Cast:Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and Ed Harris
Director:
Alfonso Cuaron
SPOILERS AHEAD“Life in space is impossible.” That stark statement of scientific fact is one of the first things to appear on screen in
Gravity,
but before long, it is contradicted, or at least complicated. As our
eyes (from behind 3-D glasses) adjust to the vast darkness, illuminated
by streaks of sunlight refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere, we
detect movement that is recognizably human and hear familiar voices.
Those tiny figures bouncing around on that floating contraption - it
looks like a mobile suspended from a child’s bedroom ceiling - are
people. Scientists. Astronauts. Movie stars. (Sandra Bullock and George
Clooney in spacesuits, as Mission Specialist Ryan Stone and Mission
Commander Matt Kowalski; Ed Harris, unseen and unnamed, as “Houston”
down below.)
The defiance of impossibility is this movie’s theme
and its reason for being. But the main challenge facing the director,
Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the script with his son Jonás), is not
visualizing the unimaginable so much as overcoming the audience’s
assumption that we’ve seen it all before. After more than 50 years,
space travel has lost some of its luster, and movies are partly to blame
for our jadedness. It has been a long time since a filmmaker conjured
the awe of
2001: A Space Odyssey or the terror of
Alien or captured afresh the spooky wonder of a trip outside our native atmosphere.
Cuarón succeeds by tethering almost unfathomably complex techniques - both digital and analog - to a simple narrative.
Gravity
is less a science-fiction spectacle than a Jack London tale in orbit.
The usual genre baggage has been jettisoned: There are no predatory
extraterrestrials, no pompous flights of allegory, no extravagant
pseudo-epic gestures. Instead, there is a swift and buoyant story of the
struggle for survival in terrible, rapidly changing circumstances.
Cosmic
questions about our place in the universe are not so much avoided as
subordinated to more pressing practical concerns. How do you outrun a
storm of debris? Launch a landing module without fuel? Decipher an
instruction manual in Russian or Chinese?
It has recently been
observed that not all of the film’s answers to these questions are
strictly accurate. The course that Stone and Kowalski plot from the
Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space Station would
apparently not be feasible in real life. (On the other hand, I was
relieved to learn that a fire extinguisher really can serve as a
makeshift zero-G jetpack. Not a spoiler, just a word to the wise.)
Surely, though, the standard for a movie like this one is not realism
but coherence. Every true outlaw has a code. The laws of physics are no
exception, and Cuarón violates them with ingenious and exuberant rigor.
The
accidental explosion of a communications satellite silences Houston
and, what’s worse, sends a blizzard of shrapnel hurtling toward the
astronauts. Quite a bit goes wrong. Straps connecting astronauts to the
relative security of their spacecraft are severed. Parachute lines foul
engines. Fires break out inside vessels, and stuff outside is smashed to
pieces. Not everyone survives. All of it - terrifyingly and marvelously
- evades summary and confounds expectations. You have to see it to
believe it.
And what you see (through the exquisitely observant
lenses of the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) defies easy
description. Stone and Kowalski’s orbital path is perched between the
inky ...
infinite and the green, cloud-swept face of home.
The perspective is dazzling and jarring, and Cuarón allows a few moments
of quiet, contemplative beauty to punctuate the busy, desperate
activity of staying alive. Kowalski, generally an irreverent joker,
pauses to savor the sun over the Ganges, and you may find yourself
picking out other geographical details. Look, there’s Italy, and the
Nile Valley. These reference points are as unsettling as they are
reassuring, because they are glimpsed from a vantage point that is newly
and profoundly alien.
That sense of estrangement owes a lot to
Cuarón’s use of 3-D, which surpasses even what James Cameron
accomplished in the flight sequences of
Avatar. More than that film (and more than
Hugo or
How to Train Your Dragon or any other high-quality recent specimens),
Gravity
treats 3-D as essential to the information it wants to share. The
reason for that is summed up in the title, which names an obvious
missing element. Nothing in the movie - not hand tools or chess pieces,
human bodies or cruise-ship-size space stations - rests within a stable
vertical or horizontal plane. Neither does the movie itself, which in a
little more than 90 minutes rewrites the rules of cinema as we have
known them.
But maybe not quite all of them, come to think of it.
The script is, at times, weighed down by some heavy screenwriting
clichés. Some are minor, like the fuel gauge that reads full until the
glass is tapped, causing the arrow to drop. More cringe-inducing is the
tragic back story stapled to Stone, a doctor on her first trip into
orbit. We would care about her even without the haunting memory of a
dead child, who inspires a maudlin monologue and a flight of orchestral
bathos in Steven Price’s otherwise canny and haunting score.
I will confess that the first time I saw
Gravity
I found its talkiness annoying. Not just Bullock’s perky-anxious
soliloquizing, but also Clooney’s gruff, regular-guy wisecracking.
Doesn’t Stone say her favorite thing about space is the silence?
But
a second viewing changed my mind a bit. It’s not that the dialogue
improved - it will not be anyone’s favorite part of the movie - but
rather that its relation to that silence became clearer. Stone and
Kowalski jabber on, to themselves and each other and to Houston “in the
blind,” partly to keep the terror of their situation at bay, to fight
the overwhelming sense of how tiny and insignificant they are in the
cosmos.
This assertion of identity is ridiculous and also, for
that very reason, affecting. For all of Cuarón’s formal wizardry and
pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart. Much as “Gravity” revels
in the giddy, scary thrill of weightlessness, it is, finally, about the
longing to be pulled back down onto the crowded, watery sphere where
life is tedious, complicated, sad and possible.
