Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity" and Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope:" not the same story

George Clooney in Gravity.

N.b.: I offer the below in the spir­it of nip­ping what I believe to be a par­tic­u­larly nox­ious meme in the bud. I’ve tried to keep it as spoiler-free as I can, and believe I’ve suc­ceeded, but those inves­ted in going into Gravity as total vir­gins might want to skip this post for the nonce. 

Now that Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is get­ting rap­tur­ous reviews from the Venice Film
Festival, with more no doubt to fol­low, I believe it’s not un-okay for me to
let the cat out of the bag and report that I was able to see the movie a few
months back thanks to the kind con­sid­er­a­tion of some Warner people who wanted
some advance feed­back from myself and a few oth­er Internet-centric movie
journ­al­ists. I would have kept the cat in the bag longer were I not a little
dis­turbed by the mewl­ings of vari­ous and sun­dry folks who travel the digital
space­ways, claim­ing that the movie, co-written and dir­ec­ted by Alfonso Cuarón,
is some­how an ignoble enter­prise in that it does not acknow­ledge the Ray
Bradbury short story “Kaleidoscope” as its story source.

There’s a really simple reas­on that Gravity doesn’t con­tain the cred­it “Based on the short story
‘Kaleidoscope’ by Ray Bradbury,” and the reas­on is because it isn’t. I say this
with con­fid­ence, my Everyman’s Library edi­tion of The Stories of Ray
Bradbury open before me to page 184, on
which “Kaleidoscope” ends. As you may know, Cuarón’s film, which star George
Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is about the adven­tures of two astro­nauts who find
them­selves stran­ded in out­er space after debris from an explod­ing satellite
makes return to their own space­craft impossible. “Kaleidoscope” con­cerns the
inner thoughts and verbal exchanges between the crew of a “rock­et” (Bradbury’s
word)  that’s been shattered by a
met­eor storm, leav­ing the mem­bers of that crew drift­ing this way and that in
their space­suits, facing their worst fears and worst selves as they head to the
death each of them knows is certain.

The spe­cif­ics of the two stor­ies are entirely dif­fer­ent. In
“Kaleidoscope,” almost half a dozen rock­et crew mem­bers are named, but the main
exchanges are between four: Hollis and Applegate, who had a kind of
pro­fes­sion­al rivalry, and Lespere and Stone. It takes place in an unspecified
future year, and is not merely sci­ence fic­tion but spec­u­lat­ive sci­ence fiction;
in the story Lespere alludes to hav­ing wives on sev­er­al plan­ets oth­er than
earth, which sets this story in a future when inter­planatery travel is more
routine and humanoid life on oth­er plan­ets has been shown to exist. Gravity, on
the oth­er hand, occurs in more or less the present time, so much so that one
crit­ic has opined that the movie isn’t even sci­ence fic­tion. I’d have to say
that strictly speak­ing it is sci­ence fic­tion, not least because there are one
or two tech­no­lo­gic­al advant­ages the char­ac­ters have that aren’t fully-fledged
prac­tic­al real­it­ies for space work­ers at this point. That’s split­ting hairs,
per­haps, but it is use­ful to note that the realm in which Bradbury was working
was neces­sar­ily much more fanci­ful than the one in which Gravity is set. (“Kaleidoscope” first appeared in book form
as part of Bradbury’s col­lec­tion The Illustrated Man, pub­lished in 1951.) 

Is the premise sim­il­ar? Yes, but only inso­far as Bradbury’s
own premise was sim­il­ar to that of a ship­wreck story. As a science-fiction
writer, a seer of rock­et­ships and space travel and more, it was his innovation
to set a ship­wreck story in a non-terrestrial realm. Gravity, too, is a ship­wreck story, but the fact that it has
a smal­ler set of char­ac­ters than “Kaleidoscope,” and the fact that one of the
char­ac­ters is a woman, already kind of sets it apart auto­mat­ic­ally, and
through­out the movie’s brisk run­ning time its emphases and cir­cum­stances differ
from those of the Bradbury story sub­stan­tially, and at nearly every turn.
“Kaleidoscope” takes a premise that’s almost as old as storytelling itself and
goes its own way with it; so does Gravity. And there’s more. The most finally sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fer­ence between the
two works is one of, well, theme. “Kaleidoscope” is about char­ac­ters facing
cer­tain death, their anxi­ety over what their lives have ulti­mately been worth,
their wor­ries over wheth­er their exist­ences have ever meant any­thing at all.
The story ends on a beau­ti­ful metaphorical/actual note that says, yes, there is
a mean­ing, but you’re not neces­sar­ily going to be privy to it, and that is
pos­sibly the thing that makes the mean­ing beau­ti­ful. I haven’t giv­en you too
many spe­cif­ics about the story line of Gravity but I will say that once the dis­aster strikes for the
astro­naut the crux of the mat­ter is that their deaths are not a giv­en. They are
very likely, but not assured, and the story pro­ceeds apace from that: these
char­ac­ters are going to do everything they can to get home. So it’s two
com­pletely dif­fer­ent things at heart.

Every writer or film­maker who endeavors in the realm of
sci­ence fic­tion owes a debt to Ray Bradbury. I think we can all agree on that.
But Ray Bradbury isn’t the secret writer of Gravity. I bet he totally would have dug the film, and I bet
if had not passed away in June of last year he would have been invited to look
at it well before I was.