Review: Gravity (2013) SPOILER FREE

Directed By: Alfonso Cuarón

First things first, watch this film in IMAX 3D if you can. This film practically demands it. Having myself experienced this massively acclaimed and praised movie in IMAX 3D, I can attest to the fact that it only stands to lose on a smaller screen. Infact I wonder how it will play on a 20 inch monitor or a 14 inch laptop screen, not very well I would imagine. If seen that way, you won’t be misplaced to wonder what the fuss is about. I thankfully did see it in IMAX 3D and I can happily tell you just what the fuss is about.

And the major fuss here is about Alfonso Cuarón bracing implacability. Alfonso Cuarón simply doesn’t blink. All the horror and devastation of a catastrophe in space is literally shown head on with an intensity that will make you wince and your heartbeat quicken. His camera is as unblinking as he is, as several sections of the film are filmed in long unbroken takes that add an immediacy to the scenes that will make you a nervous wreck. There is solace in editing, in blinking, where you can cut to something else to momentarily dissipate the tension. Not so here, you will watch dumbfounded as the International Space Station, the monument of human space achievement, shatters into smithereens in front of your eyes as debris from a Russian satellite hits it and your heroine is caught in mind-numbing physical peril.

These scenes, of which there are several in the film, are so horrifying, so stunning, that you might even forget to appreciate Cuarón’s ability to choreograph such mayhem. The movie mostly sticks to scientific principles; that is, there is no sound in these scenes when the International Space Station explodes or the Hubble Telescope is hit. There is also the physics of space where the structures don’t so much explode as sickeningly shatter into small bits that flood the frame, and they are all moving faster than bullets, a human being in their path would disintegrate into bits not unlike them.

These scenes (as others), in what really is a tense survival action thriller, heartily demonstrate Cuarón’s sound film-making skills. The complete and utter absence of schizophrenic “fast” cutting lends a coherence to the action scenes which could qualify as revolutionary when put next to today’s action blockbusters (Alfonso Cuarón also serves as editor along with Mark Sanger). The action, as it were, seems to be a recorded by a cameraman in space who was just as untethered and free-floating in space like our heroine. This approach very clearly establishes the scale and scope of the structures which she is desperately groping around, and lends a sense of direction in what is the most directionless place to stage an action set piece.

The veracity and verisimilitude of the film are really commendable, the entirety of the film takes place in zero gravity and the challenges and the difficultly of motion are rendered extremely palpable for the audience to correctly understand and follow. Similarly, the entire film way be called an animated film, as obviously not a frame of footage was shot in space and not a frame of footage was shot in zero gravity, Sandra Bullock being suspended by wires the entire time. Even so, the realism achieved by the state of the art visual effects approaches documentary level truthfulness. This is the very definition of immersive cinema. The entire milieu, the interior of space stations and even their exteriors and the very cosmos themselves are rendered to such a level of detail and perfection as to afford you the closest experience to space travel for the price of a movie ticket. By god this movie earns your money.

As admirable as Cuarón’s focus on the gripping survival struggle of his heroine is, and it is this microscopic focus which lends the movie its intensity, it is ultimately simple-minded. Ordinarily, this would hardly be a complaint in a director driven film, but Cuarón (sharing script-writing duties with his son Jonas) dearly wants it to be more than a procedural about survival in space after a catastrophe. There’s some business about Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) reminiscing about her dead daughter that serves I am not sure what purpose. And there is a fair bit or crying and fretting when push comes to shove during the film’s climatic moments. Cuarón was very brave in his choice of a Spartan aesthetic for the film but not brave enough methinks. While he doesn’t employ sound effects during the terrifying action scenes, there is Steven Price's thunderous score to quicken your heartbeat for you if the action itself fails to do so. He also wants you to be moved by the struggles portrayed on screen. Any catharsis, if it were to be felt, is telegraphed in advance and programmed for your benefit and ready consumption, very differently from say Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a similarly Spartan exercise, where the catharsis felt is very organic and not manipulated by the director.

George Clooney plays exactly George Clooney in the film in his brief role whereas Sandy Bullock is game as the all American Dr. Ryan Stone who gets to pay her own unmissbale homage to another sci-fi classic – Andrew Standton’s Wall-E. She’s good but I wonder if a more skilled actress, like say Naomi Watts, might have been able to do more with the role by making the character less sympathetic. Sympathy! Alas the price paid for making a film in the Hollywood blockbuster format, a 120 Million Dollar state of the art production about basically a woman drifting in space, the price of Cuarón’s implacability tempered by concessions to general audience expectation.

4/5 (I am feeling stingy, so actually make that 4.5/5)

Spoiler Alert (Highlight to read): Two parts that I found were weak in the movie are the implausibility of Bullock's escape from the fire in the ISS. The other is the dream sequence where George Clooney briefly re-appears. From the first second it was obvious that it was a dream sequence, it was absurd they were not even trying for realism there. End of spoilers.