The religious imagery in "Gravity" seemed a bit out of place to me (spoilers)

[DetlefK]

When she starts praying, even though she's not religious, that's understandable to me. Maybe it's a habit she picked up as a child, just like a preference for certain swear-words.

What seemed weird to me were the photo of the russian-orthodox icon and the buddha. They were context-free.
I would have understood it if they had been used to symbolize different cultures, but they were the only items that showed that this and that place were inhabited by russians/chinese. They used Galileo's sketch of a human, which is non-religious, to show european/american inhabitants.

This leaves the conclusion that they were intended to be portrayed as some kind of protecting household-spirits. But that doesn't fit the plot where she survives by using up all kinds of technological ressources that the evacuated astronauts/cosmonauts/taikonauts left behind. There are no good things happening against all odds that could be contributed to protective spirits. (Well, bad things happened against all odds.)



By the way, to me the most beautiful scene of the whole movie was her napping in foetal position in zero-gravity against the backdrop of the star-dotted darkness. A human in the cosmos. Save and at home.

[Brainstormy]

1. The praying bit

was interesting to me because she said "no one had taught her how." Obviously she hadn't picked up anything as a child. And the "thank you" to whatever deity she had in mind, after all the rest of the crew was dead and the mission reduced to flying space garbage, was pretty typical. But frankly I thought the plot itself was pretty weightless. The movie was ridiculously over-hyped and I feel very misled by the critics. No ten-year-old would want to be an astronaut after seeing this movie.

[DetlefK]

2. The plot-type is actually so simple that no novellist would touch it with a stick:

"Let your hero run from place to place under time-pressure and have him evade random dangers along the way."


Wow, by just typing that, I had to think of Super Mario.

[Brainstormy]

3. who could easily have been

another protagonist. At least Clooney had the sense to get well out of it early on.

[DetlefK]

4. I'm thinking "5th Element".

The protagonist and the antagonist never met.
Likewise Gravity could have told a story of two people who communicate via radio but never meet.

[Heddi]

5. I am unsure

why a Medical Doctor is working on the mainframe of the Hubbell Space Telescope. That is like having an aeronautical engineer performing surgery in an OR.

My husband and I went for the blowing-up parts. I thought it was a pappy movie that people slobbered over. It wasn't horrible, it wasn't great. I found myself holding my breath a lot for some reason and some lady in the theater was getting motion sick and had to leave.

I like movies with mid-air plane crashes. My husband and I fly a lot and having the plane crash is a deep-seated fear of mine and a recurring night-mare that I have. I find that watching movies with realistic mid-air crashes feeds and relieves my fears at the same time.

I enjoyed the crashing in this movie.

we saw it in 3D

I would have been happier if she had

SPOILERS

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died in the end. It would have been much more realisitic I think

[DetlefK]

6. Maybe...

But the test-audience might have hated such an artistic, dark ending.

Lands on earth and gets bit by a venomous snake. "How could you do that to her? She deserves to survive!"