The film ‘Gravity’, with Sandra Bullock, and George Clooney is a visual masterpiece. Set initially aboard the  space shuttle Explorer, Bullock, Clooney and another astronaut are outside the Hubble telescope  attempting to fix some technical problem, when earth control tells them that a Russian attempt to destroy a defunct satellite has gone wrong, and space debris has been scattered in all directions. The debris soon hits Bullock and Clooney, and the Explorer, killing everyone but them. They have lost communication with earth. Using the booster packs they have on their backs, they get from destroyed craft to the International Space Station, only to find it abandoned. I’m guessing the ISS crew have left due to the space debris problem, but that point didn’t seem one hundred per cent clear from the film.  They then try to get from the ISS to the Russian craft Soyuz, but Clooney becomes entangled in chords, and he has to cut himself loose, sacrificing himself to save Bullock, and leaving Bullock to make it to the Soyuz alone. She has 90 minutes before the space junk completes a full orbit of the earth, and comes back to hit her a second time.

The basic theme of the film is survival during disaster, so the plot resembles the plots of other films and books where people find themselves in earthquakes, forest fires, floods and other natural catastrophes. Bullock is on her first space mission, so she’s a newbie who has to learn and figure out things as she goes along, and because of losing communication with earth, she is thrown onto her own resources.

The photography of the space shuttle and the explorer with earth below it is completely convincing, although I found myself unable to recognise a lot of the bits of earth as views from space. Perhaps my geography isn’t as good as I believed. Large parts of the film take place in silence, since we, as the audience, only hear what the astronauts themselves hear, and collisions of junk in space are, obviously soundless. This adds realism to the film.  A lot of the camera shots are held for a long time, so the film doesn’t suffer from Hollywood’s tendency to give us a new camera angle every two seconds.

I won’t discuss the ending, but I can promise the film is worth the money to see. I intend seeing it a second time before it finishes its run at the local cinema.

So has anybody else seen this film? What did you think? would you pay to see it again?

best wishes – Richard Snow

My novel Fire Damage, an action thriller, is available on Amazon Kindle, here. The novel is based on the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system in the 1990s. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the app to read it on your computer or phone from here. A paperback version is available here. It’s also available as a Kindle on Amazon UK .  Blog: http://richardsnowwriter.com  twitter: @Richard_A_Snow