I usually do book reviews, but this time, I had to do a film.
Gravity. Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.
As a technical piece of filming, it is brilliant. Nicely done.
As a piece of Science Fiction – it is rubbish.
I’ll ignore the tacky lost child scene. Nobody liked that and neither did I. Un-needed.
It was the end-of-a-rope, so-old-it-is-embarrassing, cliché. SF plot contrivance 1a.
The astronaut is on the end of a rope. Hanging on for dear life. The heroic end-of-rope character undoes the clip and drifts away to his doom but allowing other character to be saved.
Cobblers.
Try this experiment yourself …
Tie a rope to a floatable object. Hold on to rope. Place object on a pond (no wind, no current) and push floatable object away from yourself. You can do this in a bath or a sink if you scale things down a bit. When the object drifts far enough away that it has taken up all the slack, it will stop with a force roughly equal to the force that you initially supplied. It will stop. It may even rebound (elasticity of the rope) and begin to drift towards you. What it will NOT do is try to pull on the rope perpetually. There is no gravity. You can even let go the rope. It will NOT move further away. I have done this with a piece of nylon rope and a 10 tonne yacht. No problem.
I can only assume that Sandra Bullock found George Clooney, repulsive in some way. No matter what you do with a rope, you can NOT push with it!
If astronaut Clooney had jettisoned his expired Orbital Manoeuvring Unit in the direction away from astronaut Bullock, action/opposite reaction would have made him drift towards astronaut Bullock.
It is all there in the school text books. Unfortunately, these textbooks are not available in space.
Also …
Why oh why oh why would someone try to manoeuvre in space with some else dangling on the end of a tether? Draw the other person in close, and let them hold on. That way, you get around as a unit, and stop acting like a human bolas, trying desperately hard to kill each other with constant collisions or pulling the spacesuits apart with regular whip-lash tugs. Or are we suffering from Clooney-Bullock mutual repulsion again?
I will not comment on the ‘land a capsule by hitting indecipherable (Chinese character) buttons’. See the film for yourself.
As all the critics raved about it, then it surely must be me. I watched Bruce Willis in ‘Armageddon’, which is acknowledged by all as Fiction without the Science part hindering the plot. Enjoyed that, and found it easy to ignore reality because no-one in the film seemed worried about it.
‘Gravity’ trumpets itself as ‘so real, you can’t hear people complain’.
Well, here on Earth, the sound travels just fine.
And gravity works a treat.