3. The Lake At The End Is The Same As In Planet Of The Apes
I for one was rather surprised any of Gravity's action took place on Earth. Maybe it's my bent towards depressing endings leading me to expect no escape for the heroes, but I wasn't expecting any happy ending to Stones journey. Instead we got a thematically perfect escape where the rebirth subtext suddenly shifted to become painfully overt. Aside from having Bullock rise from the sodden sand like our biological ancestors millennia ago, the primordial feel of the lake made this landing feel almost otherworldly. And thats not the first time the location, Lake Powell in Arizona, has been treated like that on film. The CGI enhancements made it particularly hard to spot, but the lake is the same one that Charlton Heston crash landed into in the original The Planet Of The Apes. But what makes it more than a convenience (Doctor Who also shot The Impossible Astronaut at the same location), is the nature of the scenes; both involve a crash landing that almost drowns the pilots before they stand on what 'feels' like a new world. This is more than one of the little movie references discussed earlier; as the only non-studio based element of principal photography, its clear an effort was made to evoke the sci-fi classic.