The Physics ruined it for me...

Rating: 1/10 (23 October 2013)

If Oscars were being handed out for movies being intense then Gravity would get the award and then some. Many of the moments throughout the movie were intense for the viewer and there was always a sense of peril that cast a long shadow over what was going on and in all circumstances (with the exception of the finale) the outcome was catastrophic. I was barely able to breathe; I was having difficulty holding on to my chair and digesting the material as it was being delivered. This is Hollywood and because of the $174,919,886 domestic total (boxofficemojo.com 10/23/2013 @ 10:01 PM MST) as well as general critical response there exists a sentiment of a job well done. But for me, being the harsh sci-fi critic that I am, I have to grade fairly and there were quite a few things that I saw that I stand resolved on - they were just not right. First, there is a scene when Ryan is talking into a radio (blindly trying to send a message to mission control) where the camera is clearly set in space looking into her capsule and we still hear the muffled voice of Ryan as though she were sitting in a chamber that was not within a vacuum. In a vacuum, even if your ear is pressed up against the module and someone on the inside is speaking you won't hear a muffled voice or anything for that matter – because there is no atmosphere in space there is no medium for sound to travel in. Next I thought it was a difficult pill to swallow when Matt Kowalski unhooked himself from the tether that was connected to Ryan; there was a physical system in play here and the system was at rest. Because they were in space and neither person was moving and no objects were exerting force on either object (and because there could be no inertia in a system at rest in an environment without gravity) there could be no force pushing Matt Kowalski away from Ryan Stone – all Matt had to do was tug at the tether and he would have traveled toward the space station. Were these people really astronauts? My next issue was that I thought it was strangely convenient that the space shuttle Explorer was conveniently close enough to the international space station to make a spacewalk using a thruster pack look like a walk in the park. Kowalski had to use the packs power during their spacewalk (which was almost at an end before tragedy struck), he had to use the packs power again to rescue Ryan Stone, again to get back to the destroyed space shuttle and again to get to the space station. I cannot begin to imagine what 29th century technology had been used to create this device or what Marvin the Martian cartoon it came from. The debris field that orbits the earth every 90 minutes was also something that I took issue with. Please reference the 7:49 through the 10:00 minute marks in "How the Universe Works" (Netflix, Season 1 episode 7: Alien Solar Systems) Here we see that a process called accretion (with a recorded experiment at the real ISS test environment) accounts for the construction of planetary bodies. This process starts small and takes a long time. Dust particles and rocks and other debris that collide end up sticking together and do not fly apart (or through objects) as they do in Gravity. So when the debris hits the shuttle or the space station or the telescope or astronauts, while potentially damaging, would not fly through it (as we could see from when Matt and Ryan are looking at their dead spacewalker friends head and seeing the Earth below) This bothered the hell out of me. My next issue was that Dr. Ryan Stone did not seem to be a genuine character to me. She was talking "blindly" to mission control and giving her "go big or go home" speech and I was simply not convinced or impressed. I think she was trying to be emotional and trying to look flustered but at the same time she gave the impression that she knew she was making a film and contending for an award and seemed to be overacting. I also think I figured out why they are claiming that this film is science fiction and I think it is inflammatory. The Chinese Space station that Ryan was able to eventually escape to does not yet exist and won't be built until the year 2020 (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_space_station) It is my opinion that the existence of this space station indicates that the film is not contemporary but slightly in the future and that indeed means that this is sci-fi. (i.e. speculative existence of this space station) This of course flies in the face of all the inaccuracies with regards to physics and how special bodies behave when they collide – this also requires suspension of disbelief and is "fantastic" and therefore could potentially also qualify this film as sci-fi. While I do overlook some inaccuracies in sci-fi movies – most notably the sounds that ships make when they are flying through the vacuum of space (because this is generally not critical to plot or story) – there were too many issues here. The issues with physics were I think critical to plot and progression of the story and the inaccuracies ruined the experience for me. I apologize to everyone who liked this film – I think that it is great that such a work is considered by so many to be moving and intense but unfortunately this movie will get no high marks from me. I want science fiction that is grounded in current human progression of a physical understanding of the universe. Cuarón would have done well to study up before he made this movie if he wanted universal appreciation from everyone.
-SciFiMan