My previous post was a little review on how impressed I was with the movie and there pretty confident I wrote that the movie “of course is science fiction”. But then it got me thinking, where was the science fiction in Gravity? What should one movie have in it to belong in sci-fi?
Sure, there are astronauts in space above Earth hopping from station to station, and I guess that seems enough for a movie to be categorized in the sci-fi genre. Even at IMDb Gravity is under Drama|Sci-Fi|Thriller.
Now lets look at the facts, all space stations in the movie are real and built, currently orbiting Earth, even the station modules are factual and existing. The astronauts were wearing (I suppose) regular space suits, perhaps maybe stylished to be more movie-like, but that is not important, in reality we do have the ISS, Tiangong, the station modules Soyuz and the Shenzou and of course the Hubble Space Telescope. True the space shuttle Explorer which is featured in the movie is fictional, it doesn’t exist but so far several space shuttle have been built and used for transporting orbiter vehicles or space station modules to Earth’s lower orbit.
So all of the technology presented in Gravity exists today and functions pretty good.
The only thing fictional about the movie is its story. So the characters don’t exist and the events are clearly fictional and have not happened, but most of the movies and their characters and stories are figment of human imagination set in the real world.
Now some of the action sequences might be exaggerated, but so does escaping bullets and we regularly see those movies labeled as action or thriller.
So can we agree that Gravity is not a science fiction movie, but drama slash thriller? Some might say that we should stop nitpicking and enjoy the movie, but maybe it’s time that we get used to movie that might resemble science fiction that are not, I mean look at this world.