Posted on 10/04/2013 1:47:26 PM PDT by NYer
We see so many big-budget science-fiction spectacles — so many painstakingly realized fantasy worlds and lavishly rendered alien landscapes and environments, inhabited by extravagantly imagined extraterrestrial species, with fantastic spacecraft and starships traveling through hyperspace and all manner of wormholes, nebulae and so forth.
Yet simple weightlessness, though no more exotic than the space shuttle, remains among the most fascinating, captivating effects in any Hollywood production of recent years.
It’s an effect put to mesmerizing use by Alfonso Cuarón in his action thriller Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts on a space walk that goes terribly wrong.
Gorgeous, nerve-racking, literally awesome, Gravity takes us to a world much nearer in both time and space than Duncan Jones’ Moon; nearer even than the layer of satellites that our mobile phones and GPS devices talk to every day: only about 350 miles away, in the low Earth orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. Roughly the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco — but oh, that’s far enough.
Far enough for the Earth to be, not a location, but a silent third character in what is largely a simple, relentless two-character survival story. The familiar blue-and-green orb looms large in the background or reflected in space-suit visors. It is home, a place of life, of human connection — so close, yet so inaccessible.
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
Pass. George Clooney isn’t going to get a dime of my money.
Two of the three Coen Brothers films he was in were terrific.
I’m pretty sure George will get a dime or so when you opt to watch his film on Netflix. Certainly not as much as if you went to a large screen movie theater, but I’m pretty sure he will get some royalty.
I doubt it, but if that’s the case, I’ll pass on seeing the movie. I don’t feed my enemies.
Saw it. Really liked it. A simple premise executed to near perfection. The space environment they created is totally believable; they got the physics of it all exactly right. My biggest complaint would be Bullock’s obviously silicone injected lips. There are lots of close shots of her face so they’re always right there. They kept pulling me out of the story and reminding me of the vanity of Hollywood. I thought Clooney’s character was a little too cartoonish. And I have mixed feelings about what could be seen as a universalist religious message. But the most obvious message of “don’t give up” was very inspiring and in a way very American.
Yeah, Clooney was a little too silly. They tried too hard to make him seem like a regular guy. I didn’t notice Bullock’s lips as much as I noticed her overall facelift. Which was tastefully done but I didn’t think it was necessary. I guess all movies gloss over the religious stuff because they are so ignorant, but the message of never giving up came through loud and clear and I really liked that part of it.
Well, I don't think so! I just saw this tonight, and I did like it, but I was hesitant to go see it because I had read a complete spoiler rundown, and it seemed like there were some annoying implausibilities.
Those were there, for sure ( ... the coherent debris cloud and the survival trek from Hubble to the ISS to a Chinese SS, ) but when I saw it, all this seemed tolerable in the realm of moviedom.
There was other stuff that bothered me, like the "look" of the earth, which was kind of fifties-ish with the light blue ocean, but there was one incident that really hit me in the face, and this was a big plot driver.
In the initial catastrophe, the co-stars are tethered and he is trying to manouver them both with his jet pack. They showed a lot of examples of the tether going tight and giving a jerk, then going slack as they rebounded towards each other along the line of tension. Very plausible looking, even if I couldn't vouch for the entirety of the resulting motion. It was enough to "pull me in" ( ha-ha. )
But then at the crucial moment, we see them tethered and accidently hitched to the ISS, and the tether goes tight and it just keeps pulling! What the heck! It made no sense, and obviously physics was overruled for the sake of the plot here.
So anyway, they were trying, so there was a high degree of verisimilitude ... i.e. it did seem very real as I watched it, for the most part.
BTW, I thought Clooney was great, and I loved the visitation scene.
Just saw it. What a film. I hate 3D and actually think it did work for this movie. I was on the edge of my seat. Some of the story or back story may have been unnecessary but it didn’t detract enough from the amazing overall effect of this suspenseful movie. The effects were phenomenal. There is a news story today where a reporter asked the director what it was like to film in space. Lol. It really was convincing.
And Sandra bullock was totally without makeup and I think she is just beautiful. And I’m a girl. I’m wondering what the other women this year have to do to beat her out for the oscar.
I liked him as the Doctor who replaced Kenny’s heart with a baked potato in The South Park Movie.
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