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clone wrote:

there was no defeat of her plans, that's what irritated about her character, she wasn't frustrated at every turn, her character was written to give up on cue or to not bother following through on her goals...

I don't remember the exact sequence, but wasn't she gasping for breath as she entered the ISS? That experience could have disoriented her in the time she was cocooning inside the airlock. Afterwards she was trying to raise both mission control and then Kowalski and so I thought she was going after him anyway. But when fire blew out the ISS's interior she may have reconsidered that. Whatever her plan, the fuel state and the entangling cords defeated it for a while. In the time she worked on those problems Kowalski would have likely expired or been too distant anyway.


Warning: R&P content

Trackerben were you at a religious revival this weekend? you keep talking about spirituality and tests regarding a 1 dimensional character that mentioned no connection to any kind of religion including not bothering to pray before she decided to give up & just die.

I've read much of the Old Testament in my spare time. The biblical story arc is populated by lots of one-dimensional characters saying and doing mad-sounding things in seemingly absurd yet wonderful stories. Dr. Stone wanted to pray but she just didn't know how. I don't recall if this was during the astronauts' "wilderness spacewalk" or just before she attempted suicide by deoxygenation.

It was taught to me that biblically, the only character which fully matters is that of God. Humans are to be judged by how they close they get to emulating him via his learning model named Christ. From this disciplined view, dwelling on character issues in this kind of morality story is just so much useless pettiness detracting from the "lesson". I suspect the director ensured the movie played this way for he has an affinity for spiritual films Or maybe it's also because the redemption narrative is one of the most effective formulas in Hollywood's playbook.

Yikes. There's so much black-out, the post looks like a part of the screen from an early DOS text adventure game.

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clone wrote:

look, nothing against the movie but you guys are seriously trying to find ways to forgive it, "maybe she was dizzy", "maybe she was disoriented", "I'd be scared if I was in that situation"....... you, an untrained civilian are not in her position, she, a trained astronaut is......the biblical references are imagined...

Yes she lacked the self-disciplined focus that comes from experience. But nominal training isn't enough without the right attitude (and breaks) which she had up and running by the end. Trained but inexperienced people who've been through worse disasters have been similarly whipsawed, but many also wrote of finding calm and hope at points during their harrowing experience. Dr. Stone's jerkily evolving character is plausible enough for this reason.

But like you I see where Gravity could have done better in depicting LEO mechanics, or improving the "movie logic" behind the astronauts' behaviors. I earlier noted that Kowalski didn't at least try to reverse course by ejecting excess mass along his bearing to impart opposing momentum. The improbability of three separate platforms being coincidently reachable from each other's orbit and plane is another. I also wonder how Bullock's character managed to fix the re-entry geometry of the Soyuz in the little time she had. I doubt the capsule's systems have routines constantly running drop solutions just for times like that.

I guess we just have differing views of where Gravity could have been better.

...if you wanted to like it that's fine but TrackerBen you are adding elements that had nothing to do with the movie, it is not a religious film, it's an arthouse film built around a Sci Fi based survival story (inspired by Stanley Kubrick) with references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13, the Right Stuff, and a movie called La Region Centrale...

...the scene involving Bullock going fetal is a 2001 reference, a gigantic plot hole, not an "oh she was confused", not an "I think she was tired" scene. the fact that you've gone to notable lengths to explain elements that were not explained in the movie is concrete proof of said plot hole being exactly that...... a plot hole. the Director has openly admitted the references in the film, from the casting and the overall goal of the film was to use previous Sci Fi material.... not the bible. I apologize if that's a problem but the bible wasn't a part of the equation.

He obviously put in elements from earlier films like the way he redid the "emergency spacewalk and lost astronaut" from Mission to Mars. But like I said most literature eventually winds up cribbing off the old biblical texts as these have set narrative standards for the last three millenia. It's difficult to do a human-centric story without borrowing one ancient theme or another.

That said, men in space SF adventures are one genre where I usually expect to find stuff furthest from the old Book. It's because the extraterrestial setting makes escape-from-biblical-Earth themes actually possible. That the opposite was mostly the case here clued me into seeing the movie as yet another derivative of the usual Source.

You just need a little tag to pop up that says redacted in the middle of each one.
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__________________________________REDACTED___________________________________
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Well redact me silly. That's cool signage, Forge.

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I thought the acting in the scene when she stripped out of the space-suit was worth an award

clone wrote:

given I consider Gravity a dishonest movie I agree, we do & cheers to that.

I'll say it again given the director and writer have made it quite obvious: Gravity was no more inspired by the bible than the use of the word English ='s inspired by William Shakespeare.

No problemo, we disagree on what we see and that's ok

a friend of mine claims Pacific Rim copied it's ending from The Avengers movie because both endings involved bombs and a hole. having watched both and listened to the commentaries from both directors it's not true and neither inspired the other.

you are seeing what you want to see, not what the director is showing you.

p.s. 3 pages in, still polite and on topic, congrats.

Polite's always welcome, you're doing great too.

Funny but I also thought that Pacific Rim's finale was phoned in from the Avengers. Now don't get me wrong I really liked both, each had great fighting stories and a comprehensible pantheon of characters flavored with new twists. I don't mind directors copying each other so long as they come out with competent and refreshing takes of the same material.

But to digress (a lot), both movies derive their ending sequence from the original military-SF idea in Harry Harrison's "No War, Or Battle's Sound". That amazing story introduced a load of hot stuff which are all the rage now. Such as ranged ship-to-ship EVA tactics, concentric assault via hull and bulkhead breaches, weightless CQB with edged weapons and fixed corridor autoguns, invasion via shipborne transporters, portal strategy and defense, and of course the bomb-through-the-enemy's-gate hail mary play.

Diplomacy42 wrote:

I thought the acting in the scene when she stripped out of the space-suit was worth an award

Ok, a difficult point to discuss without leaving PG territory, but I noticed that she seemed to be digitally enhanced in that scene. More than simple airbrushing, she also seemed to be about 2 or 3 cup sizes larger than she did, even in scenes that immediately followed. Makes me think Cauron knew that scene would be... appreciated, paused, etc, and wanted to add some oomph.

I was a bit disappointed, but since I only noticed the difference after, I guess I'm a pig, as the director intended.

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