the m0vie blog

Gravity is a phenomenal piece of filmmaking, and one of the highlights of the year. It’s a bold and visually stunning survival movie, built around the most simple of premises with incredible craftsmanship. It’s a lean and well-constructed thriller that manages to effortlessly capture the impossible isolation experienced by those flying in the void. Never over-wrought or over-strained, Gravity is an absolutely beautiful accomplishment for all involved.

Floating in a most peculiar way…

Space is silent. The title card tells us as much, and the movie remains faithful to that premise. Barring the occasional collision against Ryan’s suit or the understated atmospheric hum of Steven Price’s score, there’s an impossible sense of emptiness at the heart of Gravity. It is the most pure of those “character against the elements” survival stories, where our lead faces an environment so hostile that not even sound or air can exist in it.

At it’s heart, that’s what Gravity is. It’s easy enough to imagine the movie as a film about castaways lost at sea, or survivors of a plane clash trekking through hostile territory. In a way, Gravity is the purest possible distillation of that core concept. There is no water, there is no jungle. There is nothing. There’s just an impossibly large amount of nothing, a black void ready to swallow you whole if you will let it. To describe it as “man against nature” is to miss the point – there is no nature here. It’s “man against emptiness.”

Hold on!

Alfonso Cuarón does a wonderful job bringing this tale of survival to life, as two astronauts find themselves stranded in orbit after a freak debris cloud destroys their shuttle craft and scuttles their mission. Cut off from any other human, even the hum of Houston on the surface below, the two attempt to find their way back to the planet surface – to survive and to make it home.

Visually, Gravity is stunning. It’s a 3D film that deserves to be seen on as large a screen as possible. It looks breathtaking, appropriately enough, with Cuarón managing to effortlessly convey the sense of remote isolation felt by the astronauts. Earth looms impossibly large to our survivors, but the gulf is keenly felt. There’s just a whole load of nothing, with man-made structures like space stations mostly existing as tiny specks in the distance, almost indistinguishable from starlight itself.

Into the void…

And yet, against this massive backdrop, Cuarón has crafted a movie that feels almost minimalistic. The sound design is a massive part of that, challenging the audience to watch impossible destruction that sounds no more intense than the occasional bit of dust brushing against Ryan’s suit. However, the script also plays into this. Like oxygen to our heroes, words are not to be wasted. There’s no purple prose here, no excessively long conversations or forced comic relief.

Long passages of this film pass with nothing but the sound of Sandra Bullock’s breathing echoing through the cinema. There’s a ruthless efficiency at play here. Our two astronauts are cleanly and efficiently designed, but without wasting time or space. The whole production has a sense of urgency that bleeds through and helps make the stakes seem that much more real. These aren’t stereotypical Hollywood action heroes dealing with a blockbuster threat. These feel like real people facing the most mundane and horrifying reality possible in their situation.

Find something to hold on to…

This creates the only real problem with the script. Due to storytelling necessities, Gravity needs to externalise some of the character moments. Both Clooney and Bullock are phenomenal in their roles, playing to the film’s low-key strengths by refusing to ham it up. However, there is a need for exposition and there is a need to clue the audience into various character beats. While Gravity is normally quite elegant in this, there is one sequence that feels especially clumsy.

It’s the only way to really convey the necessary character motivation to the audience in a clear and unambiguous manner, but it does so at the cost of the movie’s low-key minimalism. It’s only one sequence in the entire film, and it serves a vital character function, but it still stands out as something that doesn’t work quite as well as the rest of the film surrounding it.

Oh, chute!

Gravity is a film of paradoxical elements – of bits and pieces that really should stand in contrast, but wind up functioning perfectly. It’s an impossibly epic movie, but also a strangely intimate one. It’s visually stunning and complex, but its plotting is elegantly simplistic. It feels like we’re watching the characters embark on an incredibly vast journey, crossing incredible distances, and yet the movie is edited together with merciless precision. There isn’t an ounce of fat on Gravity, not a second that is wasted. It’s unfathomably large, but never unwieldy.

Gravity is stunning, and impossible to resist.

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: 3d film, Alfonso Cuarón, film, Filmmaking, george clooney, Gravitation, Gravity, hollywood, Houston, Physics, Ryan, sandra bullock, Sound design, Space station |