Nature: 'Gravity' is indeed a masterpiece!

Nature publishes movie reviews only rarely. But Gravity is a blockbuster in the truest sense.

Chris Hadfield, the former commander of the International Space Station, has taken aim in his book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth at the empty optimism of motivational books. He says that flying in space requires not positive thinking but rather the essential and effective philosophy of always planning for the worst.

So in ground-based "contingency simulations," NASA officials would throw a series of unexpected misfortunes at Hadfield and his colleagues to test their responses and figure out how things might be improved. While trainees were already busy dealing with one deadly threat -- say, a medical problem -- they would be told: Oh, sorry, now there's a fire. And, by the way, you're losing oxygen. Hadfield said he found a strange sense of reassurance sitting around a table with friends and colleagues discussing topics like how his body would be disposed of if he were to die in space.

This kind of cascading catastrophe almost certainly provided inspiration for the dramatic plot of Gravity. For the astronauts played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, almost everything that could go wrong does go wrong, such that (spoiler alert for even the faint of heart) when Bullock finally splashes down into a remote lake, the audience is subconsciously waiting for the shark from Jaws to enter stage right with its famous score.

As Colin McHugh wrote this week in the Worldview column, Gravity is rich with political and scientific symbolism, some subtle, some not so much. The three great space powers -- the U.S., Russia, and China -- all make an appearance on screen, and their respective roles in the narrative reflect realities about the state of the space industry today.

It's said that the best stories are true ones, and even the most majestic movies can't compete with the grainy photos of the moon landing in July 1969 for capturing the imagination of an entire generation. Gravity is fiction, and debates among hard-core science-fiction fans about where it stands in the pantheon will probably last decades. (Though it looks like the Oscars are a lock.) Physics nerds will nitpick Bullock's hair in zero gravity and complain about why these spacecraft were so conveniently aligned to make the story work.

But none of that matters while you're watching the film. Gravity delivers a glorious, dazzling, awe-inspiring, thrilling 90 minutes that excites and uplifts. See it on the big screen before it leaves town. And more importantly, bring an impressionable child.