Gravity
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

More for Gravity

Mistakes

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).

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

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

More mistakes in Gravity

Quotes

Ryan Stone: It's time to stop driving. It's time to go home.

More quotes from Gravity

Questions

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 ★

More questions & answers from Gravity

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.