Gravity

You don't see a lot of mundane movies about space, really. Gravity is interesting if you're into that kind of thing, and it does maintain a good level of tension. There are some nice shots, and the soundtrack is fine, but it's not that impressive overall. 

I wasn't really interested in Gravity, but it got so much hype, I had to watch it. I'm not a huge Sandra Bullock or space fan, but it wasn't so bad. She didn't really have a lot to do here, it seemed like. I was skeptical about watching her float around space in a space suit for an hour and a half, but luckily she gets out of the suit and does some other stuff inside spacecraft, too. It wasn't the most amazingly beautiful thing I've ever seen. There were some nice shots of the Earth, but if you've seen any of Chris Hadfield's pictures on tumblr, you've pretty much seen all there is to see (in fact, more interesting stuff than there was in Gravity). The score had some nice moments, but it was mostly unremarkable.

A lot of the shots seemed forced. When she first gets back into her own ship and takes off her suit, they hung a little too long on the image of her floating around like a fetus. Sure it was a pretty shot, but we didn't need to spend that much time on it. And it was supposed to be so triumphant when she finally gets back to Earth and stands up, but the angle was just bizarre. It didn't work at all.

It was a bummer when that first guy died. He was having so much fun. And his head was pretty gross, too. I'm pretty sure if I were her and Matt said "we're going to get his body" I would've said "the hell we are, we're going back to the ship." I don't think Matt really would've detached from her like that, either. He seemed like a "try anything/never say die" kind of person, and I don't think he'd just give up like that. At least he probably had a peaceful death, though; just went to sleep like Ryan was about to when she ran out of oxygen.

She got an awful lot of lucky breaks. More than is believable, really. But I guess you just have to go with it for the sake of having a movie. It was pretty lucky that she survived that fire. I didn't like the callback to the first bolt that she unscrewed that floated away; when she unscrewed the bolt from the parachute and it did the same thing, it was just too much. You would think she would've held on to that tool a little better, too.

I got bored really fast with her howling like a dog and talking to the Chinese guy. We knew that wasn't going to go anywhere, so there was no point in dragging it on. It was pretty silly how she told him "I don't know how to pray, no one ever taught me how," too. You don't need someone to teach you how to pray. We've all seen how it's done. You just say whatever you want. Did she live under a rock or something? 

I was pretty confused when Matt opened that door and she didn't die. I thought for sure she was dead. That would've been a really interesting direction to go with it. I probably would've liked it better, actually. Then I thought maybe she put her helmet on really quick, but no. It worked out alright that it was just a scene that her brain conjured up, though. I don't think it's very realistic that if you push a button and you don't like what happens, you can just push it again and it will stop the procedure. She got pretty lucky with those controls.

It did keep me interested the entire time. It was pretty terrible at the end when stuff kept happening. It was like, okay, she's back on Earth, but now there's smoke; okay, she got the door open, but now she might drown! The little frog they put in in the water helped ease the tension a little. I had a dream last night about a toad in a maroon dress, and I blame the movie.

It's a pretty good cautionary tale against going into space. I don't know why anyone would want to do it. It seems terrible. I wonder how atrophied her muscles really would be. She had a lot of trouble getting out of that water. But they do exercises in space, and she had only been up there for a week.

I think the most interesting part of the whole movie was getting to see the different space stations and what kind of things were floating around in them. The international one had a chess piece, and the Chinese one had a ping pong paddle. I kept hoping maybe one of them hadn't been evacuated and she could get help from some people, but no such luck. It was interesting that they were actually safer outside the ship, since the people inside didn't have their suits on, and didn't have any protection from space.

I'm glad I saw it in the theater. I don't think it would've been nearly as good on a smaller screen. You really need to see that stuff in a large scale. I was still getting settled in when the movie started, and there weren't any trailers ahead of it, so I didn't realize it was going already, and I barely read the opening cards. I wish I had gotten to see what they said, but it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference in my experience of the movie.

It was a lot more tense than I thought it was going to be; I wasn't sure how much I was going to care about her floating around. Still though, at the end I was just left with the sense of "why did I watch that?" They tried to bring some weight to it with the whole "no more just driving, I'm ready to live!" theme, but that didn't really do anything for me. I did like how she finally got herself together. She seemed a little weak at the beginning, but she proved that she was willing to fight to survive at the end.