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Amphibians in Movies |
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Gravity (2013) |
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Spoiler Alert !
Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
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This sci-fi thriller about two astronauts stranded in space won 8 oscars, and was nominated for three more, including Best Picture. It has amazing cinematography, visual effects, and sound design. One of the astronauts (Sandra Bullock) is greatly effected by gravity, or the lack of it - she gets sick when she performs a space walk, her daughter literally died from gravity (by falling and hitting her head), and finally, when she returns to earth, she sinks in a lake because she is too heavy to rise, then she finds it hard to move her legs and stand up, once again under the influence of gravity.
At the end there is a very brief but unusual scene with a frog. After space debris from an exploding satellite destroys everything orbiting the earth, Bullock's character returns to Earth on a Chinese space ship. We see it parachute into a large lake on Earth. She swims out of the ship but sinks to the bottom because her space suit is too heavy. As she struggles to remove the suit so she can swim to the surface, we see a very large frog swimming by her. Then it returns and swims by her again. The camera leaves her to follow the frog up towards the surface, then returns down to her as she finally removes her suit and swims up to the surface. She makes it to the shore of the lake where she emerges from the water like some primordial amphibian.
The frog is CGI, but it looks real enough. It's rare to see a frog swimming so deep in a lake, but it's not unheard of. The Titicaca water frog, for example, is a large entirely aquatic frog that rarely rises to the surface to breathe and it rarely if ever leaves the large lake. Still, you'd expect to see fish and not a frog in a scene like this. That's what made me wonder if the frog was meant to be more than just background.
Someone on the Gravity Wiki fan page about the frog mentions that in the script, Bullock gets the frog from the space station and carries it inside her space suit. When she takes the suit off, the frog swims away. But that part was cut out of the finished movie. |
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