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What I Think

Why I loved ‘Gravity’, and it’s not why you think


Stunning visuals. Tick. Great plot. Tick. Edge of the seat. Tick. Clooney not being a douchebag, nor taking up too much screen time. Tick. Bullock. Tick. Wearing not much. Tick.

But I loved Gravity because one of the mechanical heroes was the Space Shuttle. The two remaining Space Shuttles were retired two years ago. The reasons are many; too costly, no need for humans in space, provides no benefits to mankind (oh really, space exploration created your  mobile phone, you shortsighted congressional luddites). But it wasn’t the nostalgia of seeing the Space Shuttle as hero, and then tomb, in this movie. It was because the creators of this movie were able to use old tech, in a present day movie. Without the need to enlist a historical element to make the audience believe the story was ‘old’.

How did they achieve this? An alternate reality perhaps? Everyone knows the Space Shuttle doesn’t fly anymore. Even though they invented a whole new Space Shuttle for this movie; Explorer. There were actually five Space Shuttles in the fleet. The first, used only as a test bed and never went into space was named Enterprise OV-101 (named by petition from Star Trek fans, really truly), Columbia OV-102, Challenger OV-099, Discovery OV-103 and Atlantis OV-104. All anyone sees from NASA these days is the Mars rover robot.; red dust, red dust, red dust.

And why does this aspect of Gravity make me love the movie even more? Because I’ve had a script idea for years that I thought died when the Shuttle was retired. Look out for ‘Playing God‘. In cinemas 2018.