Gravity: Can Film Ever Get the Science Right?

dryriver writes in with a story lamenting the lack of accurate science in movies. "The relationship between science and science fiction has always been tempestuous. Gravity focuses on two astronauts stranded in space after the destruction of their space shuttle. Since Gravity's US release (it comes to the UK in November) many critics have praised the film for its scientific accuracy. But noted astrophysicist Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, had several issues with the accuracy of Gravity's portrayal of space. Through a series of posts on Twitter, Tyson — who later emphasized that he 'enjoyed the film very much' — highlighted various errors. He noted the Hubble space telescope (orbiting at 350 miles above sea level), the International Space Station (at 250 miles), and a Chinese space station could never be in line of sight of one another. On top of that, most satellites orbit west to east, yet in the film the satellite debris was seen drifting east to west. Tyson also noted how Sandra Bullock's hair did not float freely as it would in zero-gravity. This is arguably not so much an error in physics, but a reflection of the limitations of cinematic technology to accurately portray actors in zero-gravity. That is, of course, without sending them into space for the duration of the film. The Michael Bay film Armageddon is known for its woeful number of inaccuracies, from the space shuttles separating their rocket boosters and fuel tanks in close proximity to each other (risking a collision) and to objects falling on to the asteroid under a gravitational pull seemingly as strong as the Earth's. More than one interested observer tried to work out how big the bomb would have to be to blow up an asteroid in the way demanded in the movie. Answer: Very big indeed. Nasa is reported to have even used Armageddon as part of a test within their training program, asking candidates to identify all the scientific impossibilities within the film."

Comments

Moo

[Chacham]

That is, of course, without sending them into space for the duration of the film.

That doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Re:Moo

[MikeBabcock]

Lets send Congress while we're at it.

Re:Moo

[icebike]

Have you ever been near a film shoot?

The number of people needed, and the time involved for a typical 15 seconds of video won't be possible in space for another hundred years.

In the mean time, why can't people simply enjoy a film, without trying to pick apart ever millisecond?

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?

Re:Moo

[Nethemas the Great]

Even though they killed Mars Direct I'll be happy to donate to a fund to send them on a Sol Direct mission.

Re:Moo

[Z00L00K]

I can live with glitches like the hair of an actor not behaving correctly. If that's the only scientific glitch you can find in a movie then it's definitely well done, and there are ways around it too - like letting the actors have special hair styles that aren't as sensitive to gravity or not. And I think that Kubrick would have done it that way too - hide what's not critical, be a perfectionist in other parts. It's hard to beat the realism presented in the movie 2001 (aside from the fashion parts).

But we watch movies for pleasure, not to get educated.

Re:Moo

[brainboyz]

I think you missed the point of putting them in space. No one mentioned adequate life support.

Re:Moo

[SJHillman]

To be fair, warp technology makes this point pretty moot in Star Trek. If they lose engines, they're either A) already stopped, B) at warp, thus losing the warp field but keeping the inertia they had in the warp field (which is to say, none) or C) not in range of another unpowered object from which to get a frame of reference... when a powered ship comes across an unpowered ship in Trek, they could both easily be doing a third the speed of light relative to the nearest planet, but at a stop relative to each other.

In short, Star Trek's warp-related physics doesn't break nearly as many real-world physics as it seems to at first glance... most of the time.

Re:Moo

[aardvarkjoe]

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief...

Not all of us do!

Re:Moo

[Chacham]

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?

• Gravity intends to be accurate about our world. LOTR is somewhere else.
• Gravity explores real-world possibilities. LOTR explores fantasy worlds.

Re:Moo

[s.petry]

The Battle Droid Syndrome.

The mutated muscular soldiers of Mordor turned out to be hilariously ineffective fighters, a dozen of them held off by a single dying human. Apparently they made the beasts by crossing Orcs, Goblins and the French.

I almost wet myself!

Re:Moo

[idontgno]

Let's be a little selective, though.

We wouldn't want to be wiped out by pandemic unsanitary telephone disease.

Re:Moo

[SuperTechnoNerd]

Well at least the movie Apollo 13 used the vomit comet for some of their zero-g needs.

Re:Moo

[plover]

Apollo 13 had a huge advantage these other stories don't: it wasn't fiction nearly as much as it was a recreation. They didn't have to write the drama into the script, they didn't have to invent science, they didn't have to invent an oxygen tank stirrer that might explode (which sounds like a plot device from ST:TOS). They even had first-hand reports from the scientists involved. They didn't have to fake anything.

If you're filming a space drama from scratch, there are a lot of gaps you have to fill in. In a science fiction movie, technology is always just beneath the veneer of the characters, embedded in the very set. Their lives are intertwined with the tech, dependent upon it for everything, so it's always visible on screen, and in the back of the audiences' minds - will the tank run out of air? Will a micrometeor strike rupture the hull? But if that mission has never taken place, the tech is imaginary. We think a manned mission to Mars would require X and Y and Z, but we've not done it yet. That leaves some tech up to the imagination of the production designer.

2001 did a phenomenal job incorporating imaginary tech into the sets. The rotating set shots were indeed brilliant. Even so, how many astronauts would you need to enter an actual 2001-era CPU cabinet to shut down a rogue AI program? While he nailed the vision of centripetal gravity, he completely missed on some of the most important technical advances. In 300 years would Lt. Ripley really need a separate room to access MOTHER? Would MOTHER really still be displaying on a green screen CRT?

These days it only takes a few such mistakes to break the tech-savvy audience out of their willing suspension of disbelief.

You can say "we have a great story, let's have these great actors and actresses carry it. Behind them, we'll place some blinking lights and switches that look all spacey, paint them white, and we'll get ILM to add smoke and rocket exhaust, but for the most part we're not going to worry about it." Or you can say "let's take the design for an actual rocket that might be used for this mission, and build the set to resemble it. For the plot devices, we need a panel to access the cryo stirring control valve, and a different hatch to access the electrical bus, and each should contain all the appropriate parts, lines, hoses, and wires in our imaginary spacecraft. The astronauts are expected to live 40 years, so we'll need 372 cubic meters of storage representing food and water, 69 working CO2 scrubbers, the tanks will need to hold 4.3 million liters of fuel, etc. We'll film all the scenes on the Vomit Comet so that we don't make any mistakes regarding zero-G." They end up spending 30% of the budget on scientists and engineers and sets, and 60% on a zero-G film crew, and they haven't even told you the story yet.

I hope you like Polly Walker and Eric Stoltz, because they're the only actors they can afford on what's left of the budget.

Re:Moo

[ImprovOmega]

In the second, when the enterprise is falling to earth, all of the crew should have been weightless.

If they're not weightless in space, why would they be weightless in free-fall? I mean, the engines weren't working but that doesn't mean the artificial gravity McGuffin was offline.

Re:Moo

[ewibble]

The inverse ninja (Orc) law applies, that's a real thing right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_ninja_law#Inverse_Ninja_Law

Re:Moo

[ravenscar]

Exactly - another mistake in the movie. Julia Roberts is actually Sandra Bullock.

Re:Moo

[TrekkieGod]

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?

It's not a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem with lazy writing. As a writer, you may define your world however you want to, and I'll accept it, but you cannot violate your rules. You want to write about an alien who can fly when he's in a planet orbiting a yellow sun? If those are your rules, that's fine, I'll accept them. I know nothing about this alien species of yours other than what you've told me, I'm willing to accept their biological structure makes use of some physics that's unknown to us. However, when this alien saves a human who fell from the top of a skyscraper by catching them 2 meters off the ground, you didn't explain how that's any better than hitting ground. You want to write about humans who are trapped in a virtual world by sentient AIs and don't know it, and how liberated humans are able to enter this world and hack it just enough to perform feats which seem impossible? That's alright, that's your setting. However, when one of those humans starts performing those impossible feats in the real world, you failed to explain how that would work.

In a way, the more detached you are from reality, the more difficult it is to screw up. If you're writing about a world of hobbits, orcs, elves, dragons, and dwarves, there's very little you can possibly do that's going to make me question it. Everything you do in that setting I take as simply additional information that I didn't know about that world. The only way you can screw that up is by contradicting whatever you've established before. If you tell me all dwarves are all short, and then introduce a dwarf character that happens to be taller than an elf, you better have an explanation. In the very same way that you should have an explanation for why a woman floating in zero-g doesn't have free-floating hair.

Re:Moo

[Artifakt]

There's proprtionality to consider. Deep impact was made at the same time as Armageddon, and while it didn't get all the science right, it came quite a ways closer, Armageddon get's dissed because it went so far out on some very thin limbs, and somebody else at the same time made a better movie on a lower budget.
          I'm pretty OK with Gravity though. The movie came out well after the last space shuttle mission, so everyone should know that bird is not still flying. Gravity is therefore set in some alternate universe where more shuttles were built and the program is still ongoing, and also so the Hubble and ISS may have been placed in more similar orbits, the manned maneuvering packs designed differently and retained longer, the Chinese decided to locate their station close to the ISS, etc.
          It's like an early Tom Clancy novel. The Japanese never really built a covert nuclear weapons program, but flying an apache 12 feet above a railroad track and having AWACs style radar think it's a bullet train until it pops straight up at them might actually work all the same. Clancy may have been utterly fictitious in attributing the sorts of motives he did to the Japanese, but he made damned sure to check the top speed and operational ceiling of his helecopters, whether they could actually be deployed by sub, and many other things about them.
        In Gravity, we had:
1. the death of the mission specialist by having his head punched out, with a pretty realistic injury appearance.
2. The rest of the shuttle crew's deaths by decompression, also realisticly portrayed and with the fact that they would normally not be suited up just because the bay doors were open included. Note that in that scene, most or all of the bridge instrumentation and lighting is down - which may explain one of the supposed inaccuracies - why automatic stabilizing jets didn't fire when the shuttle was first hit, as it looks like the same impact seems to have killed both the bridge crew and the electronics.
3. The use of a fire extinguisher as an improvised propulsion unit, and our heroine's having the sense to grab one rather than push it away. If it's not technically accurate as to how much thrust it would supply, at least it had a real science feel as good as a Clarke or Heinlein story.
4. A realistic fire in space, with a lengthy smouldering period as 0-G kept the smoke from leaving the vicinity of the flame, and eventual flashover as it found sufficient oxidizables to outrace the smothering effect.
5. Realistic air pressure aboard the first Soyuz design capsule (what, you thought spacecraft are pressurized to a full 15 PSI?). Hypoxia in a young healthy adult and its different symptoms from such conditions as Emphasemic Hypoxia with accompanying Peripheral or Organismic Cyanosis treated with medical accuracy. (Periods of recovering from brief unconsiousness to full mental awareness are documented in highly athletic people suffering from suddon onset Hypoxia and not normally in cases where the cause is age or illness, but that's an unusual situation with the ambiguous "religious vision" as part of it, so whether the film got that intentionally right or just hit it by accident is up to the viewer).
6. A Soyuz style capsule stabilizing heat shield down from a tumble in the same manner as a boat tail bullet as it hits denser air, (Something the original Russian designers have long bragged about it being designed to do better than the Apollo, which was in turn supposedly better than the Gemini series).
7. Debris begins to glow with heat at altitudes where the air is still to thin to conduct much sound. Realistic hypersonic decelleration booms, increasing in volume as the air begins to bite,and unshielded debris shredding and vaporizing follow, and it all happens in very accurate realtime with the visuals confirming what the craft's altitude should be as it begins grabbing real air, begins to slow and the last bits pass it by. Time for the shot is textbook standard reentry time if the guidence systems actually get everything right.
8. Just getting the fact right that the Soyuz design is meant to land on solid ground is worth a few brownie points.

Re:Moo

[camperdave]

Oh no, you don't! No way in hell am I going to let those fuckers into space. They've voted against funding NASA since the end of the Cold War and have recently shut down NASA (and everything else) entirely. They get to stay here on boring old Earth while the rest of us get to have an awesome party on the ISS.

Are you kidding? Nothing would get NASA funded to adequate levels faster than having congressional lives at stake

Moo

[Chacham]

"My pet peeve is inertia," says Trollope. "There are many good reasons for keeping your engines on in space, but 'maintaining speed' is not one of them. If you turn your engines off, you don't stop."

I have *years* of experience watching Star Trek to know that isn't true. Indeed, the only thing inertia can do for space travel is keeping horrid shows about it from being cancelled.

Short answer "NO"

[tekrat]

Long answer: Gravity is about as close as Hollywood's *ever* come to doing it right, and will probably be as close as anyone's ever going to get, until the day you can actually shoot your movie in space itself.

But by then it'll probably be a reality TV show -- "the real housewives of the moon", or something like that....

The most annoying thing.

[Kaenneth]

I now understand how my dad (A Boeing inspector for many years) felt when watching movies with airplanes... pointing out that they took off in a 737, but the landing scene shows a 757!

I still recall how annoying it was to have such things pointed out all the time... So I try and keep my mouth shut during shows.

Imagine what it must be like for a real medical doctor to watch 'House', or a real serial killer to watch 'Dexter'.

Re:The most annoying thing.

[EkriirkE]

Oh man, don't get me started on cooking meth...

Unrealistic.

[nospam007]

George Clooney talking for hours with a woman his age?
Pure Fantasy.

No, because reality is FUCKING BORING

[TWiTfan]

Would you watch a Rocky movie if the boxing were as boring and silly-looking as a real professional boxing match (with most of the opponents time spent hugging each other)? Would you watch Mythbusters if they sent out all their results for months of peer-review? Would you watch House of Cards if almost of of the Senator's free time were spent at boring fundraiser dinners?

I get what he's saying here

[jollyreaper]

Tyson is correct in every point he makes but he's missing the point. This was first and foremost a good, stunning movie. While I noted science quibbles in passing, it was hard to be preoccupied with them because I was fully engaged with the film. I do my worst nitpicking when I'm in hate with a film for wasting my damn time.

There's no sound in space. They stuck with that. I'm impressed so much by that one detail. What's more, read up on the notes the studio gave the director about things they wanted to see. They wanted flashbacks to Earth, they wanted Russians deliberately shooting missiles at the survivors and other silliness.

How would I rate the realism of this movie? It looks real-ish. Apollo 13 is hardcore real, only strained interpersonal dynamics were hammed up from what actually happened. But Gravity is a damned good film.

The only physics bit that bugged me was the tether scene. Spoilerish. Two astronauts tied together falling past a structure, once one of them grabs on and withstands the shock of the other astronaut snapping the tether taut, he should rebound back towards the secured astronaut, not dangle as if still being pulled by gravity. This would not be the case if, say, they were on a rotating structure or on a rocket making a significant burn but neither is the case.

Re:Science FICTION

[invid]

I don't think Gravity falls under the category science fiction. If I was to make a movie about a fictional accident in a fictional submarine, would that be science fiction? People can make movies about space now and it doesn't have to be considered science fiction if all of the technology is contemporary.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[miniMUNCH]

"Why don't they make more movies with space realism?"

"Damn, that *space realism movie* had some minor/moderate inaccuracies... I was really disappointed [that they didn't spend 500 million on production cost to really film he whole movie in microgravity]."

For space sake... there seems to be no way to please certain people.

If you are a NASA, space-science, space-exploration supporter: There is a time to be scientifically brutal and honest, and a time to sell cars (to borrow the phrase from Steven Spielberg, among others). When something like Gravity gets made, spend 95+% of time lauding the good aspects of the film... less time preening your own scientific ego about how much you know about space.

Tyson's is correct but Bad Astronomer's better

[Caledfwlch]

OK, I saw the movie, it is awesome in the true sense of the word awe, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The special effects are great, the story line simple and engaging. The the effects, especially the interior shots, are very detailed and the few technical issues didn't pull me out of the film to a large degree. While Tyson's comments are correct I think the link below from Bad Astronomer is a more interesting and full description of the issues: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/10/04/ba_movie_review_gravity.html

Re:Don't care

[nharmon]

If they got the science perfectly right, there would be no film.

I disagree. Actual manned spaceflight is dangerous and damned scary as it is. The scenes with the remains of dead astronauts were just freaky. You didn't need a monolithic cloud of space debris, just a few pieces that cripple the shuttle's windows and heat shield. Then what do you do? Houston says they can't launch a rescue shuttle due to the unknown debris factors so your only choice is to chance a transfer orbit to the ISS using an experimental jetpack. Despite the differences in orbital shapes, IIRC the delta-V required isn't that obscene and probably easily written into the capabilities of an experimental jetpack.

You could cut out 90% of the drama in Gravity, and still have a beautiful, compelling, and downright terrifying movie. It's really too bad they felt the need to overdo it.

Re:It CAN be done (but not always is a good idea).

[plover]

Exactly. Imagine a movie that features a realistic docking to the ISS -- there's six action-packed hours of orbital maneuvering that just screams "great cinema!" Instead, they fly, they dock, and the story continues - not the accurate science.

Re:It CAN be done (but not always is a good idea).

[Jarik C-Bol]

The "Bad Physics becoming a pivotal plot point" in 'Gravity' that made me nearly yell at the screen was when Bullock was hanging by her foot from the parachute lines, and had a hand on the rope attached to Clooney, and their motion is arrested by the parachute lines attached to the station (making them 3 orbital bodies with essentially no relative motion to one another) and SUDDENLY, WE ARE WATCHING "VERTICAL LIMIT: IN SPACE" and for some strange reason, Clooney is being pulled by some mysterious force, and he sacrificially unhooks his lifeline, and FALLS OFF THE MOUNTAIN^^^^SPACE STATION.

Worst part of the ENTIRE movie right there. forget line of sight between 3 orbital bodies that are no where near each other, forget this magical debris field, forget the floating hair, this was the worst physics scene in the movie.