“Life in space is
impossible.” These are the words that first appear on screen in “Gravity”, the
new film released on October 4th, by Alfonso Cuarón (“Children of Men”, “Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban”) and these are the words that set the tone for the rest of
the movie. The story is exceedingly simple; at its heart, “Gravity” is your run-of-the-mill
story of survival set among the stars. Its narrative arc is completely
predictable and in typical Hollywood fashion, its characters escape danger at
the last possible second. With its opening words, however, the fragility of the
human body against a backdrop of a larger universe totally incognizant of our
insignificance is something that cannot be forgotten. That the astronauts, with
only their space suits to protect them, won’t end up like their colleagues once
exposed to an environment devoid of life — frozen, with faces shattered and
caved in — is something that is kept in mind throughout the film. Oddly poignant
objects drift past the camera lens at select moments — a Marvin the Martian
doll, a ping pong paddle, a single teardrop — against a floating Earth and it’s
these moments that present a strange juxtaposition between humanity and the
cosmos.
To me, “Gravity” is
not a science fiction movie. Unlike so many other science fiction thrillers
that happen to take place in space, “Gravity” is not concerned with alien
fights and warp speed travel. In fact, the only real threat that propels the
film forward is flying space debris. Space itself is the movie’s focus because
space is fascinating and terrifying enough to keep the movie going without
threats from extraterrestrial life and the aid of futuristic toys. Auroras
travelling across Earth’s surface and the constant orbital rotation of the
stars form the background against which the astronauts fight for survival. Matt
Kowalski (George Clooney) takes a few moments to admire the sunrise over the
Ganges during all this; it’s hard not to wonder at the beauty of the universe
through it all and to feel completely insignificant when looking at Earth from
afar. Comparisons to Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” almost can’t be avoided with
cinematography as spectacular as that of this film. While “Life of Pi” makes
Earth beautiful, Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuarón’s regular cinematographer, makes space
breathtaking in its realism.
“Gravity” is not
without its flaws; the script and dialogue are unremarkable at best. Ryan Stone
(Sandra Bullock), a first-time space traveller, is annoyingly helpless without
Kowalski at the start of the movie. The side story of the death of Stone’s
4-year-old daughter is completely unnecessary and added in solely to give an
emotional dimensionality to Stone’s character; it gives Stone a reason for
living. With shots of Earth’s lights in an otherwise infinite nothingness, the
struggle of a stranded astronaut to get home is more than enough to keep the
film moving. These shortcomings, however, do nothing to dent the movie’s
awesomeness, a word well deserved by the film’s truly awe-inspiring and
spectacular depiction of the cosmos. It certainly helps that Sandra Bullock
gives one of the best physical performances I’ve ever seen by delivering
essentially a one-woman show during which she twists, turns, and swims to
suggest a plausible environment that defy the regular laws of physics on Earth
through gestures in a studio simulation. After Sandra’s character slips out of
her spacesuit and into a oxygen-filled escape pod, the audience is given a
memorable image of a sort of poetic rebirth in the amniotic fluid of our
universe.
“Gravity” inspires a
certain “How did they do that?” reaction, even to the most jaded viewers, and
that’s a reaction very rarely achieved by many of the films today. It’s not
noticeable during its viewing when the audience is transported to space
alongside a floating camera lens, but Cuarón manages to rewrite the space genre and
movie-making as a whole. With “Gravity”, outer space turns into a very real
place bound by very different, but very tangible rules. The movie begins with
one of Cuarón’s signature
long, unbroken shots and it is in this shot that the genius of where the camera
is moving in relation to the action can be seen — it sometimes feels as if the
Earth’s rotation is controlling the shot and it can be hard to remember that
almost everything in the movie, down to the character’s costumes, was edited
in. The shots are done with such technical precision that shifts in perspective
transition smoothly when the camera lens float from the macro scale, where the
astronauts are just miniature specks against the Earth’s horizon, to the micro
scale, where individual nuts and bolts from the shuttle float past the lens, as
the lens drift slowly from outside to inside a character’s space helmet,
seamlessly shifting to first person. The film allows the audience to float
alongside the astronauts in zero G, as the stars travel around them.
Oscar nominations
for best actress, cinematography, and direction are to be expected with a
masterpiece like “Gravity”. I’m just sad I did not watch the film in IMAX 3D.
When the struggle for life in an otherwise terrifying and unknown space of
simultaneous nothingness and infiniteness is thrown at us for a solid 90
minutes, I have a newfound appreciation for a world where life is tedious,
complicated, sad, and comfortable, but entirely possible.
Note: This article made its first appearance in The Cavalier Daily. This is the original, unedited review.
