Gravity

Continuity mistake: Just after Matt retrieves Ryan, Matt tells her to set her watch timer for 90 minutes, which she then does. A shot is then shown of Ryan's arm adjusting the watch timer to 90 minutes and the time on the watch reads 00:32. Later on, when Ryan is in the Soyuz capsule, she looks at her watch and says "Seven minutes to get out of here." It is shown that the time on her watch reads 02:21 (1h 49m later) but the timer reads 7 minutes and 26 seconds left of the 90 minutes. (00:19:10 - 00:46:30)

Casual Person

Continuity mistake: Just as Ryan and Matt are about to bump into Shariff's body, the POV shot of Ryan shows Ryan shielding her face with her hands. It can be noticed her right hand is positioned in a shifted 10 o'clock direction. Instantly as soon as the next shot starts, her right hand is now in a 12 o'clock direction, not shifted at all. (00:20:30)

Casual Person

Continuity mistake: On the way to the ISS, Matt asks Ryan where's home. Ryan replies "What?" and Matt says "Down there. Mother Earth." Behind Matt as he says this is the rope keeping Matt and Ryan tethered together drifting around. At the end of the shot, the part of the rope shown in front of Ryan is shown to be drifting around differently to when it cuts to a shot of Ryan. (00:25:00)

Casual Person

Continuity mistake: When Ryan and Matt reach the ISS, as Ryan says "Wait, you have to brake!" the ISS is visible from the POV of Ryan. About two shots later, another shot of the ISS is from Ryan's POV, only now they are way further away from the ISS than they were two shots previously. The second shot may appear a bit confusing because it is at a different angle, but they are definitely much further in the second shot. (00:29:40)

Casual Person

Gravity mistake picture

Continuity mistake: After the rope keeping Ryan and Matt tethered together is snapped, Ryan continues drifting downwards towards the Earth. The shot continues panning until the camera stops with the camera high up. As she falls, the ropes from the parachute around the satellite are on Ryan's right. In the next shot from low down, the ropes from the parachute have moved to Ryan's left. She was only shown spiralling downwards throughout the shot, so her position next to the ropes would not have been affected. (00:30:25)

Casual Person

Continuity mistake: Right at the end, when Ryan's pod lands, in the beginning, there are hardly any plants, but, in the next shot, there are lots of plants; the same with land, one second she's far away from land, but then, suddenly, she's right near it. (01:21:10)

kh1616

Factual error: When Sandra Bullock and George Clooney manage to get to the ISS, she gets entangled with some ropes and manages to grab Clooney's safety rope. Clooney's speed should be very close to Bullocks' and the ISS', hence. The parachute ropes should be able to withhold the forces of deceleration (the mass of two people is very small, compared to Soyus or ISS), so no more pulling or having to sacrifice himself... This is due to the fact that there's no drag in space to constantly change Clooney's velocity (revert to Newton's First Law).

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Suggested correction: The parachute ropes are of course strong enough to hold the relatively low kinetic energy of the drifting astronauts, but that is not the reason why Clooney detaches. The rope is not attached firmly to Bullocks' leg. There are some loops loosely wrapped around her leg, and while both astronauts are still drifting away from the ISS (seen in a shot a few seconds earlier), those loops slip away from the foot one by one. Before the last loop slips away from the foot, untethering and condemning both astronauts, Clooney detaches himself to lessen the kinetec energy that pulls on the rope by reducing the total mass of the "system of two astronauts", so that there is a better chance that the last loop will remain attached to Bullock.

Once Clooney had stop moving all that would have been need was a slight pull from Bullock to pull him towards her. The momentum was lost when he stopped moving. So no need to cut himself loose.

It all happens in free fall. As soon as the cord withstood inertia resulting from George's body mass pulling on it, George would bounce back towards Sandra. The entire scene was completely unrealistic.

Clooney stopped moving in relation to Bullock. But both were still moving in relation to the ISS (look at the scene again; there is a wide shot that establishes this), with both their masses pulling on the parachute cords, straining the tenuous connection of the cords looped around Bullock's foot. To lessen the strain, Clooney detaches itself from the two-astronaut-system, reducing the mass and kinetic energy pulling on the cords.

t-6

Clooney and Bullock - when they were connected to each other - never actually stopped moving in relation to the ISS.

Actually parachute cords can withstand hundreds of pounds of force, making them very difficult to snap.

The danger wasn't the ropes snapping, the danger was that they would slip off her foot, and they would both be lost to space.

Friso94

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Question: During the scene in which Matt detaches himself from Ryan so that he does not pull her away with him, why didn't he bounce back towards her when the rope snapped taut? Was there something that kept pushing/pulling him away that I missed?

Answer: If they had been tightly tethered to the space station, he would have bounced back toward her. But her foot was only tangled in parachute cords, so that when the tether snapped taught all it did was begin to pull her away from the station as the parachute cords gave more and more slack, slipping more and more loose as they drifted further away.

Phixius

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