Realistically terrifying (Image: Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures)

It's the dawn of civilian space flight what better time to scare the wits out of any would-be space tourist thinking of remortgaging to buy a ticket to orbit? Gravity, the new film from Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarn, does that in spades and in captivating 3D.

Life in space is no picnic. If the unforgiving vacuum doesn't get you, you're at risk from the hypersonic speeds of orbiting objects and the burgeoning space junk we have abandoned in Earth orbit. Never before has a movie set in space made the dangers so viscerally plain.

This high-tech tale of orbital adversity, apparently set in the near future, kicks off with three spacesuited astronauts working on the Hubble Space Telescope, which they have docked to a still-in-service space shuttle. When a spectacular and brilliantly portrayed cosmic catastrophe destroys the shuttle (and, yes, Hubble too, telescope fans) two of the astronauts played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are left adrift to navigate a hazardous orbital scrapyard.

Watching the pair cope with their oxygen running out as they strive to reach other spacecraft for safety is hugely entertaining and seat-of-the-pants suspenseful, due in no small part to Bullock's bravura performance. As you may expect from the title, physics has a lead role, and the screenwriters have done a fantastic job of demonstrating it from the way tethered astronauts bounce off each other to the orbital mechanics of space debris with impressive accuracy.

After the initial disaster, Gravity has such a sparse but compelling plot that I can't say much more without spoiling it not least because with a running time of 91 minutes this is a pretty short film. That said, the compelling portrayal of the astronauts' agony at their plight caused a colleague watching the screening with me to remark that she could not have coped with a single minute's more suspense.

Gravity's storyline wins great credence from the factual space-flight asides that root the fiction in reality. For instance, it is mentioned that if you can drive a Russian Soyuz capsule you can probably also take the helm of a Chinese Shenzhou. This is correct: Shenzhou is indeed derived from a Soyuz design. And the Kessler effect in which a piece of hypersonic space debris smashes into a spacecraft, starting a chain reaction that generates still more debris is well shown, too.

This is a CGI-rich movie filming a drama with A-list actors in low Earth orbit is not feasible just yet. The 3D is pitched just right: it is so subtle that it was not until I saw one of Bullock's tears floating towards me across the cinema that I even noticed it. One oddity, though, is the way the CGI spacesuits, floating in space, had the actors' live faces injected into them: Bullock looks just fine, but Clooney looks astonishingly like Buzz Lightyear much of the time.

If you like New Scientist's space coverage it's a safe bet you'll be blown away by this movie, and it is already being spoken of as an Oscar contender after screenings at the Venice Film Festival. But be warned: Gravity does such a good job of taking you into orbit, you may be happy never to go yourself.

Gravity opens on general release in the US in early October and in the UK in November

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Gravity movie shows the dark side of space flight