“Life in space is impossible,” stark text asserts, adding that 500 km above the surface of the earth there is no oxygen and no air to carry sound.
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Gravity |
At that altitude, as the saying goes, no one can hear you scream; accordingly, Gravity is to Alien what Open Water was to Jaws, stripping out the fantastical antagonist and making the setting itself the primary enemy in a thrilling struggle for survival.
As Gravity opens – in serene silence, miles above terra firma – biomedical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is completing exterior repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope on her first mission into space.
All is calm and except for the chatter of radio communication, all is silent. Engineer Sharif (Paul Sharma) amuses himself with his zero-gravity dance moves while veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), hoping to break a spacewalking record, jets around with a propulsion pack, regaling them with tall tales.
Then Mission Control in Houston (Ed Harris, in a nod to Apollo 13) sends urgent warning that a Russian satellite demolition has hurled a dangerous, snowballing debris field in their direction and communication with the ground is about to evaporate. Moments later, their Explorer shuttle punctured and ruined, Stone and Kowalski are the only survivors, cut off from Houston and fighting desperately for their lives between empty space and deadly gravity.
The most stunning moments in Alfonso Cuaron’s masterful Children of Men were the lengthy tracking shots which took audiences by the hand and led them, in uninterrupted takes, through ambushes, war zones, and the birth of a miracle baby. In Gravity, the director employs this technique throughout, so that much of the film takes place in real-time, if not strictly so.
Meandering in terror through space from the debris field of the Hubble toward the faint hope for survival represented by the distant International Space Station, and occasionally straining plausibility along the way, the plot is a Rube Goldberg device of procedural space-horror in which everything that can go wrong invariably does. To watch Gravity is to join Dr. Stone for the ultimate “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” at the outer reaches of earth’s atmosphere.
With nearly the entire film spent in survival mode, all flight and no fight, there is precious little opportunity for conventional character development, and so Stone’s backstory unspools in tidbits and soliloquies offered credibly in context, at least in comparison to a customary prepare-ye-for-battle speech.
Amid repeated disasters, explosions, and the emotive but sometimes heavy-handed musical score by Steven Price, Cuaron saves room for quietude and reflection, whether it is the slow dance of the Northern Lights – seen from above – or the touching profundity of a baby’s burbling, transmitted via ham radio from the surface, in the midst of despair.
Cuaron’s lens makes a zero-g womb of an airlock and in the final moments of the film explicitly evokes the evolution of life on earth, but despite its outer-space imagery and nods to metaphor, Gravity has more kinship with a wilderness survival story such as Castaway than with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Accordingly, it is up to Sandra Bullock to shoulder the weight of the audience’s involvement and she does so gamely, finding a core of authenticity in a character who is part empty cipher and part familiar archetype, giving audiences a hero it is easy to fear for and cheer for.
George Clooney, naturally a reassuring authority figure in the writerly imagination as well as the popular consciousness, performs to his own unimpeachable standards in a supporting role that could seemingly have been written for him (but was not, and which nearly went to Robert Downey Jr.).
This is the first film of the 3D era to properly transport audiences into space. But Gravity can also count among its triumphs an absolute lack of invented techno-babble and the refusal to contrive self-explanatory, sequential objectives for the characters (beyond the obvious). But if Cuaron’s procedural rigor augments the immersion of viewer, it also means that the stakes and the rules are not always clear.
When oxygen and fuel run low, as Stone and Kowalski count down dwindling percentages to keep themselves aware, the precise exigencies of the situation are never as obvious to viewers as they are to the characters. But if anything, this only adds to the powerful sense of bearing helpless witness to something disastrous, which is precisely the promise made by the film up front.
As a documentary of the human presence in space – which it is not – Gravity has failings in abundance for those who care to look; simply as an experience, particularly in IMAX 3D, it is just about transcendental.