Astronaut Chris Hadfield Reviews Space Movies, from 'Gravity' to 'Interstellar' | Vanity Fair

I found out after they made interstellar some of the folks told me that when I was on the International Space Station and I did a cover of a David Bowie tune and they were trying to decide how to light Matt McConaughey's face when he was looking through the windows of his spaceship they actually looked at that clip of me - to see how the light the actual light on a spaceship looked and then they they sort of mirrored that when they were lighting Matt's face it made me laugh that art imitating life imitating art my name is Chris Hadfield a colonel in the Air Force astronaut flew in space three times commanded the International Space Station did two different spacewalks used to be a test pilot engineer downhill ski racer occasional guitar player and we're here today to look at some scenes from different space movies [Music] uh this is gravity and this is the scene where the Space Shuttle Explorer is orbiting the Earth and they're doing repairs on the Hubble telescope and they go through some sort of asteroid debris field ok well that's a nice concept and the visuals are great but what happens is so far from reality that that I just I want to turn my head first off this satellite goes whizzing by at about I don't know maybe 120 miles an hour satellites are are going five miles a second 17 and a half thousand miles an hour how that thing where you go you could identify the satellite going by and then it's like some big dump truck just suddenly put this big pile of rubble just upwind of the space shuttle and suddenly it looks like an avalanche in space has poured in front of this shuttle and they violate the laws of physics when Sandra Bullock she's on the end of the big Canada I'm the big robot arm and and it's tumbling and she releases her little straps and suddenly voo she flies away in a whole new direction like there was some force on Sandra that wasn't on the arm like how come she has a different gravity than the arm does and then everybody on the crew I mean the dialogue they're all yelling back to Houston as if somehow Houston's gonna help them right here and George Clooney is referring to this other astronaut is dr. stone like they've they haven't really met each other yet and he's asking permission from somebody I don't know to go and help her out on I mean it's not astronaut behavior it's not logical behavior it's so execrable from an actual practical demonstration of what what the reality of spaceflight is like the most experienced astronaut in American history is a woman it's Peggy Whitson she's been in space longer than any other American she commanded the International Space Station twice she's done ten spacewalks she was NASA's chief astronaut in this movie Sandra Bullock has only been an astronaut for like less than a year and when she's faced with the problem she panicking and has no idea what to do and George Clooney is driving around like some sort of space cowboy as the only person who really knows what's going on and it's they met when they were out on this space walk and then it's like he's trying to pick her up during a space walk your pretty blue eyes and what is he even doing out there driving around in his jet pack I mean we don't go outside recreationally is so different than the actual people that are exploring space that that devote their lives to being astronauts that are actually on the space station right now the wonderful human role model examples we have of people who are doing these things I think it's set back a little girl's vision of what a woman astronaut could be an entire generation Sandra Bullock did a great job of portraying this character in the movie but I just think the character that they wrote for her was really disappointing that's what I would have changed get the characters right get it to represent what astronauts are actually like and then build the story around that don't just make it The Perils of Pauline where she's strapped to the train tracks and she needs George Clooney to magically appear next to her to tell her which book to open to be able to do the right thing real astronauts recognize the seriousness of their job the fact that it's always life or death and that were there as the representatives of seven and a half billion people everybody's trust in us to be good at this to have spent decades getting good at this if you want to know what a spacewalk looks like there's never been a better movie though than gravity that opening scene is magnificent for the visual impact and the beauty of the silent turning world and and the resolution of each of the fine things and a lighting it's wonderfully good so it gives you the raw emotional sense of a spacewalk just don't pay attention to what the astronauts are actually doing [Music] this movie is passengers so if you're gonna get on a ship and you're gonna be on it you know between star is going to settle some planet in another solar system you can't be floating weightless the whole time who knows what your babies would be like if they were conceived and developed and tried to grow without gravity you know their bodies wouldn't grow right so how do you make gravity if there's no planet nearby one way of course is just like we do in a little experiment where we spin it in a centrifuge you can spin the whole ship and then everybody is sort of pinned against the outside of the ship just by the centrifugal force and that feels sort of like gravity if you shut off the the spinner then it would continue to spin for quite a while there's really nothing to slow the spin down and that's one of the big scenes in passengers the ship as a problem it stops spinning and therefore everything becomes like on the International Space Station and it starts floating so I'm not sure why when it starts losing power the ship suddenly starts slowing down you'd actually have to put big brakes onto it to stop all of that metal from spinning I'm not sure why the ship didn't just sort of blithely keep on spinning as it as it drove into the asteroids but would have been a worse story if that had happened so let's say alright the ship stopped spinning now everybody's got no gravity and one of the characters is in a swimming pool so what happens to water without gravity on board the International Space Station we played with water all the time you could squirt it and it would just float there in front of you it naturally with the surface tension goes to a perfect ball that's the easiest shape for it to go to so if you had a swimming pool held in place by gravity and then the gravity went away the water would have some inertia as the ship slowed down and it would slosh but then the water would almost look like a big blob slowly forming itself into a ball and I think that's quite well shown and the weirdest thing is if you were in the water at the time how would you even know which direction to swim which way is the surface if there's no up or down even if you started swimming one direction the blob is flexing and the way you're swimming might beginning further away from you so that was a very compellingly a cure scene assuming there's a swimming pool on board a spaceship the way it resolves though it kind of bends the edge of probability because if you spin the ship back up again then you generate this intrical force and the water would get squished back down into the the pool side of the room but it would take a lot of force in time to take a ship that has stopped this great big massive metal thing and get expanding again it wouldn't be like nothing and then bang gravity like it's portrayed in the movie where suddenly everyone's going bang into the floor as if gravity was an on/off switch but that wouldn't have been as visually compelling and allowed the crew member the young lady to on her last dying breath to burst out of the water and stay alive coming in hot oh yeah okay this movie is Armageddon which is sort of the disastrous end of everything and I think that's an appropriate name for this movie I haven't seen it since I turned away from it when it first came into the theaters this scene here we're aware that the two space shuttles are landing on an asteroid you know with the with the the deep-sea worker and blaster guys who are gonna blow up the asteroid so it doesn't destroy Earth there are so many things wrong with this that I don't even really know where to begin let's start with the fact that they're talking to Mission Control real-time there's no lag how did suddenly time in space change you can instantaneous communication all the way out to this asteroid with no leg and then one of them says we're coming in hot we're coming in hot relative to what what are you talking about and how do you know that do you have some magical landing information about an asteroid so that you know you're going faster than you meant you were supposed to and then if you watch as the shuttle commenced to light it flares it like it it slows down so it can touch down on the asteroid like by pulling back on the stick there's air on an asteroid I mean what-what made that magically happen and there's these weird video game displays in the Space Shuttle that allow you to suddenly you're flying in the game asteroids and the crew is it everybody's panicked and yelling at each other that the big engines on the back are constantly running where's the fuel coming from there's no gas tank so they'd be accelerating the whole time so why I mean what are they doing that for it is as atrociously bad as any space movie that was ever done it's so bad it's it's tragic comic I'm glad they safely landed on the asteroid but but it's just atrocious let's see a board force 7,500 anything more than that in the Matthew tip this is the Martian I like how the one crew member is wearing his nametag in the middle of his chest it's a little far along in the mission to be wearing your nametag Mars is an interesting planet in that it has dust storms we can see them through our telescopes from Earth and some of those dust storms envelop huge sections of Mars simultaneously this is unfortunately about the worst part of the whole movie the Martian is that the atmosphere is so incredibly thin on Mars it's almost like the very edge of space on earth you would have to be like a hundred thousand feet up to get to how thin the areas on Mars and think of the people that go to the top of Everest which is only twenty eight thousand feet up almost all of them need oxygen just to be able to to get to the top of Everest and this is you know four times as high as that if the air was blowing incredibly fast there'd be so fuel air molecules going by you that you'd hardly even feel them and there's no way you could pick up all those big pieces and blow them and knock mark Watney over and it's a slow cumulative change of seasons on Mars the people that made the movie just decided the gravity on Mars is the same as the gravity on earth even though it's actually only thirty eight percent of the gravity so Matt wouldn't be quite that hunky on on Mars he wouldn't be solidly on the floor he'd only weigh one third as much as he does on earth so he'd be a lot more bouncy moving around and and things would move differently mark Watney played by Matt Damon is trying to find a way to make enough food to last until he can be rescued all he's really got our potatoes but potatoes are simple and they grow and multiply so he needs a few things he needs water he needs nutrient-rich soil he needs heat and he needs oxygen I'm gonna it makes sense actually that they're growing plants on Mars if you're gonna live there you can't bring everything in little tins and dehydrated packages you got to grow food where you go we've been growing stuff on spaceships for decades and so the movie ends up being very good for how could you get that little environment for one human being and his and his crop of potatoes to grow on Mars the idea of using the human crap from outside in order to harvest the nutrients that you need for potatoes just like putting manure on on crops at home here on earth how he used existing chemicals whether it was rocket fuel or whatever they're all just sort of hydrocarbons you know things with with hydrogen and oxygen and carbon in them and so so long as you can get the right chemical reaction you can get out the things you need and if you think about it that's sort of what happened on earth we didn't use to have oxygen on earth it's just a chemical process that created our atmosphere here on earth and Mark Watney Matt Damon is sort of hastening that process on Mars on this planet one of the best parts of the Martian is that it came from the book by Andy weir he's a really smart guy in an engineer but he also crowd-sourced the science as he was write in the book he put it out there and said hey everybody tell me what's wrong with with my science here what am I doing wrong as an astronaut Mark Watney could have been just any of the people in the astronaut office it's that type of person the the deep academic background the strong operational sense of what you're gonna do next I think it gave people a sense of what being an astronaut is like it there's some hard sad difficult parts but there's some ridiculously fun and almost always joyful parts to it and a great sense of camaraderie better than almost any space movie the Martian shows that Apollo 13 Apollo 13 tells the story of an explosion that actually happened on the way to the moon really good movie maybe the most realistic of all of the space movies this is Houston say again please houston we have a problem when you're talking on the radio of course the first word you have to say is who are you talking to so that's why from a spaceship the first word we say is Houston or Moscow or Tokyo or whoever we're talking to Mission Control is sitting there and if they hear the commander of the ship say houston we have a problem it's an understatement but it has a huge impact all normal operations cease and everybody is now listening to hear what the commander is going to say next look it up there data like crazy it's a wonderful succinct way to phrase it and all space commanders since then self included have used that phrase when needed because it it has the desired effect if you've lost a bunch of your oxygen and a lot of your purification equipment how do you get the carbon dioxide out of the air onboard a spaceship you need some sort of scrubbing equipment and when you've had a malfunction maybe it's not gonna work the way you planned but they had the lunar lander it had its own carbon dioxide scrubbing system the trouble is they were built by different companies the pieces weren't interchangeable the engineers recognized the problem early they present it to the flight director ed Harris done a great job of playing gene Krantz and Gene Sam ok I understand the problem now go fix it that happens every day it's face flight maybe not that dramatically but I worked in Mission Control it's this great detective hunt every day of how can we take what we hope to do which is now being ruined by the reality of everything going wrong and we're constantly reinventing stuff and all the people in the back rooms are trying to figure out the solutions to the problems but the way it's portrayed in Apollo 13 it was a terrific dramatic example of it but it's almost a textbook of what actually happens to solve problems to get something done Ron Howard when he made the movie I mean he tried to restrict dialogue between Mission Control and the space capsule to be actually what the transcripts of what the crew had said back then Ron actually came to Houston spent time with us there saw what the houses were like he came down to launch he he really wanted to get to know what astronauts and and everybody else at the Johnson Space Center and in the space business were like I really admire the team that put together Apollo 13 and I love the movie I think I think it does a great job of showing what spaceflight is like especially at that moment in time [Music] well I'm just confused now this is interstellar if you get sucked into a black hole I mean people are worried about the riptides at the shore you know this this this is like a Riptide a Tyrannosaurus this is beyond our ability to imagine the scope of the forces that are involved and not just a force like gravity holding us down to the surface of the earth but a change in gravity with with distance because gravity is the strength of it is proportionate to to where the black hole is closer you get more gravity again it would be just tearing everything to pieces until eventually the the forces are so high it even sucks light into it it's not something you can build yourself a tough little capsule in and somehow penetrate there's there's nothing we know of right now that could withstand the destructive force of being near a black hole how that's going to be portrayed in a movie you can kind of do whatever you want with it for now is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space no we're in a mathematical equation is there a symbol for love it'd be a nice little heart I guess but I don't know how you multiply it or divide it maybe for the arc of artistic story then love is the only way to get through to the end to end up at that place looking through into his daughter's library rack it's it's very emotionally nice but I'm not sure that Einstein or Stephen Hawking would have would have followed the logic I brought myself here we're here to communicate so how do you deal with time travel which is essentially what happened here it becomes so confusing it's almost like the movie needs like footnotes and scientific subtitles here so that you can clue in the viewer as to what's happening also there's no point in yelling through your spacesuit nobody can hear you outside your spacesuit I'm also really confused just by the physicality of what we're looking at I mean suddenly he's in some sort of huge filing cabinet the endless land of venetian blinds movie creators had some specific thing in mind trying to take the physics and the math and make them three dimensionally compelling it still ends up for me just being quite puzzling interstellar has a fascinating history of birth it was the brainchild of one of the best physicists in the world a guy named Kip Thorne and Kip was trying to figure out the math of what happens around a black hole and he hired a company called double negative and they took his math and turned it into the raw visuals of what a black hole would look like and that became the genesis of the movie it's a real interesting coupling of a science fiction story based very much in an experiment of how to visualize the non-intuitive complexity of what the environment would look like around the weird singularity that is a black hole the reason the time is dilated for the crew and interstellar is just because of the incredible change of gravity the distortion of time do the huge gravitational forces but what that means is if you get going faster and faster and faster time passes differently for you than someone who has not gone that fast and so while I was on the space station I had some people do the math to see was I aging faster or slower than people on earth I'm actually younger than I would have been if I'd stayed on earth for the whole six months every month I aged about one millisecond less than people on earth so after six months six milliseconds younger than then my family doesn't mean anything but if you extrapolate it to the speeds and the physical conditions of interstellar then suddenly the difference becomes huge I've waited years where a fixed amount of time for Matt McConaughey and his crew would be a wildly different amount of time for people who are in a different set of circumstances it doesn't intuitively make sense you just have to sort of accept that the world that we live in is only one particular set of physical circumstances and so wildly different ones exist in other places in the in our galaxy and in the universe this movie is first man the story of the very first human being to walk on the moon the story of Neil Armstrong didn't that altimeter say he was at 45,000 feet before astronauts become astronauts they always have some other significantly complex technical profession a lot of them used to be test pilots and that includes all three of the astronauts in Apollo 11 including obviously Neil Armstrong and there's the opening scene in the movie where he is flying an x-15 right at the edge of the envelope right at the edge of its capability one of the biggest problems with the scene is sound it's sort of like he's in in a pickup truck driving across a field with this big whiny noise that tells you just how fast he's going all the time you can hear sort of going up and down like maybe there's a big I don't know piston engine running nearby it's all completely wrong you don't hear that in the cockpit and the vibration it's it's there's so much little rattling vibration where's that coming from he's in a bullet plane with a rocket motor on the back that the vibrations would be imperceptibly small airplanes especially airplanes like that fly really smoothly also he keeps going in and out of cloud he's at 45,000 feet what clouds are they're at 45,000 feet there's maybe the occasional thunderstorm that sticks up that high but you would not fly a x-15 through one of those thunderstorms and then it goes from this weird sort of rattle II had a noise like like it's some old jalopies fine and then suddenly dead quiet then what happened there where did all that sound come from and where did it all go and as the pilot also he's wearing a pressure suit he's got a headset on he's inside a cockpit you don't hear any of that as he pulls back on the stick and starts going up to get the x-15 up high that that's fine once your rocket lights then you want to start going up where the air gets thinner and thinner well the sky oddly enough gets lighter and lighter like the sky goes from sort of a normal blue to like this light blue that's the opposite of what happens as you ride a rocket up to space it goes from light blue to dark blue because there's less and less air to refract the light till eventually it goes black in this clip for whatever reason it goes from from regular sky to light blue light blue and then suddenly bang the sky turns black as if you like went around a corner right something the front of the x-15 starts glowing with the heat well that that's because of the friction of the air as he's going fast it doesn't happen at the right time you know up where the air is the thinnest and they didn't really show at what speed he was going the time it takes to heat the front of an airplane and the amount of air molecules that have to hit it to cause the friction and the drag to make all that all that heating and make the metal glow a different color it almost look like he got the space and then the nose got hot and those two things aren't related to each other what disappointed me most about first man was how sad everybody was everybody inside was glum and spaceflight is joyful it's hilarious it's magic you can fly you're you're seeing the whole world these guys were going to the moon they had a lot of responsibilities but where is the spark of joy that is there and every second of the time that you're onboard a spaceship the distance from loss to orbit we know where it's on mass we know mercury capsule weight we know you did the math I really liked the movie hidden figures it tells a story that most people don't know about it highlights a group of people that did really pivotal work to get us into space at the beginning and it's a really nice human story and it's really well acted there's one scene where the character Catherine Johnson who's of course one of the real brilliant human computers that that's in the movie is trying to solve one of the math problems you have to solve for orbital mechanics and getting people into orbit and and doing it accurately enough it's super oversimplified and dramatized and it's like the entire staff of NASA is 15 people in this one room somewhere and the part played by Kevin Khan he's like the leader of this team and he seems to be the administrator of NASA and he seems to be the flight director of the specific mission but you gotta simplify things to tell a story and I guess that's okay but people sitting in front of blackboards postulating and coming up with ideas that's real that's realistic that's how we figure out a lot of those things maybe it's not new math at all it could be old math Euler's method there's nothing unusual about saying that this is old math all math is old it's just weather we've figured out what the mathematical principles are or not one of the guys who figured out a lot of the math was a guy named silk offski who was a math teacher in the 1800's he figured out space flight with his mathematics by candlelight in his house in in rural Russia and Euler came up to some equations that are absolutely necessary for us to be able to do the predicting properly in order to do rendezvous and burn the engines at the right time that you're gonna get to where you want to go but I love the interplay of the bright minds and the kind of quirky people that actually allowed early Space Flight this is the movie ad astra the chase scene on the surface of the moon between the bad guys who are in Black Moon Rovers and the good guys who are in white moon Rovers making it easy for those of us on earth to follow along God must work fine without air guns don't need oxygen to work really if you think of what happens inside a bullet you know there's this striker in the back and it it causes a chemical explosion and it's the exploding gas inside the confines of the rifle that make the projectile come out the end really fast that doesn't count on gravity and it doesn't count on Earth's atmosphere so a gun would work fine on the moon in fact we actually carried guns on board the Russian spaceship that I flew and when I went to the Russian space station Mir in 1995 the ships that came up had guns in them but they were in the rescue pack because if you did an emergency deorbit from the space station you might land anywhere on earth and you might land in a place where there were you know grizzly bears and so there was a specially designed gun that had to shot barrels and one gun barrel so that you could fire two shots at the grizzly bear and maybe the last one for yourself I don't know but we've had guns in space before never fired one in space that I've ever heard of on the moon there's about one-sixth gravity as there is on earth so the bullets gonna fall more slowly than it would on earth it's gonna take longer yeah so that means the bullet with the same speed horizontally would go further it go further around the moon it's possible I guess if you had a big enough gun that it would get to the speed where it might actually be able to escape from them it could get to escape velocity where was going so fast that by the time the pull of gravity of the moon kept bringing it down it would be far enough away that it would have a inertia to float away from the moon forever I haven't done the math to figure out exactly what that speed is I'm sure we could make a big enough gun to do that why are they driving Apollo Rovers around in the future those Rovers were built in a great big hurry during the Apollo program to try and let the exploring astronauts have slightly better range and explore more of the moon we would not build Rovers like that in the future that's like if if you were watching some movie in the future and and they brought in a Model T Ford as the vehicle that everyone's racing around in it's like why are they driving Model T Fords you know those were from the 1920s that doesn't make any sense as you watch this scene where is all the noise coming from you are in a perfectly empty vacuum on the moon so as you watch this scene it's really noisy you can hear the vehicles bouncing along and you can hear the guns being fired and you can hear them hitting and everything there's no air on the moon if you make a noise on the moon there's no way that the pressure wave can be carried anywhere you can't hear anything that that doesn't happen inside your ship or inside your suit like it's as if there are I don't know Mel Gibson driving around in some sort of dystopian future and you can hear the great big vehicles behind them it would be perfectly silent the whole time all you would hear was everybody breathing and talking to each other so I guess it makes it familiar for people but it's wrong perhaps the greatest space movie of all time 2001 a Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke's great book amazingly portrayed in the late 60s by Stanley Kubrick and his team when I came back from my first space flight and sat in my living room with my wife I remember telling her it was amazing how you see the world the speed you're heading over the world the big curve of it it's exactly like they guessed it would be when they showed it in 2001 the imagery of it as that ship that that left earth and it is coming up to dock with the rotating Space Station the sort of gigantic slow ballet of spaceships at the time I remember thinking it's like you know elephants mating this big ponderous careful three-dimensional activity with a specific purpose in mind but that's that's what it felt like to fly a ship up to try and dock with a Space Station the little pen floating out of the passenger on board who has fallen asleep and now the flight attendant walking down the aisle and having velcro on the bottom of her shoe is matching the velcro of the floor the inside of the International Space Station it's it's there's velcro everywhere anywhere you want to stick anything including that pen there's velcro on the pen with the with the one type of velcro um and the wall is the you know pile or hook she did sort of stumble though which was obviously a gravity thing if you watch it really close but the idea of placing one foot then placing another foot and peeling them almost like someone walking up a wall of ice or something that was an interesting solution to the problem I think it's beautifully artistically and quite scientifically portrayed it it's great this movie is wall-e really designed for kids very sweet in this scene wall-e is out there flying around in space and having fun using a fire extinguisher and Eve the more advanced robot has own propulsion system I'm a little confused about Eve because Eve's head isn't attached to the body but there's this weird sort of red cable umbilical on the outside what intrigued me was how the animators moved wall-e around by firing a fire extinguisher and it would work just fine you get a fire extinguisher you pull the trigger all that stuff flies out of the fire extinguisher and if you don't brace yourself it would sort of push you over on earth if you're floating in space and you can't brace yourself at all it's gonna propel you just like a little rocket motor and they were clever enough to make sure that Wally always got it down to the center of his body because if you did it up by your head then it would push you off center and you just sort of pinwheel but if you can push it through the middle of your mass middle of your body then it's gonna move you in a straight line and he's very careful to constantly move the nozzle to the right spot it's quite cute and quite a nice little study of orbital mechanics the very first American spacewalk when Ed white went out he actually had one of those squirters with him not a fire extinguisher but a little handheld squirter that he could maneuver around with eventually we found it was an impractical way to move you're better just to put hand holds on the ship or wear a jetpack but that same thing that Wally's using that was actually used by the first American never walk in space this is sunshine a movie about a crew having to reignite the Sun but in this scene the crew recognized that they're going to see mercury go between them and the Sun it's almost like a tiny little version of an eclipse and people love eclipses you know that's it's almost mystical it's it's a neat thing to see and so I think that that would be natural the crew would love to see mercury highlighted against the light of the Sun in the single mercury is whipping around the Sun I mean just in the time it takes those people to sit and look out the window it goes probably an eight to the way around the Sun in earth days mercury takes like months 88 days or something to go around the Sun so you wouldn't perceive the motion relative to the Sun just looking out the window like they are also the Sun is stupendously bright how are you seeing mercury against the Sun it's it's like staring it at the headlights of a car and trying to see you know marble or something you you just your eyes would be so overpowered by the brilliance of the Sun unless they've got some really great special filters somehow on their viewing screen and their ship what's nice about the scene is the sense of wonder the aw at the majesty of the reality of the rest of the universe and seeing it firsthand I've been around the world 2,650 times or so and I never once could see enough of it during my first spacewalk while I was outside in the dark we actually were far enough south that we went through the Earth's Aurora it is so fantastically beautiful and such a raw artistic human experience to look at the Northern Lights is like magic to be in them to surf on them but that's beyond magic it's surreal my last orbit of the world was even more rich and magnificent and and awe-inspiring and then all of the ones before it the unheralded beauty of our planet and of where it sits and the environment that we're in is so constantly magnificent that when you're looking at it you talk in hushed tones you know like you've walked into a giant forest or or the most beautiful Cathedral on earth you don't you don't talk in a big brassy voice there you're reverential of where you are and I think that little scene gets some of that the reverence and an understanding of the both the miniscule nature of being a human in the enormity of the universe but also the enormity of being able to see it in that way the huge awareness that we have of our ability to try and interpret and understand it I think they portrayed that well I'm Chris Hadfield I love space movies it was nice to have a chance to look at look at some of them with you I look forward to every new space movie that comes out and hopefully maybe some of the things that I've said here will help you see each of the new space movies that you see through an astronaut sighs happy viewing

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 4,424,038

Rating: 4.9384727 out of 5

Keywords: astronaut review, chris hadfield, astronaut chris hadfield, space movies, space movie, space movie review, vanity fair reviews, astronaut reviews space movies, gravity, interstellar, vanity fair space movies, space movies vanity fair, astronaut chris hadfield reviews space movies, passengers, armageddon, the martian, hidden figures, ad astra, 2001 a space odyssey, wall-e, wall e, chris hadfield interview, chris hadfield space, vanity fair, chris hadfield astronaut

Id: 3RkhZgRNC1k

Length: 35min 57sec (2157 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HummingArrow]

Imagine being able to say, “ I have been around the world 2,560 times”

[u/axistim]

34:09

I’ve been around the world 2,650 times or so, and I never once could see enough of it. During my first spacewalk, while I was outside in the dark, we were actually far enough south that we went through the earth’s aurora. It is so fantastically beautiful and such a raw artistic human experience. To look at the northern lights is like magic. To be in them, to surf on them, that’s beyond magic. It’s surreal.

Beautifully said. I can only imagine the things he has been able to witness. Pictures cannot do it justice.

[u/vsaint]

I loved the part where Sandra Bullock hyperventilated for 2 fucking hours

[u/170rokey]

For the record, hadfield says in the video that there were things about the movie he actually did like. Nobody can deny that the special effects were cool!

[u/Dr_SnM]

The worst part of that film is how Cloony dies, it completely defied basic physics

[u/PLS-SEND-UR-NIPS]

I watched it right after reading An Astronauts Guide to Life on earth (Hadfields book).

That book taught me a ton about what being an astronaut is really like.

Gravity was not what being an astronaut is really like.

Can see why Hadfield hated it.

[u/HothHanSolo]

It's weird how many people are expressing hate for this movie in this thread. I don't think that's representative of the population at large. It has audience ratings of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.7 on IMDB, both of which seem like they're at least average.

I was also incredibly popular with critics, where it was rated 96% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

[u/AccessTheMainframe]

Gawd Chris Hadfield you don't get it Matthew McConaughey didn't actually fall into the blackhole he passed the event horizon and was saved by the hyper-advanced future human civilization that transported him to the tesseract that represented their 5 dimensional reality as 3 dimensional space allowing him to communicate with Jessica Chasten across time and space using gravity manipulation which he uses to transmit the gravity equation to NASA and Michael Caine in binary which allows them to launch the O'Neill cylinders they built under Cheyenne Mountain and create a new civilization in outer space that would go on to develop the super advanced technology needed to build the tesseract eons in the future and complete the causality loop that allowed Matthew McConaughey to transmit the equation in the first place and lead to the tessaract's own existence.

Like gawd Chris Hadfield it's like you didn't even watch.

[u/sciamatic]

I think pretty much everyone in the space industry hated it.

The thing is, I don't think they just hate anything with inaccuracies. You didn't see the same reaction with Ad Astra or Interstellar, or even Solaris and the like. None of those tried to "look real." They were all very upfront about being science fiction.

The problem with Gravity is that it tried to carry itself off as "real." That it was very grounded and realistic and that this is what spaceflight is like. One of the big parts of its advertising was talking about how much they tried to be true to reality, and thus a lot of audience members walked away with an impression that this was fiction, yes, but grounded fiction, as opposed to total sci-fi.

I think that's why people in the space industry dislike Gravity so much. They're totally here for space stories, and for far out there speculative sci-fi, but Gravity annoys them.