"Clear skies with a chance of satellite debris."

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón's homage to mass and inertia, is a great movie.  Sandra Bullock gives a gripping performance as orbital disaster victim Dr. Ryan Stone, supported by scripting and direction that combine to present an intimate, emotional experience against an epic backdrop. The film beautifully balances and contrasts the awesome beauty of planet Earth as seen from orbit with touches of humanity: country and western music, bits of everyday life like chess pieces and pens, and the crying of a baby over a radio.

But the really impressive thing about Gravity, the thing that really caught my attention?

It's not science fiction.

The settings of space shuttle, International Space Station and Soyuz flight module are real settings; the spacesuits are real spacesuits, with clumsy gloves and fogged faceplates; and the dangers being faced are real dangers, no more fictional than the perils of being killed during a bank robbery or waking up in a burning house.   

Yes, we as a species have now reached a point in time where it's possible to make a 90 minute movie, set in space*, in which the heroine narrowly escapes death by satellite debris impact, lack of oxygen, zero-gee combustion, freezing, explosive decompression, and burning up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, and it's not science fiction. In fact, when it finally dawned on me that I wasn't watching a science fiction movie, I was almost embarrassed, as if I had gone to the theatre under false pretenses. 

 And the next step?  The next step is we start shooting on location...

- Sid

* Okay, near-Earth orbit if you're going to be picky.