[five-star-rating]Sandra Bullock, George Clooney[/five-star-rating]
Utterly mind-blowing: Gravity is one of those rare films that grants two huge wishes: it gives us an experience we’ve never had before, and it makes us feel deeply. Most flicks – even great ones – can only achieve either one goal.
Gravity takes us into space – into the claustrophobia of the suit and shuttle, the vastness beyond. It also shows us the strength of the human spirit in the face of catastrophic tragedy.
Bullock is Dr. Ryan Stone, an oddly named scientist sent into orbit to add a new feature to the Hubble Space Telescope. Clooney is the charming cowboy of a ship’s captain. When an accident creates a field of deadly space junk, Bullock and Clooney – who are on a spacewalk – are literally lost in space, utilizing their technical knowhow and a very few options at their disposal to make it back alive.
Director Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the script with his son Jonás) creates a film that is both seamlessly harrowing and spellbindingly beautiful. Think of that – both hypnotic and heart pounding at the same time! Cuarón creates not only the sense of weightlessness, but also of the void of space and of the physics of extreme environments. Gravity is filled with both thrills and poetry – a majestic, epic story punctuated by deeply affecting human drama.
It’s Bullock’s gargantuan job to provide the heart, and she does so in a way that she never has before. Still grief-stricken from a tragedy she suffered on Earth, Bullock must also show the fear and the courage of an intelligent soul in extraordinary circumstances, with limited resources at her disposal, and plenty of reason to just give up
Perhaps some audiences may argue that the happenstance of the film seems patently unbelievable – the sheer magnitude of the destruction and slim chance of survival. However, film isn’t just about reality; it’s about heightened reality. Gravity tells us that life is full of amazing tragedies and the unexpected, miraculous want to move beyond them, to tell our stories.
[rating-key]
Alfonso Cuarón should be on every cinephile’s radar. His career launched when he reinvented the Shirley Temple film A Little Princess into a timeless children’s classic. He also directed the flawed but fascinating Great Expectations (with Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro). His greatest achievements (up until this one) are a homoerotic Spanish road trip flick Y Tu Mamá También, the best Harry Potter (Azkaban), and the superior dystopian drama Children of Men.
In Gravity, Cuarón reaches a whole new level of experience. He’s sharing with us something that is both awe-inspiring and scary: he’s sharing life – that great accident that occurred millions of years before on that speck of dust whirling in Bullock’s windshield – that great planet insistently pulling her back to its surface. Cuarón and his Gravity want to let us all know that facing adversity is a vital part of greatest tales we have to tell.
It’s clearly one of the year’s best and one of the decade’s most memorable.
You must be logged in to post a comment.