Puns!
So, I had problems with Gravity. Maybe I'm just super-anal retentive about how stuff works in zero-g, and maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy the saccharine tones of triumph as Sandra Bullock quotes George Clooney at the end (Seriously, can we be done with that trope? We get it, the person has changed to become more like their mentor. Do you have to have them quote the person directly, movies?), but the movie just didn't sell me. It seems like the movie took the easy way out: instead of trying to be something new and great, it took the old and easy path.
Picking on the inaccurate portrayal of space seems picky, and it is a bit. But I dislike the inaccuracies for a different reason than you may think. The problem, at least for me, is that they seemed to try for realism most of the time, but they broke the rules when it was convenient for the writers. There is a critical scene between Bullock and Clooney that would make anyone who understands relative motion balk, but allows us to have one of the most important moments in the movie. In real life radio communication is one-way, but ignoring that lets us have a poignant scene where Bullock has an interesting conversation with a stranger. The inconsistency in realism makes the above scenes, and others throughout the film, feel really contrived.
Sometimes even the scenes that could happen are marred by symbolism so obvious it makes you want to say "I get it" to the screen. Sandra Bullock curling up like a little fetus seems like film-school level symbolism. When she did the aforementioned Clooney quoting, I groaned audibly in the theater. There's a moment where she and Clooney talk a bit about her not giving up, and his speech is so over the top he feels like the coach in a 90s sports movie.
And how did Bullock get into space? She's sick in zero-g (for, like, the first ten minutes of the movie, then it is never mentioned again), she apparently crashed every time she performed a simulated landing (and NASA was still cool with sending her up without correcting that), and she seems entirely unfamiliar with everything around her (I guess she just missed all the briefings). Good thing she's got a competent man to save her. Side note, giving your female character a doctorate does not make her any stronger when she has to be repeatedly saved, physically and emotionally, by a man.
Alright, now it just feels like I'm attacking it, and I don't want to do that. It was an okay movie. It was well put together (though a few of the continuous shots just didn't work and really broke my suspension of disbelief) and was a beauty to see. It made some interesting decisions and told a compelling story, but it did it in a really paint-by-numbers, spoon-feeding sort of way. It didn't want me to have to think very hard. But I wanted to think hard. If I was thinking a bit harder, I would have had less time to nit-pick the space stuff.
Seriously, though, that teardrop floating through space was dumb. Plus, that's not how tears work in space.
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