As you may have noticed on the Twitter feed to the right, I saw "Gravity" this weekend. I like space. There used to be a show on The History Channel called "The Universe" that took viewers on tours of distant planets, other moons and explored the possibilities of just what else might exist in all that vastness. The animations were awesome and the series lives on in repeats on H2, but it's a shame they stopped producing it. I was all in to see "Gravity" from the moment I heard about it, and even moreso when I heard it starred Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. She can do no wrong in my book and Clooney tends to be good in just about everything he does. We opted for the 3D version because it's a movie about space and that kinda screams 3D (not to mention the spiffy glasses we all get to don). In hindsight, we could've seen the 2D and gotten all the same effects. There were only a few moments where the 3D actually popped and came in handy, and they were cool, but not as great as I expected. The movie itself though was fantastic. It only had a handful of actors but it didn't need a large cast anyway. The premise of the film casts the pair as astronauts who are working on the Hubble Space Telescope when debris from a destroyed Russian satellite begins hurling their direction. It's incredibly well shot, well written and terrifically acted. I thought it was easily the best movie of the year thus far. Nothing was unbelievable, in my humble opinion. But then, my degree is not in Physics. But this fella's is. And he apparently felt the need to show off his big brain to the world, and get himself some publicity, by taking "Gravity" to task.
This fool went off on Twitter about the inaccuracies in the movie. Some of his gripes; the debris in the movie orbits the earth east to west instead of the opposite direction, Sandra Bullock's hair not being affected by gravity once she takes her helmet off, and why she was even in space to begin with since she's a medical doctor. Couple few things here. First, I guarantee 99% of the people in the theater were not nitpicking over the direction of the debris. Who cares? It's a movie. Second, I've never known a film to show male astronauts hair flailing wildly about in zero gravity, the explanation always being that it is too short to be move too much. Her hair in the movie is also super short so I didn't find it curious that it wasn't moving about. If she'd had long hair that was unaffected and picture perfect then maybe this mother lover has a gripe. Finally, unless I missed it, there was no mention of what kind of doctor she plays in the movie. I assumed she was one of those who spent most of her time in a lab developing stuff and was then selected to train and go into space because she developed something only she knew how to fully control. That's very believable and plausible as most astronauts have some kind of training in that type of specialty. At the end of the day, these all come off as minor gripes by a dude with way too much time on his hands. Movies aren't reality, ya'll. They are meant to be a form of escapism, a place where you don't always have to overthink every little thing. It's not like this is the first space-themed movie to come out or something and every movie, no matter how meticulously researched by the director, has inaccuracies. "Apollo 13" is full of them even though most of the material it's based on was available well in advance of the script being written. "Titanic" also has inaccuracies, but the majority of those have to do with us not knowing the specifics of how the ship actually sank until fairly recently. Ron Howard took artistic liberties with his movie and James Cameron wrote and directed his using the best knowledge available at the time. It's not a big deal. When you make a film, you have 120 minutes to capture your audience, keep the attention of your audience and tell your story. Do you think anybody wanted to sit through a long, drawn out scene of NASA going through all the little technical things that happen when a shuttle launches? Of course not. You go for the drama, for the emotion, and hopefully it lands. But this dude's degree isn't in Film. Mine is. And I actually enjoy movies. Sucks to be smart, yo.
