One thing this shot is sync the sound and visuals. In reality because of the slower speed of sound (around 340m/s) the noise of the rocket wouldn't be heard until the rocket was significantly above the tower. You also hear various other pieces in the sound that indicate it wasn't recorded on site.
This is one of the things I really notice in movies. Whenever something explodes in a fight sequence (eg Marvel movies[1]) the sound matches the explosion exactly. I find it annoying although I suspect the average movie-goer would be put off if the sound was realistically delayed.
Reminds me that explosions in space in Interstellar were silent (as they should be).
I hope this kind of thing catches on. If a movie shows a distant explosion and its sound is heard at the moment of the explosion, you don’t really think about it. But when they treat the sound accurately, it really grabs your attention.
I loved the detail in Interstellar where the audio from EVAs is muffled, like you're hearing what the occupant of the suit would be. The Expanse also does this to some degree.
Pretty sure that awful Sandra Bullock movie Gravity was quiet as well. Except that they made the awful choice to have Sandra Bullock screaming, moaning, and making all sorts of groans which came across as stupid and melodramatic. If she had been calmly radioing "Houston, vehicle breakup. Houston, pressurization loss. Houston, emergency EVA" it would have been better.
So, you'll notice that humans had that sort of flattened affect you're looking for in Kubrick's 2001, but he placed it in contrast to HAL, which for most of the film is the only character who communicates with an emotive affect.
You need some emotion, some performance. Kubrick got that and managed to achieve this in 2001 by combining the emotional austerity of spaceflight with an artificial intelligence who, in an inversion of expectation, is the emotive one. Then he exploited this for the climax, the loss of HAL's personality, being.
Lacking a HAL like element, especially in a film that has one actress, you can't make the humans dull, you need some emotional experience to attach to. In the context of Gravity, that means dramatic calls and the sounds of her human presence. People don't go to the cinema to listen to an ATC feed.
Probably because they insisted on not using any CGI and doing everything with practical effects instead. I think this is an absolutist take and I would have preferred they used a bit of CGI were it's warranted. Like that nuclear detonation for instance. I couldn't explain why, but compared to the archive footage of nuclear explosion, it just felt wrong.
Years ago I got to watch the last night launch of the Space Shuttle from a parking lot in a hotel some miles away. It was like watching a high-speed sunrise, and the sound followed several seconds later after the Shuttle had already gone into the clouds. It was really something the way the sound rumbled in after we'd already seen the launch.
Yeah, I actually misremembered that scene as being the opposite of what GP described, as the pressure wave was the thing that made the biggest impression on me back those years ago - it's the other thing that's very rarely modeled when things in movie explode.
Not sure about rocket launches but in energetic explosions the shock wave moves faster than sound for a certain distance, until the shock slows down and the sound catches up.
They don't per se, the precursor wave travels through the ground at the speed of sound in whatever medium (usually rock in nevada tests), which is about 5x the speed of sound in air.
This is one of the things I really notice in movies. Whenever something explodes in a fight sequence (eg Marvel movies[1]) the sound matches the explosion exactly. I find it annoying although I suspect the average movie-goer would be put off if the sound was realistically delayed.
[1] https://youtu.be/4vHxHgYaOes?si=BnzjncUQLHz_6DZy&t=58