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney with a voiceover from Ed Harris. I Knew It. Right. And Music by Steven Price. We don’t always mention the music, but I feel like in this one we absolutely had to because the character of the gut wrenching tension. Yes. Comes from the soundtrack.

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Oh, my God. The I also have a note here that the British visual effects company, Framestore, spent more than three years working on this movie and over 80 of its 91 one minutes are special effects from this company.

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So definitely a tour de force of what is possible with computer animation. So, yeah, for those who haven’t seen it, gravity is about a space mission. Modern day two astronauts repairing the Hubble Space Telescope when an accident happens elsewhere in orbit. When the Russians are trying to demolish this, I wouldn’t call it an accident. Well, I mean, they were trying to demolish a satellite. They didn’t mean to do all of that. They set off an accidental chain reaction. Right. But that’s because someone wasn’t thinking, yeah, and debris begins flying around orbit. And it’s about these two people and eventually this one person trying to get back to Earth amid this unfolding disaster. Do you have any feelings? Yeah. Do you have any overarching thoughts to get into before we start stepping through the story?

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I mean it. Well, let’s I think we should just start with the very beginning, OK, which which the the the moment it opens, you’ve got some words coming across the screen and it says. At six kilometres above planet Earth, the temperature fluctuates between two hundred and fifty eight and negative one hundred and forty eight degrees Fahrenheit. There’s nothing to carry sound, no air pressure, no oxygen. Life in space is impossible. Setting the tone. I was going, all right, like maybe there’s real science in this movie. Crushing blow to my hopes and dreams for it. OK, OK, I will be nicer. I will not I will not just I mean really I don’t have a lot of good notes. No, no. OK, so overall, thumbs down from you. I mean, I like this movie for the art. If you’re just watching it for the art of it all, I think there’s something to it. There’s probably some great things to be said for it. But, um, I think that it’s, um, kind of hammers you over the head with its themes and the allegorical nature of of it. And I find that really frustrating as an artist. Like I come from the film industry and I just I, I like subtlety. And there’s just zero subtlety to this movie. It is beautiful. Um, I do think that there are some solid acting moments. Um, but I, I really struggled with the direction from beginning to end. And seeing as he is the director and writer and producer like that’s all on this one guy. So, um, and from a scientific aspect, like maybe you can tell me that there’s actual real science in it.

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But from from my amateur, I there’s just not so, you know, I was actually so I’ve got some notes that I was that I had for the end, but I’ll go ahead and sort of tease them now, which is anybody who is sort of interested in real science and movies and TV shows based on real science, we’ll start to notice a pattern, which is that a lot of movies pat themselves on the back for being historically accurate or scientifically accurate.

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And then the experts like Neil deGrasse Tyson or whoever will come in and be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you’re not.

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Here are all the ways you’re not. And you can tell that, like, the creatives are really excited to sort of do do this thing that’s scientifically accurate and it’s just not up to snuff from the perspective of the professionals. Gravity is the first movie I have ever seen where all the creatives were like, I don’t know, it’s not that scientifically accurate. Like we tried to do our best, but we didn’t really do that well. And all of the experts are jumping in, going, it’s incredible. They did so much. Right. And obviously there are some things that they got wrong and we’ll we’ll go through them.

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But there are so many things I’m suspicious of this I’ve got I’ve got quote after quote from, like astronauts and NASA professionals and things that that range from the really nit picky, like individual pieces of gear that they have on the space station that like who would have thought to put that particular wrench?

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Except they did put that particular wrench and. Yeah, all sorts of stuff.

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So I’m I mean, I’d kind of love to hear it. Maybe it’ll help color my review of it. All right. In a positive thing because I have next to nothing positive to say so.

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The director said this is not a documentary. This is a piece of fiction. The costume designer made a big deal about how apparently no space suit opens from the front. Whenever you’re putting on a space suit, someone else helps you do it because it sort of buckles up in the back. But they needed her to be able to get in and out on her own. So they had to redesign it and re-adapt all the functions of the suit for a front opening and a bunch of stuff like a bunch of different creatives. We’re talking about the things they had to change or the things that weren’t accurate. But anyway, so Michael J. Massimino, who took part in the Hubble Space Telescope telescope servicing missions, which is to say he’s doing what the characters in this movie are doing, OK, said nothing was out of place. Nothing was missing. There was a one of a kind of wire cutter we used on one of my spacewalks. And sure enough, they had that wire cutter in the movie. Buzz Aldrin, very famous Buzz Aldrin, landed on the moon, said, I was so extravagantly impressed by the portrayal of the real of the reality of zero gravity going through the space station was done just the way I’ve seen people do it. In reality, the spinning is going to happen, maybe not quite that vigorous, but certainly we’ve been fortunate that people haven’t been in these situations yet. I think it reminds us that there really are hazards in the space business, especially in activities outside the spacecraft.

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Did a PR company pay for these quotes? I’m pretty sure that’s what happened here.

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So let’s see, here’s one. One of them is praising the, uh, the use of 3D, which is not quite, but OK.

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Beyond the tools, beyond the gravity stuff like the actual work done. Yeah. OK, let’s just go ahead. We can go back to the top and you can find your notes on it later.

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One other quote just in from Cody Coleman said, The only really big mistake they made in the movie is that you if you were up there on a space mission, the last thing you do is let George Clooney go, which, you know, yeah, that was George Clooney call and he made it too quickly.

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Let’s start at the beginning of the movie. OK, so I, I this the sound effect that, you know, they they tell you right at the beginning there’s nothing to carry sound. And as soon as you’ve got that sound and that rising, rising, rising tension and then it just cuts out and it’s like the sound effects really set up the the the movie, which is, you know, they they do a good job. I don’t appreciate it because it tries to give me a heart attack. Yes, I feel like.

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So my take on this movie overall is only OK. I had a lot of criticisms of this movie too. But I feel like by the end of this episode, we’re going to have ended with you talking about all the things that are terrible of me just trying to shore up the other side. So let’s start with the opening shot is really impressive, 13 minute long without a cut like I have from a filmmaking standpoint. I have no idea how they pulled that off. But one of the things just to point out what you were talking about with sound effects, the music does an incredible job with rising tension. But I did find a note that apparently when the trailers for Gravity came out, they had sound effects in space. You could hear the explosions and all that sort of thing. But that is not true in the movie. There’s no sound in space and that’s how they do it. But I did notice one thing that was very subtly done, but I really appreciated it as soon as I noticed it, which is there is sound in space as long as she’s touching something.

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Whenever she’s, like, holding on to the side of the ship, you can hear the ship creaking and shaking and then as soon as she lets go, it instantly cuts out because it’s the sound isn’t being transferred through her gloves.

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Yeah, they they do a couple of things really well within the environmental aspect, and that’s one of them. I do have to say that they did a great job of a couple of things like that.

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I feel like that’s kind of where probably 60 or 70 percent of their effort went is just evoking the environment of space, whether it’s in the cinematography or in the sound design or in any of this. I feel like the point of this movie was make you feel like you are out of control in zero G.

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And that’s maybe to the detriment of other parts of the movie where a lot of the creative effort went into. And you can tell, but you can also tell that, you know, time wasn’t spent on other things. Mm hmm.

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I mean, I think time wasn’t spent on the science within the script environmentally, they they did some cool things. But what is she doing with the panels? We have no clue.

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She’s installing some kind of prototype. She talks about she’s designed a thing and she’s installing it.

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Yes. And and even that comes into question because he’s like NASA doesn’t do prototypes, like they put millions of dollars into this. This is they wouldn’t do something that they are unsure of.

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Well, I mean, my read of that was that she was being self-deprecating. She was saying, yeah, I made this thing in my garage and he’s like, they don’t do things.

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But that’s what I’m saying is like. Even the stuff that we’re told is walked back. Yeah, exactly, and so we don’t know what she’s doing with the panel. There’s a lack of info that I was I wanted. Like she she warned engineering that this could happen and they didn’t take heed. And then, of course, they don’t apologize. And it’s Mel when she’s right there. And I, I, I was really frustrated with that because I don’t believe. OK, so last week we watched Apollo 13. There’s so much redundancy and there and I fell in love with that. If you watch the first episode, I was severely injured. Yes, I loved that. And I felt like this movie is the polar opposite of Apollo 13.

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And they there there’s no redundancy and no no redundancy and a surprising lack of preparation. Yes. The biggest thing like I feel like this is a really interesting movie about what would happen if NASA had lower standards, like, you know, because they’re really good.

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But because, you know, the thing is, it’s one of the things that a lot of people talk about with this movie and I know is one of the issues that you had.

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It is one of the issues that I had with it, is that she doesn’t seem very thoroughly trained, know it’s like she’s a newbie and she has to be sort of walked through what to do every step of the way. And at first I just thought that was OK. Well, somebody didn’t know how to write really competent characters. Not everybody can be anywhere.

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But then I started to notice that even within the script, they kind of hint that she is kind of a new like at one point, George Clooney specifically asks her, how long did you train? And she says, six months. And then the Indian guy says, including holidays. And she goes, Yeah. Which sort of draws our attention even more to the fact that she’s apparently not done as much training as her crewmates would have expected, and not only that, but she didn’t train with them.

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You know, they don’t seem they don’t he doesn’t know how long she trained. He had to ask her while they were up there.

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And that seems to me I’m highly suspicious.

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Yeah, I think that even if they didn’t even if she was like a last minute replacement, which I’m sure, you know, somebody gets away because she went up to put the prototype in. Well, right. Right. But what I’m saying is, like, even if somebody else was supposed to be on that mission and they got bumped at the last minute, like in Apollo 13.

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George Clooney would have reviewed her file, like he wouldn’t be asking, what are you installing? How long did you train? Like, why don’t you know this?

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Yeah, yeah, that is. And and like I said, the weird part is that it’s almost like the script itself is asking you to ask the it wants you to ask these questions because it keeps bringing up things that you didn’t have to put that in the script. Like all you needed was for George Clooney to not ask that question. And we would just assume that they train together.

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And I like I meant to go look up NASA like training protocols because it was I found it so upsetting that they would send someone such an amateur up there. And, you know, it gets underlined again and again that she doesn’t she has always crash landed the I don’t remember what it’s called. So. Yes. Yeah. Like. Excuse me, what like I know she’s not supposed to pilot, but, my God, you you can’t do something that is so only important to your survival or not even important to your survival, because theoretically, they weren’t supposed to use that spacecraft at all.

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But I’m surprised that anybody in a in an astronaut training program gets to just fail.

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Like if you tried a thing and then you failed and you failed and you failed. And then I guess they were just like a. Like, why didn’t you keep trying?

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There’s like there’s a phrase for people who get promoted past their competency. Yeah. And to me, like, I don’t remember what it is, but to me that’s what’s happened is rising to the level of your incompetence. Yeah. And to me, it’s more like she I’ve got an uncle who does who who does project management for for various companies that end up putting experiments on on shuttles and things like that. He’s a legitimate rocket scientist and project manager and he’s never been in space. To me, this would be a project that had been project managed by this woman and she would never have left Earth like she she has. There’s no good reason for her to be up there. And I I found that so frustrating. And I found it kind of insulting to actual astronauts because the amount of work they do and I was like, you didn’t work hard enough to get here.

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Yeah, I actually I’ve got a note here at the beginning. So one thing that our viewers will either already have picked up on or pick up on as the show continues is I don’t like just straight up criticizing things like I always try to look on the other side.

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Yeah, I always try to spin it in a positive light. And so actually at the beginning, when the crisis starts happening, I have a note here that says Panic. This movie is an interesting exploration of what is totally understandable, but still unprofessional where like, I can’t fault her for hyperventilating when she’s spinning off into space. Like, yes, that is a totally reasonable response, except that the reason that you get to be an astronaut is because you have that trained out of you. And so I kept sort of bouncing back and forth between, OK, this is a reasonable human response, but it’s still unprofessional.

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Just like with a soldier, if somebody is shooting at you, it is totally reasonable to want to turn around and run away. But you’re a soldier, so don’t turn around and run away like this is what you trained for. And as the movie went on, I have little indented notes below that line that just get more and more and more critical because as the movie goes on, it’s less and less. You know, when it first happens, everybody’s freaking out. The lizard brain kicks in. Sure. But after a while it’s like, OK, but you got to like, get on, get with the program. There’s a shot when he George Clooney goes out to get her and brings her back and they’re coming in toward the the ruined shuttle. And he tells her because he’s got his hands on the jet controls, he tells her grab the body of the third astronaut who has died. And there’s a thing they do throughout this movie where they cut to a first person camera. And I will have to say, not many movies do a straight first person camera where you can literally see the hands. And this is the best version of it I’ve ever seen. Like they did it and they did it in the movie. They do it every once in a while and it’s always awful. And this time it’s at least reasonably well done, except that she’s flying in and he says, get hit, grab his body. And she’s like, OK. And so the hands are out like this. And then she’s coming in faster and faster and she does like this. Which is like, OK.

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You’re you’re trying to prevent an impact, but also like you’re supposed to grab the like so off like three or four times throughout this movie, she’s given instructions to grab on. And when she gets close, she does like this. But that’s not how you grab onto things. That is specifically like that’s the opposite. Yeah, that’s that’s a pushing away young.

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One of my biggest frustrations before we even get to the her flying off into space, the the lack of professional voice during high stress moments drove me crazy because especially what’s his name. Ed Ed Harris. Right. Ed Harris, I we talked about an Apollo 13. Ed Harris and Tom Hanks had excellent professional voices like all of these people would, would just go from like high stress into their mask. Yeah, like professional carboy. Yeah. And and we are hearing from Ed Harris the exact opposite a week later of him flipping out.

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And I’m saying you’re going wait way, way. Is anybody in control here who did it? Yeah. By the time he’s even yelling at one point.

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Yeah. And I was just I was about to like, lose my mind because, like, the lack of following directions when told to abort, I mean, even Kevin Bacon and Apollo 13 followed directions and I was willing to blame everything on him. He does great. But like, I kept going, wow, Hanks is a better leader than Clooney, obviously. But the way they are, accuracy can be more than just about science and history. It can be about the way you comport yourself while in in situations that for other people are actually real life. Yes. And I felt like the director purposefully pushed the drama in a way that was totally unnecessary. The these astronauts could have been professional and competent the entire time and still had all of this happen. And it would have been incredibly dramatic, but it would have been more realistic to me, therefore, more powerful and more powerful. And again, not as like hitting me over the head with the drama.

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Yeah, I feel like there’s a there’s a central tenant of the disaster film genre, which. Not everybody picked up on it. I think that the filmmakers here didn’t really pick up on it, which is disaster films are very much like Sherlock Holmes stories, which is the the thrill is watching people overcome stuff that you don’t think you could have. Right. Just like Sherlock Holmes. The whole point of watching a Sherlock Holmes story is watching him solve a crime and being mystified at how brilliant he is. If you’re watching a disaster film and you’re leaning back the whole time going, why are they doing this? That’s not fun. Fun is watching people overcome insurmountable odds. And if they’re reacting with less competence than the audience feels that they would have in that situation, then. The whole thing just becomes a what not to do.

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Yeah, and this this entire movie kind of feels like that.

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I will say we sort of breezed by the initial crisis. Yeah. Which is worth taking a minute. First off, can you imagine how the fallout from this movie? Like, I kind of want a sequel to Gravity that is not a disaster movie, but is like a West Wing style or like an Aaron Sorkin political legal drama around Hey, Russia, you tried to destroy one missile with a rocket and you instead knocked out the entire planet’s satellite grid. Oh, like what?

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I and I wanted to know the fallout from that.

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Like, that was way more important to me than this woman getting back to Earth because was alienating at a certain point, if all of the space stations are shredded, we have to assume that all of the communication satellites are shredded. We know that they lost their communications. You’d think that they would have bounced something off, something if there was anything left. But the implication is that there’s literally nothing in orbit anymore except debris. GPS is out. Yeah, communications are out.

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This is like apocalyptic kind of stuff.

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Like this is the kind of thing where entire power grids start dropping because, you know, this is like Y2K wasn’t but could have been. Yeah. And that is a story worth exploring.

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I wrote the explosion kind of sucks. I don’t really know what that means. So if you know what that means, let me know. But just because we’re going back to, like, the actual story of it, there’s that point. There’s a moment where Clunies says doing that thing you’re doing is the point of the mission. What a dumb line that is like the most exposition, but like it’s it’s crap exposition with zero information. Yeah, like what is she doing? What is this mission like? Can we can we talk about that before we get into this disaster?

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Because I want to know what she’s good at, man, because you make her look bad at everything.

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Also, if that’s the whole point of the mission, why don’t you know what she’s installing? Yes.

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I will say, though, on on the upside, one thing that I did have to did have to give it is the speed with which things fall apart, I feel like was perfect.

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I feel like a lot of filmmakers would have wanted to absolutely blindside them. Like this is just coming out of nowhere and all of a sudden the world is ending, whereas and then others would have wanted to sort of drag it out and tease it and and make it this slower build. Whereas I feel like so the the debris wave comes around three times by the end of the film and each time. I feel like there is enough time for the audience to recognize what’s happening, you start to see things whizzing by in the background, you start to pick up on, oh, wait, I think it might be here, but then by the time it starts, it’s happening so fast that you sort of can’t respond fast enough. You know, like, yes, she should have stopped what she was doing and headed back to the shuttle. But as George Clooney points out later, they were never going to make it. Like in retrospect, there was no way they had enough time to get back into the shuttle. There was no way, you know, she she goes out at one point to detach the parachute from the Soyuz and you start to see things whizzing in the background and the music starts ramping up. And it’s just like there’s we’ve already established how long this thing takes and there’s not enough time to get.

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Well, I think that’s actually part of one of the problems for me is that Houston explains to them that this has happened and that engineering or whoever says it’s not going to hit you. And I’m sitting here going, OK, but it’s going on because it’s the movie. It’s a movie. So it does.

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But how are the how are these brilliant minds who are double checking each other? How are they so wrong? It’s again, the lack of redundancy and to me, the lack of competency. And I’m just sitting here going, NASA has some of the smartest people alive working for them. This isn’t how this would go down. Yeah, I mean, this made me so angry for the real people out there doing this job.

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I mean, the answer to your question, Ed Harris does say the debris, the initial debris cloud wasn’t going to hit them. But what happens is the thing that happens in this movie is that it hit something and then that one blew up and that’s headed their way. That is so before I watched this this week, four to four tonight, there were two things in my mind that went down as like the major inaccuracies in this movie. And one of them is and this one is like, to be honest, I’m willing to give it to them, because this is just the nature of drama.

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I’m not I’m not willing to give them anything right now. So show me your way.

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I file this under the same category as the dust storm in The Martian, which is way more powerful than any dust storm on Mars is ever actually going to be.

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But we need it for the drama. And that is that space is so big that there’s no such thing as a cloud of debris that comes back around. Like if there was debris, it might hit you. But as soon as it does, it just scatters out into the universe.

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And then there’s like a point zero zero zero zero zero zero three percent chance of another one passing within a mile of you.

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You know, there’s just no I wasn’t willing to give that to them because it was to me, again, forced the story in a way that I thought was unnecessary. They didn’t have to do the repeat. Coming back around, yeah, they didn’t have to do it again, that that was already going to be hard enough for her to get back to Earth by herself as someone who never trained properly. It was going to be hard enough for her to do that. I don’t think that they had to underline it over and over and over again. Just I mean, I don’t understand what the point was to make it that that bad.

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I mean, I think the answer is because otherwise she would have just gone to the soldiers and come back down and like you needed you needed some kind of ongoing threat because the Soyuz wasn’t going to be able to get her to Earth anyway because that parachute had already gone.

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Right. True. So she needed to get to the to the Chinese station. Yeah. Um, either way. And that was already going to be problematic. I just I guess to me, they took it so far out of reality that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief right. Enough to to be willing to engage with the movie the way they wanted me to.

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This is fun. This is the first time I think I’ve ever encountered a thing where your standards of scientific excellence are higher than mine.

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This is weird. You’re freaking me out. Where is my husband? I am. I have concerns.

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So quick history lesson, by the way. The Soyuz spacecraft dates back all the way to the 1960s and was designed as part of the Soviet lunar program.

[00:32:10]

And they’ve been using it ever since. They’ve obviously been updating it and building new ones and coming up with new versions. But it is the most reliable spacecraft ever designed with over one hundred and forty manned flights. Wow. Yeah, it’s the rocket that gets it up into space, was built out of a Russian ICBM, which is to say intercontinental ballistic missile. This thing rides a nuke into space.

[00:32:36]

And after the space shuttle was retired in 2011, it was the only vehicle that Americans could use to get to the ISS until this year, spring 2020 with space X.

[00:32:48]

Oh, look at that. We are no longer reliant on Soyuz.

[00:32:53]

Um, so I think now we are to George Clooney has picked her up. She has headed by the trauma of carrying a dead body, which, by the way, whoa, the guy’s face. It turned into a zombie movie for a little bit with seeing all all of the different dead crew members. I was I don’t do zombies either. Listen, I don’t like space disasters and I don’t like zombies and I don’t like postapocalyptic anything. And this is her.

[00:33:27]

And yet, weirdly, she loves the experience which has space disasters and zombies.

[00:33:33]

They get one that is the one that does it anyway.

[00:33:37]

So I this movie kind of I mean, I know it’s not a postapocalyptic movie, but it is her postapocalyptic like. That’s part of the theme, but OK, so we are now to they are having their little conversation.

[00:33:54]

They’re heading for the US to take Soyuzes down.

[00:33:59]

Yeah. And and they’re talking about her trauma. You know, who’s on earth. Yeah.

[00:34:06]

And I am displaying the fact that he knows nothing about this one, doesn’t know she’s married, doesn’t know if she has any kids or.

[00:34:12]

It’s utterly bizarre. Yeah. Especially because as we learned in Apollo 13, knowing your crew the way that they the tone of their voice and the way they breathe is so important. It was weird.

[00:34:27]

Also insists that you keep talking while she’s running out of oxygen, which is.

[00:34:32]

Oh, so I just I, I had like a hole. She keeps saying, sorry, there’s heavy breathing and she’s swearing all the time and like, girlfriend get it together. Um, she really doesn’t for the longest time.

[00:34:45]

Although I have to say I did laugh out loud at George Clooney saying we’re going back to the shuttle. Copy that. And she just says, fuck. And he goes, Roger, copy that.

[00:34:57]

That yes. That is exactly how that would go down.

[00:35:01]

Yeah. With someone who’s panicking. Yes, absolutely. But they’re talking about her trauma and you guys like, again, towards accuracy. I don’t think NASA would have let this woman up there because this woman needs therapy and therapy, I don’t say is a bad word because I go to therapy.

[00:35:20]

Therapy is great. People should do that. But she didn’t get it. And she’s got like PTSD.

[00:35:27]

Yeah, she’s got PTSD. And the other thing that that occurred to me, and this isn’t really something that sort of comes up within the script, but it’s something that once you start thinking about it, they sort of try to have their cake and eat it, too, where on the one hand she’s really sort of depressed and like she’s she what she talks about are symptoms of clinical depression, just driving for hours on end, like her social life is coming apart. She sort of doesn’t exist out of work. These are all big red flags for clinical depression, even suicidal tendencies.

[00:36:01]

And yet she made it through an astronaut selection program like that. The woman that just drives every evening for hours on end is not the kind of person who beats out a thousand other applicants to go on a space not without help.

[00:36:17]

And that’s kind of where I kept going, is like the I just drive line. It sounds poignant because the whole thing is she’s lost her daughter to what she calls a stupid accident. Our daughter’s on the playground. She trips and falls, hits her head, and that’s it. That’s the end. And it crushes this woman as it obviously would. Of course it does. And she gets the call while she is in her car. And now what she does in the evening, George Clooney asks her what her evenings look like and she says she listens to the radio while driving. That’s what she does. And I’m sitting here going, she’s putting herself through her trauma on repeat. And you don’t get through a psych eval when that’s the way you live your life. And at NASA, anybody an employer should be like you. We you need leave you. You need help. And out of here, we’ll put you on the next mission. Exactly. But that’s not how she is. She didn’t go through therapy. She shouldn’t be here. And I really frustrated by it because. The the dumb accidents that can happen in space, Russia does this dumb thing and it sets off this chain reaction that they underscore multiple times like. They’re dumb accidents and it’s happening again, and that’s what space is, accidents happen and that’s why you have redundancy so accidents don’t happen.

Gravity Movie

[00:37:52]

And when they do, they’re dumb, really what they should have done. And I’m just making this up now, but I’m pulling out a little piece of the Mars trilogy in early in the Mars trilogy. There’s this sequence where you learn that everybody on that first mission to Mars was lying through their teeth during their psych eval. And like the way that you get to go to Mars is that you just present yourself as the perfect candidate and you just don’t tell the truth to the shrinks at NASA. And it’s the sort of ongoing joke about how they’re all crazy because you have to be crazy to go to Mars. What they should have done with this movie that would have fixed a lot of problems is lean into her hyper competence early on that she is in control of every situation. She has trained every single situation. And what you realize halfway through the movie is, oh, this was her coping mechanism and that first she has to get to where she is in the movie. First she has to go from hyper competent to freaking out and then she can heal.

[00:38:51]

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, yeah, yeah. That would have to me that would have worked.

[00:38:56]

Yeah. If, if, if, if this was the thing that was finally more than she could take because she’d been gripping so hard, handling every situation that nobody can handle this. Yeah. And so it sort of forced her to come to grips with things you can’t control.

[00:39:11]

Yeah. Um so at this point we are to, we get to the ISIS. Um, well, hold on. ISIS is the first step, right. Yeah. So we kind of get to ISIS. They neither of them manage to grab on, to grab on. And I, I, I was really frustrated by that because he’s like, she’s like, you need to break and he’s like, I’ve only got one good thrust left. And I’m like, dude, you’re a pilot. And I feel like he should recognize they can’t come in too fast because you just I mean he says at one point, oh well that’s it.

[00:39:47]

That we’re coming in this fast. That’s all I’ve got.

[00:39:50]

Right. But to me, I feel like they had enough time from where they were to where they were going that he would not have let them come in that fast.

[00:40:00]

So this is this is one area where I will jump in and defend because there is specifically a line as they’re coming toward the ISIS where she notes, we’re not headed the right direction. We’re going this way. And he says, I’m not firing the rockets yet because I’m running out. And then later, he does course correct. They’re coming into the ISIS and she says, slow down. And he says, that was my last thing. So I was under the impression that the reason they were coming in so fast is because he had to use all of his rocket stuff to keep all of his fuel, to keep them on course. Otherwise they would be going at a reasonable speed in the wrong direction.

[00:40:35]

See, I was under the impression that he was like, this is all like he was saying as he was doing that last bit, I was under the impression that it was. I’m going to do this one last thing, because it’ll get us there and I’m sitting here going, but we know that an object in motion.

[00:40:51]

Oh yeah. Like yeah, he was course correcting rather than accelerating. OK, but if you want to hit on George Clooney, I will say this is the next of the two big things that I remember being inaccuracies, because this is one of those things that just.

[00:41:08]

It’s fine if you don’t.

[00:41:11]

Like, if you don’t spend all your time thinking about space, if you don’t spend all your time thinking about space physics, then it makes sense.

[00:41:17]

But the way George Clooney dies. Not only is unnecessary, it’s impossible because what happens is they’re they they go toward the space station, they’re trying to grab on to something, they’re trying to grab on to something they can’t and they end up getting detached.

[00:41:35]

The cable that connects them gets detached. And so they’re each flying around. She ends up getting tangled up in the parachute netting of the Soyuz, which is deployed. And so she kind of gets stopped and she’s able to grab on to the to the cable that was previously connecting them. He’s on the other side. He keeps drifting, but she’s connected to the to the parachute. And then she’s got his thing. He reaches the end. And then there’s basically a cliff moment where he’s like she’s trying to pull him up off the cliff.

[00:42:03]

And he’s like, you have to let me go. And then he ends up letting himself go and falling off the cliff.

[00:42:07]

Except here’s the thing. In space, you’re either moving or you’re not. There’s no gravity that’s going to keep pulling you down, which means that if she’s able to grab that an arrest, his momentum, he would automatically start moving back to her. He would go out and then it would start moving back like she could pull him. But she wouldn’t even really need to do that. She would just need to stop his momentum. And then he would either stop and then start slowly drifting back or and this is what they should have done for for movie drama. He would have cracked like a whip. Which would be so much more of a shocking death, because for those of you who don’t know, when you take a whip and you do like that and it cracks that sound that happens when you crack a whip, that’s actually a sonic boom. What happens is you take a whip, which is thick when you hold it and you use the you use the leverage and the tapering, the tapering with the mass of it. And so when you do like that, the the end moves so fast that it breaks the sound barrier and the same thing that like an airplane creating a sonic boom, that’s the crack of a whip. And so what they could have done is she gets tangled up in the net. They’re drifting, she reaches out, grabs the cable, he’s moving, and all of a sudden all the angular momentum of the parachute and her and the cable and him gets drifted out until he just. And now she’s she will just like basically liquefies it like he’s just all of the angular momentum gets put into his body as the end of the whip.

[00:43:52]

And now she either lets go because you can’t hold onto that much force or she gets it like wrapped around herself so that she’s still holding on to now his dead body. Right. That is the trauma that they were looking for from that instead of this weird thing where it’s like, OK, but what is pulling him? Yeah. Why? What is he?

[00:44:12]

Yes. And I was like, is he’s letting go. Was poorly thought through. It was impulsive, which I also like. I think we’ve seen enough astronaut things to know that there is something else, even if they have that fighter jock mentality. Yet however, there they are also freaking scientists and to me there’s an impulsiveness in his decision to die that I found remarkably out of character, even though his character is not set up to seem like the smartest person on the planet or the most capable or whatever. I just found it out of character for what we’ve seen of astronauts.

[00:45:00]

And they didn’t set him up as outside of that realm enough for me to believe it, especially because the fact that this was not a thing, according to physics, sort of undercuts the drama. But also because even if you don’t know enough science to not recognize that this isn’t a thing. They never really established what was the problem like she’s got him, she’s holding on to it. So why is he going to drift away, like if one of his thrusters was, like, broken and constantly pushing? And so it was like pulling him away from her and she was trying to hold on, then it would make sense. But as it was, it was like he’s just right there and he’s like, you have to let me go.

[00:45:39]

And it’s like, yeah, I guess I do, because that that the cable is coming loose around her foot. And I think the idea is she’s going to float away, but she’s her momentum is arrested, too.

[00:45:50]

Yeah. Like just pull him like, what’s the problem. Just get in here quick.

[00:45:54]

And honestly, you know, honestly, him managing like her pulling him is likely going to get him past her to the parts of the parachute jump. A real Horin.

[00:46:07]

Yeah. At a certain point she yanks him. He goes past and now he’s pulling her back to we’re not even halfway through this.

[00:46:12]

And it’s true, you guys, I’m sorry. We like there’s just a lot to kind of dive. It’s interesting how much you can dive into how little there is. And that’s kind of what we’re dealing with.

[00:46:26]

I will say this. This is not something I think they were trying to do specifically, but it did make me smile. The scene where she’s growing more and more delirious and he’s talking to her, did give me a fond memory, which is a scene from Firefly where Alan Ticketek and Nathan Fillion are being tortured and they’re being tortured by the bad guy. And the whole time, Nathan Fillion is just talking about how he’s going to have sex with Allenton ex-wife because it’s keeping him pissed off and it’s keeping his morale up. And and like, it’s this really funny scene because the bad guys are torturing them and they’re just fighting between each other, like ignoring the bad guy.

[00:47:09]

And I did think it was well done as he’s drifting away, not dead yet, but beyond help that he kept talking to her. And clearly the way he was talking to her was in that same spirit. It’s like talking trying to sort of keep her engaged, keep her focused so that she can get to safety.

[00:47:28]

One of the things that I was struggling with, as she’s trying to find the hatch that will allow her into the ISIS is that she keeps stopping to catch her breath. Yeah. And I’m like, no breath to catch. Yeah. Lady, you are breathing CO2. You need to get inside. You don’t get to stop. You are about to suffocate or whatever or CO2 poisoning. I don’t know. But is that what it is. Yeah. OK, so listen, I, I don’t I don’t love science the way he does and so I have to double check.

[00:48:02]

Sometimes I will say this quite possibly the scariest thing in the entire movie is that gas canister with the blue flame flying around in zero G in an enclosed environment that freaked me out when the ISIS is on fire and that, like fire in space is already scary. But that thing whipping around like a little rocket in the room like that, I would have lost my cool in that moment.

[00:48:30]

I thought, well, that’s cool, because she, for the first time ever, was calm enough to be like, I’m going to put out this fire, but then somehow didn’t stabilize herself so that she could actually put out.

[00:48:45]

I was so mad. I was so mad. I was like, you are oh for ten.

[00:48:51]

And this is the first time you’re going to be calm enough to actually fix anything and not have somebody save you and you screw it up by not stabilizing yourself. You’re in zero g lady. I was.

[00:49:02]

Oh you guys. I just got real mad. I got real mad.

[00:49:06]

All right. So at this point she goes out to the Soyuz, she’s going to get it hooked up, but she realizes that she’s still attached to the parachutes. So she has to detach the parachute. And I will say, I think one of my favorite moments in this whole movie is her trying to detach the parachute cables.

[00:49:22]

And then in the background, you just see one thing was by.

[00:49:26]

And then two things was by and she hasn’t, like, picked up on it yet, and you just the music starts to build up and build up and she turns and she sees it. And just the way that it revs back up to, oh, it’s here. Yeah, it was really well done.

[00:49:42]

You jumped the gun, OK? I’m not done with the fire. OK, we can get back to that. It’s going to be four hours.

[00:49:50]

I have, uh, OK, I the I want to know. How did this fire not?

[00:50:03]

Like, eat up all of the oxygen, that fire seemed big enough that it seemed like the oxygen would just have been burned away.

[00:50:10]

Oh, it would have just not I mean, I don’t know how fast fires burn up. Like, I don’t know what the rate of oxygen consumption is, but it would have eventually.

[00:50:19]

But in the 30 seconds that she was engaged, except for the fact that that fire became a roaring inferno explosion thing behind her. And I was sitting there going, if it’s that big, I just I don’t know that I believe that I am actually.

[00:50:38]

I’m not enough of an expert. And. All right. I was hoping know. But my but my guess is that if it’s inaccurate, it’s not by much. Because the thing is, the ISIS is pretty big. There’s a lot of air in a lot of different branching hallways. And so even like the the the path that she took through the ISIS was not much of the ISIS. So there was still plenty of air sort of coming into the room. And it may have suffocated itself just, you know, within that area.

[00:51:06]

But I think it works. I, I think my other problem with the fire portion is they’ve shown us to be shown her to be incompetent enough. That I don’t believe that she’d remember to take the fire extinguisher, which is important that she does.

[00:51:25]

Yeah, which I’m not in her defense, she didn’t remember. She tried to close the hatch and it closed on the fire extinguisher. So she just grabbed it.

[00:51:33]

Yeah, I thought she had purposely brought it with her and I was going, but I guess, OK, so maybe I’m right. She wasn’t. And it just was a happy accident. Good for her.

[00:51:44]

I will say the destruction of the SS from outside was quite spectacular. That was gorgeous to watch just the the destruction physics and the particle physics of all the different pieces flying around in the she’s going around it as it’s sort of tearing itself apart. And that was really impressive from a filmmaking standpoint.

[00:52:07]

Um, so she’s in the Soyuz. Yeah. And the parachute is keeping her there. And you want to know what the second time she doesn’t panic. It’s the second time of this entire film so far. She wants to swear and she doesn’t. And I was like. Really, I don’t. Again, I don’t believe you. So she’s like you. Yeah, like like, oh, you’ve earned it. I don’t know, I just was like you because you, Sandra Bullock does this nice thing where I mean, she obviously makes it look like she’s going to drop an F bomb and she doesn’t. And I’m sitting here going, oh, that’s a nice moment, Sandra. But that’s not what your character would do. Yeah, you’re alone. Yeah. Hero. Yeah. So, OK, we can we can move on.

Gravity

[00:52:56]

All right, so I will point out one thing, which is just kind of fun, which is if you enjoyed the moment of her getting on the radio with Orning Guk, I think his name is and sort of having this moment of human connection, even though she doesn’t understand the

language, which I thought was pretty, pretty poignant and pretty, you know, I enjoyed it is there is actually a short film that is out there, which is from his perspective, it’s he’s like a shepherd or something in Mongolia. And it was written and directed by the son, by the the co-writer of the film. And you can I mean, it’s like Sandra Bullock, Sandra Bullock’s voice coming in through the radio and he’s like holding his baby and, you know, sort of chatting with her. There’s subtitles so you can see what he’s saying. And yeah, it’s just a neat little tie. End of the film I.

[00:53:49]

I don’t want to take that moment from anybody. But I did have the frustration of why can she talk to him, but not a single space program can talk to her, why? Why is this happening? And. Why is there no fuel and where is the redundancy? I, I that that was my overall question and I made it made me feel like humanity is just incredibly incompetent. And I didn’t like that.

[00:54:21]

It’s actually one could argue that gravity is a really good advertisement for NASA under the heading of this wouldn’t happen.

[00:54:29]

Yeah. Like like look at how inaccurate this movie is. Look at how good we are. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

[00:54:36]

Um, so sitting in that hatch talking to Onaga, I will say the I appreciate that when George Clooney opens the hatch, even though we quickly realized that none of this is actually happening, I appreciate how they portrayed him opening the hatch, because that is pretty realistic. Humans can survive in a vacuum. Yeah, that’s true. And I like that she didn’t get sucked out into space or anything. Like they he sits down, he and he’s kind of like unconcerned. Like he dials up the air and he’s like, I have I got a story for you.

[00:55:12]

I liked it. There are a couple of things that I like. I mean, OK, first of all, I will go back and say I liked heard her doing the the dog sounds. Yes. It was very it was very human and very mean, sort of primal.

[00:55:25]

Like this is a thing that the humans who don’t know each other language have been doing for, you know, fifty thousand years ago. You can imagine two people meeting in the forest and just sort of howling at the moon together.

[00:55:36]

Yeah, it definitely had, like. Yeah. Man’s best friend sort of feeling. And so I did like that. And then going into that to that, um, moment with George Clooney and yeah, I can appreciate it. I did want the end of his Mardi Gras story, so I was hoping we would get that. But no, they took that away from me too. Yeah. You guys, they tortured me.

[00:56:02]

George Clooney is just so charming. Yeah. It’s hard not to enjoy George Clooney just being George Clooney, but yeah, they’re not killing her with the vacuum was great.

[00:56:11]

I appreciated that.

[00:56:12]

While at the same time the abject horror of the moment when he does open the hatch and everything drops to silence and it’s just like, I don’t know about you, but me as an audience member, I was just like kind of took my breath away. How awful. It was like, no, no, no, no, no. You know, and he opens and it’s. Yeah, yeah. They did a good job of that.

[00:56:33]

Yeah, they did.

[00:56:34]

Um, so and then I, I mean I’m a I’m a sucker for, for, you know, sort of poignant. Like I’m, I’m, she’s friendly. But I do have to say I really enjoyed him.

[00:56:49]

Like this this sort of semi spiritual moment of of her, her self-preservation instinct manifesting through him and sort of kicking her into gear, I think that.

[00:57:03]

There was one of his lines was it’s safe, that’s why he likes space is because it’s safe. And to me, that should have at least got her to crack a smile because no, it’s not like.

[00:57:17]

Well, I think I don’t think he was saying space is safe. I think he was saying here in this room, we’re safe from other people.

[00:57:24]

That’s what he’s saying is like. And I’m sitting here going. It didn’t crack a smile. Oh, right, it’s a hallucination. Would her brain have come up with it safe because. I don’t know that it would I mean, I guess she felt like it was safe enough for her to die there, so, yeah, that that at least was part of what he was saying is it’s safe in this room.

[00:57:45]

It’s safe to just turn down the air and drift off to sleep instead of.

[00:57:51]

Facing the situation, you know, and I did think so one thing there, there is there are a few things in this movie that I think were really done well. There aren’t very many things that I thought were were done sort of uniquely well. But I did think there was one moment, which was a very interesting take and a very interesting twist on the formula, which is, you know, in in filmmaking, there’s an idea in the three act structure of a screenplay that some people call the whiff of death or or things like that, which is generally around the transition from the second act to the third. There is some kind of a defeat or a a surrender and then you rise up from it. And so in gravity, that is obviously the moment that she almost kills herself and then decides not to. But I thought it was interesting because usually and in moments like that, in movies, what you do, what the character does is renew their commitment to life. They they double down on I’m not going to die here. I’m you know, it’s a it’s a proactive statement. But I thought it was interesting that in this movie, it’s not framed as committing to life. It’s framed as saying goodbye to death. She’s saying, you’re going to meet my daughter up there. Tell her I’m going to be a minute. I’m not going to see her yet. Tell her goodbye for me.

[00:59:18]

And the whole thing is framed as a letting go instead of as a coming forward, which is exactly what the theme of the movie is, because he tells her, you have to learn to let go. Yes. And so it’s so yeah, I agree with that.

[00:59:32]

But I thought that was interesting, saying goodbye to death rather than renewing commitment to life.

[00:59:37]

I, I like that better than some of the stuff that I had to come up with. Um, so, uh, then I think we’ve gotten to the what is it called. The zoo. Yes.

[00:59:50]

Ok, so, um, the, the Tiangong is the space station and the zoo is the ship that she’s going to take. Right.

[00:59:58]

Right. Um, I will say one, the one thing that I will defend to the death about this movie that is absolutely perfect is the reentry sequence. The whole period, the the music and the the way she delivers the performance as they’re re-entering the atmosphere.

[01:00:19]

I’ve watched that probably 50 times. I’ve watched this movie twice. And that little chunk where she’s going into the atmosphere and the the space station is ripping itself apart around her and then sort of writes itself as it comes.

[01:00:33]

So what I was struggling with is. She’s not even inside, I guess she’s she’s gotten to the space station and it looks like it’s already itself working on falling to Earth. Yeah, kissing at I think she calls it. Yeah. And it’s moving so fast.

[01:00:53]

How does she’s like there’s no way that she is strong enough to stay holding on to it and she’s leaping around on it because they’re all going fast, like the SS is going thousands of miles an hour, but there’s no atmosphere and that thing is starting to kiss the atmosphere. But there’s very like I mean, obviously, I don’t know the exact stats, but we’re talking about like zero point zero one percent Earth’s atmosphere pressure up there.

[01:01:23]

And so it’s enough that, like, the panels are starting to shake and things like that. But it’s not actually enough to blow her around yet because it’s just so thin.

[01:01:33]

Right. But I just. She doesn’t. It doesn’t seem like she’d be strong enough to be able to like because she jumps and holds on to things, and as we’ve seen up until this moment, she’s not good at grabbing. So the fact that she finally figures out how to put her arms out and reach for things is, I guess also.

[01:02:00]

Symbolism, yeah. OK, well, I.

[01:02:04]

Well, and fundamentally, it’s you know, again, this goes back to the Martian, the dust storm in the Martian.

[01:02:10]

There are storms on Mars that are more than hurricane speeds with these winds.

[01:02:18]

But the thing is, the air pressure of Mars is half of one percent of Earth’s atmosphere, which is to say that when the wind is going at hurricane speeds, it’s like a gentle breeze on your face. It’s not that it exerts no force because the air is so thin. And so that’s basically what’s happening is that it’s whizzing by her at hundreds of miles an hour.

[01:02:37]

It just turns out that I’m willing to just say I’m wrong about that because why not?

[01:02:44]

Um, but yeah, that musical theme, the music, the full heroic theme as she’s coming back into the atmosphere is just so gorgeous. I bought the soundtrack just for that one song.

[01:02:54]

I wanted to know, why is this zoo like losing its mind? It has like all of these alarms going off. And I’m like, no, but you’re made to re- enter because she’s not doing it right.

[01:03:08]

Like she had the eeny, meeny, miny her. I mean, I saw that. So presumably those I mean, I don’t speak Chinese, but presumably what’s on what’s on the screens there is like, you forgot to do this. You forgot to turn this off, you forgot to do this and this. And you didn’t strap in. And you’re, you know, like all of that, like all the steps of reentry that she’s skipping. Mm hmm. Yeah, I she I did think that Sandra Bullock did a really good job with as she’s doing reentry, she’s like sort of defiantly, I’m going to do this. But she’s still terrified. Yeah. Like the hurt her performance walks the line of screw you space and oh my God, I don’t want to die really.

[01:03:54]

Well, I felt like so essentially we’re at the end. Yeah. She lands in the water. They at one point ask her to identify herself, which is just. Comically dumb because it’s not as if. I like it’s not like stuff isn’t raining all over the planet, all over the planet, like I just. Are you kidding me? It’s not like there is an alien in there. There is one of five people that could be in there. Yeah, get over yourselves. Um, I just I like the idea that it’s some weird spy mission or like aliens are invading, like, I don’t know what they think is happening, but you’ve just completely detached from giving them any credit.

[01:04:37]

No, they don’t. I’m sorry, but they don’t deserve it.

[01:04:39]

Ok, so here she she lands in the water. She almost drowned, which is another one of my least favorite things to see in movies. And then she thinks out.

[01:04:49]

If I did have a note. Oh, you thought you were done just because we’re back on Earth. You thought that you were going to be OK.

Gravity Movie

[01:04:54]

No. And so she goes from you know, we saw her in that fetal position with the umbilical cord like thing with light behind her. And now she is being birthed into the world and she kicks off her clothes and she looks like a tadpole and she washes up on the shore and she can laugh and she laughs as she tries to stand because she’s struggling the DeAndre. OK, great. So I just like here’s the deal, I, I, I want to know, a, what is the ending? That’s to me that’s not the ending. That is that is the end of her story. I’m done with her story. I want to know the fallout from this story. And I’m mad that I don’t get it. But I want to know why she had to do this by herself. Why is this a story of one woman who barely manages to make it? That’s not how you make it through the worst point of your life. So few people can do it by like. By themselves, why, why? Because doing it by herself. Why can’t this be a story of a crew?

[01:06:03]

What you’re asking for is a story about healing. Nobody heals entirely on their own. But I think that this is more a story of someone finding their will to live, which can happen on their own often. Oftentimes, when people are placed alone in situations, they find this kind of like determination to survive.

[01:06:23]

And I know that that’s true. But to me, that was. It was almost a little bit secondary because to me, this actually felt kind of like an allegory for the Book of Job, you were going to take everything from you and and you like you’re going to suffer and you’re going to you’re going to curse the day you were born and then you’re going to be reborn. And suffering should cause us to look for answers like that’s the book of job. That’s essentially what happens to her. And you you focus on the future and what’s in store for us. And to me, that’s kind of what they’ve done here. But I just don’t. I don’t know, I felt like it was. It was a boring story to tell, honestly, I fear it being as dramatic as it was, if you take out the three debris field, if you take out two of the debris fields and stop trying to like. Make drama happen. The story just kind of falls flat, which I think is why they have to do so much drama. And I found that really. Frustrating. Yeah, which I think ultimately so there’s a show runner named Glen Mazzara. And he was speaking to the art of writing and he wrote on the highly acclaimed Twitter, he said, Your own inner confusion about what to do with your life is probably not as cinematically captivating as you think it is. That’s his advice to other writers, is that inner confusion isn’t great for the screen, which is what they did. They took someone’s inner confusion and then layered drama, drama, drama, drama, drama over it. And it’s the foundation of the story wasn’t strong enough to hold up all of that drama. And that’s why it falls apart for me. You don’t have anything that scientifically you have very little that’s scientifically accurate. You have not a very good story as the foundation, and then you just layered it to how it is cake with too much frosting.

[01:08:31]

All right. Well, you lost me there because that’s not possible. Yes, it is.

[01:08:39]

Yeah, it’s definitely not a perfect film, I think if anybody really loves the idea of survival stories, if anybody if that’s like your thing is, is overcoming adversity and watching people almost die, then there’s a lot to be enjoyed here.

[01:08:55]

But, yeah, it’s definitely it’s one of those stories that sort of extra frustrating because of how close to greatness it came. There are a lot of situations. We’re just changing that. One line would have made this so much better or, you know, give it a little bit more complexity.

[01:09:11]

Give it give it more detail. I just felt like they used, uh, a big brush for the entire thing.

[01:09:18]

The main I think the central problem that if they if they could only fix one thing, the central problem was unlike Apollo 13 and unlike the Martian and unlike a lot of these stories, this was actually not the story of someone solving problems. This was the story of someone just desperately holding on. And like it’s almost presented like there is nothing to be done. You’re just in the hurricane. Hold on until it. And yeah. And that’s that’s not quite like you got to give her some credit. She does take action in some moments, but it’s the the overarching. Yeah. The overarching thing is luckily she didn’t get hit by debris, you know, luckily she landed in water. Yeah, exactly. And so there you lose again the competence point that we were talking about with Apollo 13 or with the Martian, you lose the proactive nature of addressing the problem and just hanging on only gets it. It’s only interesting if the thing that you’re hanging on against is huge and overwhelming and awe inspiring on its own, which is what they try to do.

[01:10:33]

But you need more than that.

[01:10:34]

Yeah, yeah, you guys, I’m so sorry, like, normally I love I love to love things and I’m willing to be critical.

[01:10:40]

But this I just I can’t get behind this movie. Not a fan. I know. I mean, in theaters when we saw it, I found it incredibly stressful. So I just struggled with it. And but because of that, I couldn’t go back and look at it critically. And now watching it with a critical eye, I’m just like, this movie doesn’t hold up. It just it just doesn’t. And I’m so sad about it because I want it to. I love me some Sandra Bullock and I love me some Ed Harris now because of Apollo 13. And George Clooney, I thought could do no wrong. And this whole thing was just I maintain director, writer, producer just screwed the pooch. Sorry.

[01:11:17]

I’m sorry. Well, we’ve gone a little over, but I think that pretty much covers it.

[01:11:22]

I would hope so, yeah. Oh, what a downer, guys. I’m sorry.

[01:11:26]

Lacey and Lacey and I will be starting our new YouTube channel called Things Wrong with Gravity, where you can tune in for our twenty six part series.

[01:11:37]

But yeah, thank you for sticking around.

[01:11:40]

Be sure to share in the comments what you thought. I’m always interested to hear new perspectives.

[01:11:44]

I would love for someone to tell me why they love it and like convince me because you guys, I’m that is something that is true. If you love something and you can convince me that the reason I like happened with Ed Harris just last week. Yeah. Like it can be done. So tell me why you love it. Hey, if there’s if there’s a science, anything out there, book, movie, TV show, not the whole TV show probably, but like an episode or two that you’re like, oh my God, you guys will love this and you won’t hate it. He’s like, let us know.

[01:12:18]

Let us know what we can do it on the show. We’ll put it on the we’ll put it on the list. Yes, OK. All right. Well, be sure to give us a follow and like and subscribe and comment and all that good stuff and thank you for watching.

[01:12:30]

We’ll see. You will be in what, December and. Yeah. Two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks on Thursday. OK, all right. Thanks, guys.