Gravity Movie --- Factual mistakes and goofs (SPOILERS obviously)

[SlyReaper]

This. Enjoy Gravity for its relative lack of inaccuracies, don't hate on it because it still has a few.

You're right of course, but it's not so easy. I can enjoy films like Star Wars because it makes absolutely no effort to be scientifically accurate, so I can take my brain out and soak up the awesome. If a film gets 99% of the things right, then it throws the remaining 1% of things into sharp contrast so that they cannot be ignored. It's the very fact that Gravity gets most things right that the few things it gets wrong are so glaring.

[PakledHostage]

I know that lots of people liked the movie. Heck, even the Academy liked a lot of parts of it. But notice it didn't win for best picture or best screenplay? That, I think, is the biggest problem with it. It was, at times, scientifically accurate and the special effects were amazing, but the story was so full of cringe inducing clichés:

- The "old hand" Kowalski, effortless and at ease in the challenging environment of space constantly giving unsolicited advice and encouragement to Stone. Never mind that she's a highly trained professional astronaut and PhD... I would have politely told him to **** off.

- Kowalski nobly sacrificing himself to save Stone. Thanks Jeebus!

- The south Asian character Shariff and the cultural stereotypes his character embodies.

- The scene with Stone curled up into the fetal position in the airlock, reminiscent of an infant in a womb... What was that all about? Gratuitous artsiness? ... Uh... [strokes hipster beard] “it symbolised stone's rebirth; her beginning to get over the death of her daughter and rejoin the world of the living.â€Â

- Stone landing off the coast of a beautiful tropical location and feeling the earth with her hands when she washes up on shore… I get it. There's no place like home... But did the Lilliputians only arrive to tie her up after the credits rolled?

I could go on...

But as I said, I know that a lot of people really liked the movie. Irrespective of that, plenty of others hated it or disliked it. And it wasn't just for the occasional lapses in scientific accuracy. I hated the story. I feel that there are plenty of better examples in the history of film making of stories of people persevering in the face of incredible odds. Given a choice between re-watching one of those films or documentaries and re-watching Gravity, I'll pass on Gravity.

[Redjoker]

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

Was it ever stated why the Chinese station was deorbiting?

I also wondered about that. I don't remember seeing any damage to the station. Maybe China deorbited after they crew left to reduce to amount of debris it would have added?

[How2FoldSoup]

How2FoldSoup: The idea behind a full blown Kessler Syndrome is that the chain reaction has occured in such a way that the collisions between objects are throwing other objects into other orbits, allowing chain reactions at higher/lower orbits spreading around.

I am not certain if they mentioned what altitude the stricken satellite was at when it was hit. Depending on how that orbital situation was set up, it is possible for the initial 'seed debris' to have an elongated orbit stretching around multiple orbital altitudes. In the cold war the Soviet Union enjoyed the idea of spy satellites that had very elongated orbits that ducked really low around the Earth and extended way up into space. This allowed them to whip around the Earth very quickly without being seen for several days/weeks so it was harder to predict when the next pass would occur. If the satellite in question was one of these, when it became a debris cloud it could easily have pass through multiple orbits causing chain reactions at each orbit.

While its possible I find it hard to believe even for a movie plot. To quote the hitch hikers guide: space is big, really big and debris is really small. I understand it can be a problem. That also doesn't explain away the problem of the debris hitting at precisely 90 minute intervals either. And to have debris from GEO hit LEO? Come on that's not going to happen until the orbit decays enough which simply would not be :immediately: I don't mean any offense but I find that explanation very hand wavy just to make the plot work. A plot line should at least be reasonable

[Rickenbacker]

It is one of the most physically accurate scenes in the entire movie. ISS was not rotating (or it was negligible) - they were, around the station, holding on to the parachute rope. They could never cancel their momentum. They are rotating slowly (it's visible in the movie for a second or two), but their masses are large and the rope is long enough, so the force is not trivial. You can plug in the numbers, it's all there.

For the love of god, I could never understand why some people can't see this, because it's not only obvious, but intuitive to me.

I didn't see it the first time, but I watched the scene again, and yes, it's obvious that they're rotating.

[Rickenbacker]

The debris is on a different orbital path, so it goes in and out of the path of the orbiter, and due to exentricity, only hits it on one orbital path.

There are a couple of problems with this, though. The debris MIGHT be in an inclined orbit that's synched with the orbiter so that it hits it once per revolution. But it's impossible for it to be in an orbit that's synched with both the orbiter, the ISS and the Tiangong at the same time, even if all three are in the same orbit (but in front of/behind each other), which would be pretty ridiculous in the first place. It's also impossible to have a tightly grouped debris cloud orbit the planet without spreading apart and becoming harmless pretty quickly.

The orbital speeds simply don't work, but Cuaron obviously knew this, and I can live with it. The movie looked great and was entertaining enough that I had to watch it twice before I realized that Sandra Bullock was on wires, not in microgravity .

[Endersmens]

I also wondered about that. I don't remember seeing any damage to the station. Maybe China deorbited after they crew left to reduce to amount of debris it would have added?

yeah i was so confused. I saw no reason for it to deobit, especially because throughout the movie they said it was ~100km away (except for kowalski in stones oxygenless dream, where he said 100 miles)

[TheExplosionist]

Why didn't Clooney try to refuel his MMU ?

An obvious factual error is yanks have no operational manned space craft for starters since the shuttle retired.

[NeoMorph]

Making the movie 100% realistic was the director's goal at first, but he had to sacrifice that to make the plot work, and believE me, the plot is very deep and thoughtful. I excuse Gravity for some errors, but I don't excuse cr*p like Armageddon. Ugh!

But that film is sooooooooo realistic. I mean... they got the fact that MIR was falling apart and they really did have a fire on board.

[Holo]

Another obvious factual error is that Ryan Stone is, in real life, a male Canadian hockey player.