Written by Jon Williams
I’m admittedly late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to watching Gravity recently. I wanted to see it in theaters, and now I’m even more irritated with myself that I didn’t. In HD on a big-screen television, the film looked utterly incredible…I can only imagine how breathtaking and immersive it was on a giant silver screen. All the technical awards and accolades the film won for its production and presentation were well-deserved.
Of course,
humanity facing adversity in the course of space exploration is a plot device
that has been explored time and time again (with Interstellar being the most recent
example). The movie Gravity most
reminded me of in that regard was Apollo 13, the dramatization of the
ill-fated 1970 NASA mission to the moon. Although Apollo 13 was based on a true story, boiled down, both films have
similar plots: a group of astronauts go into space on a mission that is soon
marred by catastrophe and they have to attempt to return to Earth under
increasingly harrowing circumstances. Interestingly, both films feature Ed
Harris (voice only in Gravity), who also stars in another acclaimed movie about
astronauts, 1983’s The Right Stuff.
Another film
along somewhat similar lines is on the horizon. The Martian, starring Matt Damon, is slated for a November 25
release into theaters. Based on the popular novel
of the same name by Andy Weir, it’s not about an alien from the Red Planet,
but rather about an astronaut abandoned there after an accident leads the rest
of his crew to assume he is dead. Actually only mildly injured, he must then
use what few supplies he has available in an attempt to survive long enough for
a rescue mission to be mounted from Earth. This brings to mind, to a certain
extent, the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert
Heinlein, about a human born on Mars coming to Earth for the first time
(although I suppose that’s actually the exact opposite of space exploration).
Some movies
play on our fears of finding hostile (or at the very least dangerous) alien
life on our forays into space. The successful Alien
franchise has been built on this premise, and a new Alien film by District
9’s Neill Blomkamp is in the works. Then there’s Apollo
18, a found-footage film that posits one more crewed moon landing after
the Apollo 17 mission, one that found a very good reason why no one has landed
on the moon since. Another in this vein is Europa
Report, in which a crew is sent to explore the possibility of water and
life on one of Jupiter’s moons.
Of course,
this barely scratches the surface when it comes to tales of humans venturing
into space. There’s much more to explore, including the wide range of Star
Trek shows and movies, Moon,
starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey, and, of course, 2001
and 2010.
So tell us about some of your favorites, or what’s popular with your patrons,
in the comments section below.