By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the Sandra Bullock-starring floating-astronaut Oscar winner Gravity.
Thank fuck that Artemis II space ship thing finally landed. The Butcher was sick of hearing about its blocked toilet and looking at pictures of its showboating astronauts in zero gravity with their flying all over the place. The Butcher was also pissed off because on top of that, it served as a reminder of that shithouse 2013 out-of-orbit Oscar winner Gravity.
“I am all for an entertaining movie, but when I go into a Michael Bay Armageddon-type movie, I know to turn the brain off,” Michael Interbartolo III, a NASA veteran, wrote on Blastr.com after seeing the aforementioned Gravity, the smash hit which was also stupidly chosen by the readers of FilmInk as the Best Film of 2013. “This one tries to pass itself off as something more than that, but to me, it’s the same flash and sizzle with a lax understanding of orbital mechanics and spaceflight operations.”
As well as most movies, The Butcher really hates people who complain about factual inaccuracies in movies. Newsflash, people: all movies are pretty much bullshit, no matter how much they may claim to be based on “true stories”, or “grounded in reality.” So, when the world’s biggest scientists, former astronauts, and NASA bigwigs started to piss and moan about the fact that Gravity was filled with scientific untruths, The Butcher let out a big, intergalactic yawn.
Firstly, most scientists are annoying know-it-alls who think they’re better than everyone else. Secondly, science is boring, and the amount of times that I fell asleep in Year 10 biology is ample proof of this. Anyone that believes movies – any movies – should adhere more closely to scientific fact should be instantly set adrift in outer space. Movies should be more “realistic”? Really? No thanks.
The biggest inaccuracy in Gravity that none of these scientists mentioned was that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney were playing astronauts. Bullock was barely believable driving a bus in Speed, let alone spouting complex medical and outer space-type jargon here. The Oscar winner (yes, Oscar winner) never convinces as a medico scientist, not for a second.
George Clooney is even worse than he was in Solaris, sleepwalking (space-walking?) through his role, and giving off the impression that he’d much, much rather be somewhere else…presumably poncing around his home in Lake Como, or making cheesy ads for coffee. Gravity is apparently not realistic, but that’s only part of what makes the film so genuinely tedious. Over-reliant on special effects and drearily performed, Gravity is lost in space indeed.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
