Movie Review: Gravity
Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. I felt it in the new film Gravity; I knew what it was like to be set adrift in outer space. Not the series of half-understood, embellished images in a century of movies and books, but the foreign physical nature of muscle-free tumbling, crucially aided by instruments carefully calibrated by human brains and fashioned by other machines – devices to help you breathe to live; radio to feel that necessary contact with Houston on Earth acting as an omniscient voice of comfort and practicality; and finally (if the mission goes as planned), contraptions that miraculously bring the passengers back to safe harbor.
When Alfonso Cuaron began the slow process of rendering the most convincing, scientifically-sound outer space setting I have seen in fictional cinema (as far as I can tell; I’m sure others will speak up about any bad science), the United States was winding down the manned space mission program – once an overarching symbol of national innovation, human limit-pushing, and bragging-rights victory during a cold war – the program buckled under government largesse and societal apathy, and soon there were no more men in orbit or on the moon.
We aren’t going up there anymore, but motion pictures like Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban-helmer Cuaron’s labor-of-love Gravity are finding new ways to tell impossible tales and keep us dreaming. Plenty of films are technical show-ponies (“cough” Avatar “cough”), but Gravity excels past its considerable special effects (IMAX 3D taking us further into an astronaut’s point of view than ever before, barring planetarium documentaries) anchored by an unexpectedly subtle interior performance from Sandra Bullock and the bedside-manner assurances of George Clooney as the veteran guiding his colleague through improbable survival maneuvers once their equipment begins to fail.
Hushed and reverent to the vast, immeasurable reaches of space, Gravity unfolds at proper waves of pace – the first act is an unwinding, visually momentous overture setting us into the vastness and perpetual motion of the outer world. A trio of astronauts, one a Midwestern academic (Bullock), perform routine maintenance work with bantering dialogue until an unseen catastrophic event occurs, severing communication with NASA; at the same time, a Russian satellite has been destroyed (Toxic Politics or neglected space junk? The details, as well as all other people, remain off screen.) Thus, the second and third acts are a race to make it to a distant capsule and back down to Earth while a storm of USSR space debris hurtles toward them; each small shard a marvel of detailed attention made possible by ever-evolving digital effects, intensified by the physical effects of those 3D glasses.
Sandra Bullock in “Gravity.” Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
© 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Potential loss of human contact drives the un-tethered, intimate horrors of Gravity even more than the existential fear of an asphyxiating slow death (diminishing O2 meter levels are a moving countdown to extinction); new calamities and near-misses come in thrilling bursts, but it would mean little if Cuaron were not so interested in the human element in all of his films – playing out in real-time with few musical cues and nerve-shredding stretches of silence, Gravity barely gets to know its characters before all hell breaks loose (especially a spectral third astronaut who might as well be wearing a red shirt), yet in its assured, economical way the movie makes Bullock a shorthand for goodness and resilience – traits she has played with cloying earnestness in the past, here scaling back the eagerness under Cuaron’s sensitive direction.
It has been a fallow year in cinema; boring and unadventurous. It took four years to conceive and execute something as unique and boundary-pushing as Gravity; it demands to be savored on a massive screen to get fully submersed in its precise, incandescent beauty and shaken by its mounting perils.
Gregory Fichter
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