Gravity in Review

There's science films, and there's science fiction films. The former are the dry, National Geographic-sanctioned footage that museum IMAX theaters play on weekdays, while the latter is what sells out summer blockbusters annually and makes names like Star Wars and Star Trek become multi-million dollar franchises while playing fast and loosely with anything resembling real science.

Gravity is the perhaps closest to the former you're going to get out of a Hollywood blockbuster. In some ways, it resembles the former with its footage that looks like it's cut straight from NASA TV and a storyline that's nearly summed up entirely in 140 second trailer. And yet, it still plays a bit loose with the truth like the latter, as Time Magazine's Fact Check and Neil deGrasse Tyson's series of tweets revealed.

But really, the only reason that's noticeable is the fact that Gravity is so close to a scientific film, it's tough to set your thinking skills aside and accept that it's just a film. It depicts space and zero gravity so well that it's received praise from the likes of Buzz Aldrin and astronauts, and yet it still misses it at spots (hint: hair floats in space, too). Its premise is something that's a realistic concern in space today, and yet going from Hubble to the ISS isn't even remotely possible — and satellite debris wouldn't affect either since it would be at such a higher orbit than both of them.

So you're going to have to set aside the critical parts of your brain just a bit — far less, still, than you would in science fiction films where their space walks are decidedly less possible. But for any space buff who's spent too much time at the Air and Space museums and any NASA facilities they could reach, Gravity is a thrill like no other. You're not going for the storyline, you're going for the breathtakingly expansive views of earth, the Milky Way, Aurora Borealis, and the interior of the ISS. You're going to get the tiniest feel for what it'd be like to be on an extended space walk, one set with real hardware that's been in space in our lifetimes. It's still science fiction, but it's insanely close to real life in space in 2013, assuming the Shuttle hadn't been grounded. And that's absolutely worth seeing.

And yes, it's absolutely worth splurging for IMAX 3D tickets this time — though be warned, if you're prone to motion sickness from spinning or 3D, there's enough of both in this film to make you lose your lunch, as my wife discovered. In that case, try to get it in IMAX non-3D — this much space eye candy deserves all the screen room it can get.

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