is gravity any good

mortlock · October 05, 2013, 01:25:29 AM

??

Bro. Righteous · October 05, 2013, 03:38:33 PM

?

MadJohnShaft · October 05, 2013, 09:20:45 PM

Yes!

Instant Dan · October 06, 2013, 02:03:10 AM

Watched the bootleg version of if. It was pretty good take on isolation.

MadJohnShaft · October 06, 2013, 08:38:07 AM

It was a really good take on the benefits of exercise on lady parts.

Bro. Righteous · October 06, 2013, 12:52:17 PM

Sandra Bullock - ugh...billionaire chicks are lame...

MadJohnShaft · October 06, 2013, 01:06:56 PM

Something is

JkFlesh · October 06, 2013, 04:05:04 PM

It's great. To quote a review I read, see it on the biggest screen possible, and in 3D. This movie was made for IMAX.

strangelight · October 06, 2013, 06:44:56 PM

seeing this on imax tonight. i'm excited to feel anxious for 91 minutes.

mortlock · October 06, 2013, 09:29:17 PM

from what ive read it seems like the outer space version of 'open water'..

Danny G · October 07, 2013, 01:22:41 AM

My mom loved it, which doesn't mean much as her taste can be a little questionable heh

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strangelight · October 07, 2013, 02:34:33 PM

saw it in imax.

the 3D is amazing. there are moments where you feel dizzy, or like you're floating. just really well done visually. definitely worth the price/schlep to an imax theater. i'd watch it again just for the space-y stuff.

the writing left a lot to be desired, though. some cheesy lines, some really cliched character arcs. minor spoiler (you find this out in the first 5 minutes, so if you don't want the first 5 minutes spoiled, stop reading now) : sandra bullock's character is a rookie on her first mission, and isn't really an astronaut. she's a scientist installing something on hubble and they trained her to go to space and do a space walk, because that was easier than training an astronaut to install some hardware. i get that this is a device that allows the movie to over-explain shit to those of us who aren't astronauts, but it's just so obvious. why couldn't they just be experienced and dealing with a crisis? why does it have to involve someone who doesn't know what they're doing (but does it all perfectly) and why does the crisis have to be THAT catastrophic. it just seemed like the script had passed through the hollywood cliche-o-rama 10 times before they started filming.

other than that, though, i'd definitely go see it again. it looks beautiful and i was digging my fingers into my skin pretty much the whole time. definitely high in tension and anxiety.

MadJohnShaft · October 07, 2013, 04:01:55 PM

It's very understated though, which I think what the hype machine can't change when Clooney has his fingers in the pot. I liked it a lot.

Bro. Righteous · October 07, 2013, 09:19:22 PM

great report SL...funny w/the IMAX angle, I worked for those fuckers for 8-years, main hub
doing inventory control, my main man (bass player) teacher now in Barrie -
was flying all over the globe doing projector upkeep
which kept him quite busy....we both quit our gigs b/c it's a fucking capitalist lame-ass\
situation....mind you the free cab-rides and luncheons were pretty sweet, but really, FUCK
Corporate!

MadJohnShaft · October 07, 2013, 10:01:45 PM

Did anyone ever lose an arm?

JkFlesh · October 08, 2013, 09:54:05 AM

I agree that there are problems with the writing, but if you see the film in IMAX 3D, those concerns will probably be far from your mind. The sheer visceral spectacle of the thing is overwhelming, in a good way, and the nail-biting suspense is undeniably thrilling.

juggernaut · October 10, 2013, 05:46:31 PM

Saw it last night in Imax 3d and agree with Strangelight and JKFlesh. This is def a movie you want to see in the theater and in imax 3d.

boltthrow · October 13, 2013, 11:34:11 PM

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

In some ways it's one of the amazing, unbelievably accomplished moves of all time. Though it's not really accurate to say it's a "shot" comparable to regular films because virtually everything is CGI, the opening is a single shot of ten or fifteen minutes long that's just amazing. The visuals are mind-blowing. The sound is incredible. The detail is astonishing.

But the script kept bumping into a lot of totally unnecessary stuff with Clooney being the stereotypical cowboy jet jock (and wasn't actually very entertaining) and her being the rookie who ended up figuring out everything, like SL said. A lot of the emotional, isolation "how would you cope?" stuff was super compelling on a human level and then they muted the power of it by adding a little something extra that it didn't need (e.g. the kid).

And whether or not she was just a mission specialist she would have trained with Clooney. You don't get assigned to a crew and not know each other's backstories and where they're from. And he would have known exactly what her work on the Hubble was even if he couldn't do it himself.

Maybe someone else knows this but why were the other two space stations empty?

Why was the Chinese station losing orbit?

Her moment with the fire extinguisher near the end was where it left being astonishing and went back into regular move terrain.

Still, a total must-see.

strangelight · October 14, 2013, 09:29:45 AM

*also spoilers*

ugh, the kid. the moment where the movie lost it for me was when sandra bullock was in that little pod and made the decision to live and get back to earth and she started telling ghost clooney to say hi to her dead daughter who has tangled hair. come the fuck on. in some respects the script showed a lot of restraint by not involving some asteroid that's going to destroy the planet or whatever, but i really wish someone with decision-making power had looked at the script and said "you know, we don't need all this."

someone said the reason clooney is asking bullock's backstory is just to keep her conscious and not panicked while she's losing oxygen. i guess i'll buy that, and if he'd said "tell me where you're from again" then i wouldn't have minded.

the reason the other stations were empty was because they were all in the same orbit with the satellite debris and those guys had to get the fuck out of there. that's why a lot of the escape pod landing thingies were already gone. is that how space is? all of our space junk is just lined up in a row waiting to smash together?

hey bolt, a little birdie told me your pops was an astronaut. has he seen gravity?

boltthrow · October 14, 2013, 09:39:35 AM

Exactly! If they'd just adjusted the dialogue a tad it wouldn't sound like they'd just met for the first time.

Yeah he was and he hasn't seen it and at moments I thought he absolutely should but there were other moments when I thought it might actually be disturbing given that some of these things might be personal nightmares of his. Like in the initial debris hit, when the shuttle spun away with half its wing missing or when she landed and was floating and saw debris arc across the sky which was very reminiscent of when Columbia burned up on reentry. The astronauts I've known has very strong feelings of attachment to the actual orbiters (since they served them well) and it struck me that some of the imagery might be much more than just CGI effects to him. But I'll encourage him to see him.

strangelight · October 14, 2013, 09:53:48 AM

wow, i hadn't thought about it like that... you know, that he lived up there and worked up there and seeing it destroyed might deeply affect him. i was thinking he'd just be yelling at the screen "NO. THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. THAT'S NOT WHERE THE BUTTON IS."

it would be cool to know if he thinks they captured the feeling of being in space. but yeah maybe he doesn't want to watch all that stuff blow up. $:-\$

boltthrow · October 14, 2013, 10:23:12 AM

He usually can put all the technical mistakes aside but if he knows people portrayed, it rankles him more (e.g. he loved the Right Stuff as a book but didn't like the movie. I'm not sure what the diff was).

JkFlesh · October 14, 2013, 10:23:54 AM

Quote from: strangelight on October 14, 2013, 09:29:45 AM

someone said the reason clooney is asking bullock's backstory is just to keep her conscious and not panicked while she's losing oxygen.

That was the way I interpreted it.

boltthrow · October 14, 2013, 10:36:31 AM

If he'd just said, "Tell me about Lake Titicaca" or whatever her hometown was named it wouldn't have bumped at all. Though I thought for a woman quickly running out of O2, you might have wanted her to talk a little less.

And her saying there's no one to mourner her seemed weird. No parents? No father of her daughter? No knowledge of the way the entire world mourned the Challenger crew?

Same with her saying no one ever taught her to pray.

strangelight · October 14, 2013, 10:44:04 AM

no one ever taught me to pray AND LOOK HOW GREAT I TURNED OUT.

but yeah... she didn't need to have a dead kid. she didn't need to have nothing to live for (other than life, i guess). he didn't need to be a space cowboy slut. he didn't need to be retiring. she didn't need to be a rookie. they could've known each other for 7 years, not 1 week. an astronaut didn't need to explain to a medical doctor what happens when you run out of oxygen. he could've still said, "you're losing oxygen, so that's why you're feeling x, y, and z. read me your O2 levels" or whatever.

again, i get why they did it. they need expository dialogue for the audience, they want to create emotional investment, whatever it is. but they didn't need it. the visceral response the audience has to what they're seeing, the entire movie could've been in scientist/pilot space jargon and i'm pretty sure everyone would still be digging their fingernails into the armrests. the movie is better than its script.