Gravity: a Movie in Free Fall

Ethan Gach

I write about comics, video games and American politics. I fear death above all things. Just below that is waking up in the morning to go to work. You can follow me on Twitter at @ethangach or at my blog, gamingvulture.tumblr.com. And though my opinions aren’t for hire, my virtue is.

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13 Responses

  1. roger says:

    This has been a great weekend for me to watch movies. I finally watched my Blu Ray of Zero Dark Thirty on Friday. Saturday I took my kids to see Gravity. Sunday, we watched The Flowers of War (on the rape of Nanking) on Netflix. Three fantastic movies. Gravity was probably the most significant of the bunch.Report

  2. Burt Likko says:

    I’ve not seen it yet. It seems to me that the attraction to the movie is precisely that it is a movie, a visual medium of storytelling. That’s why I want to see this movie. But of course I know going in to the experience that it’s still a “man against nature” story even if “man against nature” is permuted as “woman against space.”

    The vastness, the cold beauty, and the speed of space are part of what makes the movie appear so terrifying. We could and would be scared of mountain precipices and cilffs, of confined spaces and the murky cold of the deep sea, the arid emptiness of an unforgiving desert, the sticky denseness of a swamp or a jungle, or the brutal and forlorn ugliness of an urban industrial waste.

    Space presents a new environment, a new phase of nature, one that has not been tackled frequently or significantly in many major motion pictures. So I want to like the movie. That the stars are attractive is only natural — it is Hollywood, after all.Report

  3. KatherineMW says:

    This is good to know. The trailers didn’t make me all that interested in the film, and the premise didn’t feel like something that would remain engaging for couple hours, but I was seriously considering seeing it based on it having almost universally good reviews. Your review seems to confirm some of my expectations of the movie, so now I can skip it and save my money.Report

  4. It’s worth $15-20 of your hard earned cash on soundtrack and visuals alone. (IMAX 3D)Report

    • KatherineMW in reply to Eric Crawford (@eszoteric) says:

      If I want soundtrack and visuals alone, I have a substantial collection of BBC Nature DVDs (Planet Earth, The Blue Planet, Life, Africa, Madagascar, Frozen Planet) that cost nothing to re-watch. Wow, those are magnificent. Gorgeous, gorgeous filming. Wish we funded the CBC enough to make things like that.Report

  5. just me says:

    Blaise asked me if I would like to see Gravity. Unfortunately, all day today at work I had to listen to co-workers break down the plot to this movie. Needless to say I’m not really all that interested in watching it any more. At the end of the day they informed me that they had just saved me $40.Report

    • agorabum in reply to just me says:

      Gravity is worth seeing on the Imax and/or 3d – it is an epic spectacle.
      The story / dialogue – not much there. Although in reality, if you’re in the middle of a massive space disaster and are trying to preserve oxygen, you just don’t talk that much anyway.
      It’s really about the grandeur and loneliness of space. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, and don’t think too hard about the little implausibilities.Report

  6. Nob Akimoto says:

    The problem is that the storyline itself is pretty preposterous and is a case of really awful science (like Armageddeon level awful).Report

  7. North says:

    I’ve read that the astronauts who’ve seen it were pretty rattled that every single space ship shown in the film is destroyed. I can see how shadows of Columbia would make it uncomfortable for them.Report