“Gravity” concludes with Sandra Bullock's character, Dr.Ryan Stone, returning to Earth and crash landing in a lake. Dr. Ryan sheds her spacesuit and swims to the surface, struggling at first to pick herself up on her feet but ultimately finding the strength to stand tall.
The film opens with the exploration of space—the vanguard of human civilization—and ends with an allegory of the dawn of mankind when Ryan Stone fights her way out of the water after the crash-landing, passing a frog, grabs the soil, and slowly regains her capacity to stand upright and walk.
Ryan Stone ends up alone in space after her companion, Lieutenant Matt Kowalski, sacrifices himself to save her. Stone manages to make it back to Earth by using the Soyuz escape vessel and landing in a body of water, grateful to be alive.
Eventually, Kowalski's messages stopped and Dr. Stone realized that he died due to a lack of oxygen from a combination of carbon dioxide poisoning and oxygen deprivation. Although she desperately attempted to get him to tell her a story, he did not respond.
He drifts away with hardly enough oxygen for a few more minutes. He accepts his fate and lets go, so that Sandra's character, Dr. Ryan Stone, can survive. In all likelihood, he went on to lose consciousness without oxygen, and slowly succumbed to carbon dioxide poisoning in his sleep.
“Gravity” concludes with Sandra Bullock's character, Dr. Ryan Stone, returning to Earth and crash landing in a lake. Dr. Ryan sheds her spacesuit and swims to the surface, struggling at first to pick herself up on her feet but ultimately finding the strength to stand tall.
Where does Stone end up after her landing on Earth? The final scene was filmed at Lake Powell, Arizona, which is a giant water reservoir on the Colorado river.
Ryan Stone's escape from space takes her through a trial of fire, then water, only to emerge on a great unknown land—she had survived but it wasn't clear she had been saved. My take, however, is maybe just a pessimistic take on the events as they are shown.
"It is a piece of fiction." Therefore, some elements of the film such as the Shuttle missions and Tiangong station were merely artistic liberties. Garret Reisman, a former NASA Astronaut, noted that, "The pace and story was definitely engaging and I think it was the best use of the 3D IMAX medium to date.
Strictly speaking, the Earth's gravity will always pull on an object, no matter how distant. Gravity is a force that obeys an 'inverse square law'. So, for example, put an object twice as far away and it will feel a quarter of the force. Put it four times further away and it will feel one-sixteenth the force.
"We had an alternative ending in which after landing on Earth, Ryan will get back on her feet and as she's walking away Matt Kowalski falls from the sky and crashes her to death," he said. "And then cut to black. Create scroll in silence." Sandra Bullock played Ryan Stone in the movie, with George Clooney as Kowalski.
The final moments of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity are hard to forget: Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone stands alone on the seashore after crash-landing and swimming to safety.
In the end, despite Taylor and Ryan's affection for each other, Taylor calls things off until she can become a more independent person. She seeks out help from a therapist, but realizes that her and Ryan are right for each other and they get back together.
Also Ryan's hallucination of Matt, her resolve to carry on, her speech on the reentry and the lucky landing play out like an absolution. In other words, what should have happened rather than what actually did happen. Nonetheless, both versions of the story are realistic enough.
Gravity (2013): $20 million (P.S. It has been reported that George was not only paid $20 million for his acting work in this film, but he was also able to negotiate receiving a portion of the movie's profits as part of his contract.
While attempting to return to the shuttle and open the airlock, he was killed after a chunk of debris which was the size of a softball pierced his helmet, tearing through his head and exposing him to the vacuum of outer space.
Much of “Gravity” is “so far from reality that I want to turn my head,” Hadfield says in the video below. Hadfield's first major criticism is how extremely “Gravity” violates the laws of physics. Take the scene where a satellite crashes into the International Space Station.
There was a scuba diver on set at all times to make sure the actress wouldn't drown. The light box or Soyuz capsule were where most of Gravity were shot. However, both were relatively safe.
Most of Gravity is set in space, where obviously, they did not shoot. That was all shot in a studio in England. However, there was one scene shot at Lake Powell in Arizona. It was a fitting shooting location, as it's also the setting of the astronauts' landing scene in Planet of the Apes.
One day when she was driving home from work and listening to the radio, she got a call that informed her that her 4-year-old daughter slipped and fell at the playground, getting a head injury which killed her. On her daughter's death, Dr. Stone said: "That was it. It was the stupidest thing".
I came on early in the development; Angelina wasn't even attached to it then.” The real problem, as Cuaron noted, was that Downey Jr was expected to use complicated technology to make the film, and it just wasn't something he was comfortable with.
'Gravity' is generally considered to be quite accurate from a scientific standpoint, with some minor exceptions. One of the most notable inaccuracies is the depiction of how quickly and easily Dr. Stone is able to remove her spacesuit.
And the metaphor of “space” related to the void created by the daughter's death. And the whole idea of “rebirth” which Cuarón has suggested is thematically what Gravity is about: “What we were trying to do was a film about adversity and the possible outcome of a rebirth.”
“Gravity” doesn't take place in a specific time. It's more a fanciful near-present, where the space shuttle (a fictional orbiter named Explorer), the International Space Station (ISS), and the Chinese space station Tiangong somehow exist in active service together.
