We human beings are a funny lot.
We crave the certainty of routine – our regular train, our favourite restaurant with the chilli chicken dish we love so much, a morning greeting from the hunky barista – relishing the sense that everything will be just as we left it yesterday.
And yet we also complain at length when routine drops a few letters and becomes a snore-inducing rut.
At that point, we’re apt to dream of escaping to worlds far removed from our own like the depths of the ocean – “I’d like to be / Under the sea / In an Octopus’s Garden in the shade” (The Beatles) or the vast reaches of outer space, which explains the popularity of science fiction in general and great space operas in particular.
If we use these newly released photos from Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming space thriller Gravity, which shows my favourite actress in the world, Sandra Bullock – yes even after The Heat; SO great is my devotion – as Dr Ryan Stone, who along with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) is stranded in space after a terrible accident fatally damages the space shuttle they’re using, working away in space before it all goes awry, you can see the attraction.
Tasks to be done certainly but look at that amazing view, brought to vivid majestic life by noted cinematographer, and longtime collaborator, Emmanuel Lubezki, who has been nominated for an Academy Award five times for his innovative visual style.
It’s on full display in these amazing photographs which give life to the massively important day to day tasks needed to keep the apparatus that keep you alive in a hostile environment.
Alas all the hard work and attention to detail in the world is all in vain when space junk rips apart their oasis in space and sent Bullock’s character hurtling at frighteningly fast speeds away from Clooney who is powerless, initially at least to help me.
It will be interesting to see how Dr Stone is brought back into the bosom of safety given that the options for rescuing her look to be very thin on the ground, or more appropriately, scarily high up in the air.
As screenrant.com sagely notes:
“Usually in survival films about a character in isolation, such as Castaway or Buried, there seems to be a feasible chance of the hero being rescued, but in Gravity it’s difficult to see how Stone is ever going to get back home. In the ‘Detached’ trailer [see below], Kowalsky (Clooney) loses sight of her within seconds, indicating that she’s travelling at an extremely fast speed away from the space station. The real life ISS, for example, travels at an average of 17,000 miles per hour, and completes an orbit of the Earth in just over an hour and a half.”
Come 3 October 2013 in Australia (or 4 October 2013 in USA), we’ll find out if you can come back from the sort of terrifying incident that sets the edge-of-your-seat events of Gravity into motion.