29 June 2021
Gravity (2013)
It’s action time, space fans! But this is realistic movie magic – Sandra Bullock plays astronaut Dr Ryan Stone, with George Clooney as her mission commander Lieutenant Matt Kowalski in this 7-time Oscar winner. A miscalculation by the Russian Space Agency sends them into a world of terror when their ship is smashed into by Soviet equipment and their return to Earth is near-impossible.
But that’s the thing about astronauts: they don’t fear things like being stuck in space, spinning out of control hundreds of kilometres above Earth, with their death almost guaranteed. Instead, they find solutions and make their way home safely … or they die trying to get their crewmates home.
For a movie made in 2013, Gravity more than holds up against anything recent in terms of CGI trickery. You’d think that Sandra and George filmed the action up in space. It’s super-realistic for most moviegoers. If you’re one of those sciency folk, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, watch it, enjoy it, and try not to shout about the handful of inaccuracies like the fact that the Hubble Telescope was in a high orbit and the International Space Station in a low orbit so their collision was highly unlikely.
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