Slave drama chronicles shameful history

Movies are typically transient endeavors. They’re disposable little nuggets of entertainment that require nothing more than a seat, a dark room and an open set of eyes. They ask nothing of us but to sit, listen and watch. At a movie’s conclusion, we abandon the movie’s fading image on the screen, tip-toe over the scattered popcorn, walk to our cars and continue on with our lives.

Every now and again, we see a good one that we take home with us. We’ll laugh at its premise, or discuss the merits of its themes or plot. Or just admire its likable and pleasing stars.

Only rarely do we see movies that inform our views of the world, movies that cauterize into us the emotions of their players, movies that open our hearts and minds to a humanity we had not yet considered. These transcend the term “movie” to become part of our personal and cultural DNA.

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is one of those rare movies. It does more than just dance light on a screen. It asks us to bear witness to America’s greatest shame, slavery, and also its greatest trait, hope. 

The movie is based on a book by Solomon Northup, a free-born black violin player in 1841. Solomon, played here by acting powerhouse Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a respected and well-spoken resident of Saratoga, N.Y., where he and his family have found kindness and equality in the pre-Civil War era. Solomon is invited to Washington, D.C., for a musical gig. When the job is over, he’s paid and taken to dinner, but he wakes up the next morning shackled in a basement within sight of the U.S. Capitol.

Solomon is sucked into a ruthless trade, one in which white businessmen kidnap and sell black men, women and children out of the northern states so they can be funneled down into the South, where slavery’s scourge is legal and thriving. In a grotesquely depressing sequence, Solomon and dozens of other kidnapped souls are held in a house that serves as a showroom for prospective buyers. The slaves are naked, and frequently slapped and poked, like your dad kicking that Buick's tires on the lot before the big purchase. White landowners come in and gaze at these terrified human beings as if they’re farm equipment — and essentially they are. One man can afford a woman, but not her child. Screams fill the house as the family is torn apart. “My sentimentality extends the length of a coin,” the slave trader tells her.

Eventually, Solomon ends up on the farm of a man named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who treats his slaves with a semblance of dignity and respect. Unfortunately for the slaves, Ford is a busy man, so he delegates much of his farm’s oversight to Tibeats (Paul Dano), a vindictive and petty man who clearly just wants to see men bleed and suffer. The movie is full of these types, and I shudder to think of a third of this beautiful country pockmarked with gaping voids of hate and bigotry like Tibeats. To Dano’s credit, his character is so effective, he’ll make blood boil.

As the movie crawls forward — never flinching away from the whippings, beatings and hangings — we get a sense for what slave life must have been like: tedious, back-breaking work all day followed by quiet periods for meals and sleep late in the evening. Solomon spends much of his free time reflecting on his terrible circumstances — “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” — and also plotting an escape that never materializes. He has many chances, but the plantation is big; the South is even bigger. He is told by others to not to let anyone know he can read and write, or they'll treat him suspiciously. The first chance gets he steals some paper to write a letter home; the only ink he has is blackberry juice.

The movie is directed by Steve McQueen, whose films (Hunger, Shame) offer stark, detached glimpses of terrible chapters in the lives of men. Even amid his large sets, the convincing period clothing and the era-appropriate dialogue, it’s obvious McQueen is a minimalist at heart. He doesn’t punctuate his scenes, or let them get too loud or flashy. They are shot simply, but effectively. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Ford’s farm: Solomon, a noose around his neck, is left hanging from a tree branch, his toes scraping the dirt just enough to keep him from choking to death. He hangs and hangs. The shadows change, indicating the passage of hours. Slaves wash and dry clothes behind him. Children play in the field. Birds chip. Cicadas buzz. And still he hangs, gasping for breath. It’s one of the most horrifying scenes in the movie, and yet it shows the very essence of McQueen’s work — understatement. It also helps that Ejiofor is so understanding of his character and the barbaric conditions he must suffer through.

Michael Fassbender, McQueen’s frequent muse, turns up late in the movie as the slave owner Epps, a monster even by Tibeats’ standards. On his farm, the beatings are more frequent, the whippings more savage and the conditions more degrading. Even Epps’ wife, a real peach of a woman, is some kind of twisted abomination. She lobs a decanter at a slave’s head so hard it nearly kills her. The audience I saw the film with recoiled so violently, the air seemed to be sucked out of the theater.

Several writers before me are calling 12 Years a Slave the Schindler’s List of slavery. I must agree. Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film framed Nazi atrocities in a historical, but also emotional, context. It was shown in classrooms and aired unedited on television. It became a learning movie. To begin to understand what happened during the Holocaust, we had to witness its cruel awfulness. Riding similar principles, 12 Years a Slave might be the definitive movie about slavery. You simply must see it. Take your teens and, if they’re ready for it, your older children. We must not ignore this country’s great shame. We must confront it. And this movie bares its soul to history's ugly details. We've never seen slavery like this. Certainly television's Roots laid the foundation. (In many ways, Roots is to 12 Years a Slave what Shoah was to Schindler's List.) Django Unchained, for all its commentary about slavery, was not exactly historically accurate . 12 Years is going to be the first time you see some of these images, and you will wince and flinch.

Now, before I close, a word on two performances: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o. Remember these names. We’ve seen Ejiofor before, in Children of Men, Salt and Love, Actually. He will win an Academy Award for this gripping portrayal of hope and survival. Nyong’o plays the character Patsey, whose story is representative of the slaves who didn’t escape. Because for every Solomon, there are thousands upon thousands of Patseys.

12 Years a Slave is one of the best movies of the year and, hand’s down, the most important. Go to the theater to witness it, but don’t treat it like a movie. It’s bigger and better than that. It’s the shame of this county’s past, but the hope of its future.

Disorder in the Court

When maneuvering around the wilderness of the movie business, most films stick to the trails listed on cinema’s well-worn map. An adventurous few strike their own path through the brush and trees. And then there’s The Counselor, which tears up the map, kicks over the trailhead signs and lights the forest on fire.

This is maddening outsider art. A carpet bombing of philosophy and metaphor. A hysterical spasm of death and excess. Not in many, many years has a movie been so equally beautiful and ugly, loud and silent, profound and pointless, rewarding and frustrating, brilliant and deviant. It exists in a paradox of ideas and images, both of which will startle and confuse you to no end.

When I left the theater I knew I had seen something uniquely disappointing, or maybe just disappointingly unique. The Counselor was taunting me, humiliating me with its bizarre-o world of crime and sorrow. It had consumed me and spat me back out, and now I wasn’t sure how to react to all of it. Part of me wanted to claw at the screen, but another part was deeply moved by the film’s one-of-a-kind tone and tempo, and its reverent meditation on themes of sacrifice and choice. Now that it’s settled a little, and I’ve picked up the pieces, I can admit that I love this terrible movie and all its puzzling intricacies. I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience; honestly, you’re likely to hate it. It will be one of the most polarizing films of the year.

The movie, directed by cinema great Ridley Scott and written by literary great Cormac McCarthy, stars Michael Fassbender as a nameless attorney in Dallas. If he has a name, I didn’t hear it; everyone calls him Counselor. He represents several seedy kingpins, including the enigmatic Reiner (Javier Bardem), who has his hands in all kinds of criminal endeavors. Reiner's style is kingpin couture: blue pants, a silk shirt with butterfly specimens woven into it and this wild anime-style haircut. Early in the film, the Counselor — his clothing is butterfly-free — is offered a buy-in on a drug trafficking deal that turns very bad very quickly.

As the Counselor attempts to fix the deal, he finds himself more entangled in the details as the body count leaps upward. Much of the plot revolves around a steaming shit-filled septic truck full of drugs, which changes hands so many times that I was confused as to who was winning and who was losing. Certainly the Counselor is forever losing in the film that bears his name, as is his sweet girlfriend (Penélope Cruz). Everyone else, though — including Bardem’s spiky-haired Reiner, Brad Pitt’s honky-tonkin’ Texan and Cameron Diaz’s murderous Ellen Barkin impersonation, Malkina — seems to have better fortunes, until they don’t.

Lots of other business transpires in the movie, including a rather uncomfortable Catholic confession, a wire strung up across a roadway for a motorcyclist, two cheetahs in supporting roles and a scene so outrageous, so inexplicably wacky, so perversely written that it can’t be repeated even in the most free-wheeling company. If the scene were to be titled, it would be called “Catfish.” And even that’s giving away too much. There's also a joke so hilarious that I laughed harder at it then I have at any other full comedy this year. The punchline, which I'm going to give you, is: "But then you'll still owe me three-eighty." It comes so unexpectedly, it's as if a catapult launched it through the wall from the adjacent theater.

The “Catfish” sequence takes place in a Dallas bar filled with pictures of actor Steve McQueen, and even a replica of the German motorcycle he rode in The Great Escape. The bar is one of many memorable interior locations where the characters sponge up and ring out McCarthy’s sumptuous wordplay. Other locations include elegant restaurants, modernist concrete mansions, vaulted cathedral-like hotel lobbies and outdoor lounges with arrays of interconnected parasols. The locations are wonderful, and the way they’re filmed suggests that Scott and his cinematographer Dariusz Wolski had a lot of fun framing their actors with them.

Now, I’ve told you about the plot, but I’ve only really scratched the surface on this cinematic wonder-blunder. Although there is much action and violence, a large portion of the movie takes place in the dialogue. Most of it is given as monologues, sometimes by characters we only see once. These performances are amazing. One by Ruben Blades is a showstopper; another by Bruno Ganz (Hitler in Downfall) is beautiful and heartfelt. All the characters get big speeches, including Brad Pitt, who’s only a minor player in the film’s plot.

What’s interesting about these speeches is that they’re all spoken in metaphor. And not metaphors in bits and pieces of The Counselor; no, the entire movie. A scene of a man picking out a diamond for an engagement ring has nothing to do with diamonds. Scenes of sexual confrontation have nothing to do sex. Discussions involving snuff films, crossroads, cheetahs, catfish, bolo neckties … they all are deeper, more existential conversations about the people having them. Remember in No Country For Old Men, when Bardem's killer character ate peanuts and flipped quarters — metaphors for more sinister things to come — with the yokel at the gas station? Now imagine a whole movie of scenes like that, and you'll be closer to The Counselor than you realize.

McCarthy’s dialogue, so effortlessly gentle in The Road, can be poetic and somber in The Counselor, but it can also be infuriating because it skirts around the obvious action happening in the movie. I just wanted someone to address the drugs and the septic truck, but instead we get lots of esoteric verbal wanderings about life, love and death. For example, here’s Pitt: “I think that if you ransacked the archives of the redeemed, you would uncover tales of moral squalor quite beyond the merely appalling.” Or this one: “You are the world you have created.” Here’s another: “The truth about women is you can do anything to women but bore them.” These lines are great, but they serve the screenwriter, not the movie’s plot or the audience watching it all unfold.

These philosophical meanderings give the film a deeper, more robust flavor, but they will turn off most viewers. Especially those who came thinking they were watching a crime thriller. In reality, The Counselor has more in common with Alejandro Jodorowsky and his avant-garde surrealist fever dream Holy Mountain than it does with a modern-day crime thriller, be it as mundane as this year’s absent-minded 2 Guns or as profound as Pulp Fiction. The Counselor is abstractly worded and absurd, and that won’t sit well with audiences who wanted gun violence and a hero riding into the sunset.

Mostly though, it’s just too highbrow and wordy for its own good. While I appreciated its philosophical implications, the film made my head spin at times, especially in the devastating final act. And as wonderful as all the monologues were, they left vast portions of the plot untouched. As for the performances, they're great, but since the film’s so hard to follow, the performances tend to get lost in all the dialogue. Ridley Scott is a phenomenal director, and Cormac McCarthy is a literary treasure, but I think they know something that we don’t about the movie. And they forgot to film it for our benefit.

And people thought Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men had an ambiguous ending — just you wait for the last scene here. There's likely to be a riot all the way back to the box office, assuming there's enough people in the theater with you to even start a riot. A hushed stampede might be more appropriate for groups of 50 or less.

In any case, The Counselor is a maddeningly cryptic film. If it ends up a cult classic on a midnight movie spree, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Nor would I be surprised if someone develops an illegal drug that enhances the plot. There's an endorsement: "The Counselor ... works well with drugs."

Carrie remake boringly repeats original

Worse remakes have been made — that shot-by-shot soul-reaping of Psycho comes to mind — but the Carrie remake might be the most audaciously oblivious. It just doesn’t get it.

Never before has a movie missed so many opportunities to actually say something profound within the confines of pop culture. The movie involves bullying and violence in a high school setting, yet it comically plugs its ears to the world around it and la la las all the way back to 1976, when the only teens who were bullied, raped, killed and tortured were in movies about telekinetic girls with mommy issues.

Of course, that’s not true. Teens and young adults from the ’70s were doing bad things, but none as high profile as Columbine, Sandy Hook, Steubenville or this rash of bullying that has led to a number of tragic suicides. This is the world we live in, yet Carrie sticks its head in the sand to avoid anything that strays far from its source material, Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 horror novel Carrie.

I’m not suggesting that this be a message movie — like some big-budget PSA, cue the "More You Know" graphic — but the fact that it avoids anything of substance is suspect, especially coming from its director, Kimberly Peirce, who gave us a much more terrifying exercise in bullying and murder when she made the transgender funeral march Boys Don’t Cry, about a woman who identified as a man and was killed for it.

What this all boils down to, though, is how you like your remakes. If you prefer them to be modern-day clones of the originals, then you’ll appreciate this Carrie. I prefer them to be something different, but with hints of the original folded in. Michael Mann’s Miami Vice comes to mind: it invoked the spirit of the TV show, but was something entirely different. The ultra-gore terror-fest of Evil Dead from earlier this year is another great example.

This new Carrie stars Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) as Carrie White, the outcast who becomes a woman at the most unfortunate time imaginable. Carrie cries out from the gym shower, “Help, I’m dying. It hurts.” Her classmates throw tampons at her and film it, uploading it later to a social network under a fake identity ("Favorite movie: Blood Sport. Favorite Drink: Bloody Mary."). Although mad at her classmates, Carrie mostly blames her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore), who is so close-minded in her religious zealotry that she forgot to teach her daughter about the birds and the bees.

Moore plays the role like she’s in the gay-bashing, funeral-picketing Westboro Baptist Church, but in the 1920s. At one point, she calls those things under her shirt “dirty pillows,” a term so laughably stupid that you’ll chuckle aloud when you hear her say it. Even Shirley Phelps-Roper, Westboro’s foaming-at-the-mouth court jester, calls them breasts.

Carrie’s mother is a maddening case study in religious fervor. She calls her daughter “my sin,” because Carrie was born out of wedlock. When Carrie shows interest in boys, books or other things “of this world” — OTW if you’re into window decals — Margaret locks her in a closet under the stairs. Inside are the most gruesome depictions of Christ’s crucifixion, proof that Margaret’s religion is based on suffering and cruelty, not love and compassion.

Grace Moretz and Moore are fine actresses, but they really don't go far enough in this movie. I wanted bigger performances, especially from Moore, who plays her motherly whackadoo at half the capacity. It could have, and should have, been much louder and more bombastic. Also, I'm not entirely sold on Grace Moretz, the girl who says the C-word and kills people in Kick-Ass. She doesn't have the chops for acting quite yet; although she may soon learn them. For context, remember that Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both were Oscar nominees for the original film, a rare thing for a horror movie. I doubt we'll see a similar feat here with this bland and effortless remake of a classic.

Another victim in Carrie is the dialogue. Some of it is weird. One character says something like, "One of my boys, Travis, did this thing …" Somehow I doubt teens still say "my boys." In the pig gutting scene, a teen hams it up to his barnyard victim: "Don't worry little piggy, Uncle Jacky is going to bash your head right in." In another scene, the school principal — the great character actor Barry Shabaka Henley — seems to have a seizure every time he tries to say period or tampon. All of this smacks of Stephen King's trying-too-hard-to-be-hip dialogue, which is ironic because this movie is twice removed from King's book. In any case, the dialogue is as socially awkward as the actors spewing it out.

The film builds and builds to its point of nuclear fission: Carrie is lured to the prom so a bucket of pig’s blood can be dumped on her head. The wait for this scene, a scene we all know is coming — a scene that the whole movie was built around — takes forever. And when it finally happens, and Carrie turns into a raging telekinetic monster, the movie seems to slump forward on auto-pilot.

Carrie’s classmates, some of them monsters themselves, have ambiguous motives that cloud the plot the same way they fogged up De Palma’s version. The movie doesn’t make it clear which students were cheering for the blood and which ones were horrified at the callousness of the pranksters. I still think, as I did with the original, if someone had just stepped forward with a towel and showed Carrie kindness that her prom massacre would have not likely taken place. But instead, Carrie stands there drenched in blood as students gawk, their only sins before they’re all murdered.

Let me circle back to my original point: this new Carrie exists in a vacuum. It is so out of touch with the modern world that it’s paralyzed by its own nostalgia. It wants to be a revenge fantasy set in a school, but it doesn’t want to remind you of Columbine, Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech. It wants to be a movie about cyber bullying, but it doesn’t want implicate the way teens use Facebook or Twitter. It wants to depict a cruel sexual assault, but it doesn’t want to invoke the Steubenville rape. These real-life stories aren’t appropriate for a popcorny movie like Carrie, but their messages — revenge fantasies, bullying and teen violence — run parallel to the plot, so why not include them in the drama?

The movie had a chance to say something that wasn’t already said by Brian De Palma in 1976. Instead it said only this: “Ditto.”

The grind continues for Danny Trejo

Danny Trejo is having a busy day.

He was up long before the sun; long before the freeway clogged with cars. His morning was typical for a promotions tour: a chauffeured ride to a radio station. Then a TV studio. Radio. TV. Radio. TV. This went on all morning. He's promoting Machete Kills, his new (and second) kitschy grindhouse movie by Robert Rodriguez.

By the time he's sitting in front of me, in the concrete cathedral of the Arizona Biltmore, he's yawning uncontrollably.

"Sorry," he says, mid-yawn, his feet kicked up and crossed on a coffee table. "I'm running on two hours of sleep."

Trejo has 256 screen credits to his name, seven in 2013 alone. My first question to him is, "When have you not been tired?"

"Yeah, right," he says, that long boomerang-shaped mustache of his unrolling across his face as he smiles. "I've never really stopped. I'll be watching something on TV and I'll look up and see myself. 'Hey, I'm in this one!' I've been in so many movies that I can't remember them all. I can't slow down."

Even if you don't know who Trejo is, you're likely to have seen him in something. Maybe Michael Mann's high octane heist-drama, Heat, in which Trejo played a bank robber. Or maybe you'll remember him as Johnny-23 from Con-Air. Or perhaps on TV as undercover CIA agent Romeo on Sons of Anarchy. He played cartel snitch Tortuga in two episodes of Breaking Bad, in which his character's severed head is loaded with explosives and perched atop a tortoise sent meandering toward some DEA agents. The show ended its glorious run the night before we spoke.

Did you watch the Breaking Bad finale?

"No, I missed it. I just don't have time. People have been talking about it though. I should probably watch it, but I don't watch a lot of TV."

Trejo is smaller than I imagined. I'm short, and he's shorter than me. In his movies, he always seems bigger. Maybe because he's always playing the tough guy. Trejo admits he was typecast as the "macho Mexican" early in his career, but that has since opened the door for more opportunities.

"I've played so many tough guys. I remember one of my first roles, I was Inmate #1," he said. "I thought it was funny, and I had no idea what typecasting really was."

He says the typecasting never worried him, because, hey, work is work.

"Years later, after I was acting more, I was doing an interview and this young Latina, straight out of college, told me, 'Danny don't you think you're being stereotyped?' She told me that I was always playing the mean Chicano man with tattoos," he said. "I thought about it for a second and I told her, 'I am the mean Chicano man with tattoos.' Somebody got it right when they cast me. I mean, come on, I can't be cast as Daycare Worker #1."

Trejo has quite a story: hooked on drugs at a young age, he was in and out of jails and prisons through much of his early life. He was a boxer and a weight lifter, and at one point was a champion boxer in San Quentin, California's notoriously tough prison. Once out of prison and clean, he fell into the movies as a bit and character actor. The roles grew and grew, and now here is starring in his own action extravaganza, the Machete franchise.

The first one, brimming with its trademark nostalgia — faux-scratches on the film stock, purposefully terrible acting, cheeseball stunts and effects — was charming in its own violent little way. It had a great tagline: "They just fucked with the wrong Mexican!" In it Trejo played a day laborer fighting a corrupt Texas kingpin and his congressional henchman. The sequel takes the same premise and adds elements until the weight creates an unintended implosion. Mel Gibson, Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas and Cuba Gooding Jr. all have supporting roles. At one point, during a sex scene, the film warns you to put on your 3D glasses except, one problem, the movie isn't in 3D. Machete Kills, despite Trejo's warm nature and hard work, is too hyper for its own good. Frankly, I didn't like it, but I did like Trejo, who lets this big, overeager movie roll over him without crushing him to pieces. With his story, his extensive career and his gentle demeanor, he is the most interesting part of the movie.

He's not your typical action hero. First of all, at 69 years old — he was born less than a month before D-Day in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles — he's not as spry as he once was, though he holds his own in Machete Kills. Second, the height thing. But height never stopped Tom Cruise. Lastly, Trejo doesn't seem convinced he's a star yet. Or even a major player in Hollywood. He seems mostly focused on his next movies, none of which will feature him in the starring role. Can you imagine Tom Cruise playing thankless bit parts at this point in his career? I can't. But Trejo pulls it off, mostly with humility.

I ask if he considers himself a brand, a dependable commodity within the movie business. After all, he's wearing a Machete shirt, Machete hat and he's seated under a poster of his own face snarling with a curtain of fire behind him.

"I can't think of stuff like that. I leave that to other people," he said. "I'll say 'yes' to pretty much anything. If that means anything to the movie business then I'll let someone else figure it out."

He's been in so many movies, I wondered if there were any he was sad to see fall through the cracks.

"Blood In, Blood Out … I filmed that one 1993 and I'm really proud of that one," he says. "I also did Sherrybaby with Maggie Gyllenhaal and I learned a lot from that movie. Honestly, I didn't get it the first time I saw it because there was so much drama and I didn't get to kill anybody, but it's a really great movie."

He also mentions Mi Vida Loca, a gang-drama set around a group of young female gang-bangers as they maneuver around life and loss near Echo Park, Trejo's own barrio.

When I ask the flip side to that question — what big movies of his was he tired of talking about — he clams up.

"I don't refuse to talk about anything I've done. In fact, the only way I would regret doing a movie, is if I didn't bring my A-game. If I showed up and phoned it in, that would be a problem to me," Trejo says. "But honestly, I've never done a movie that I'm not proud of my performance. Some of them are bombs, for sure, but I give my best effort for everything."

No irony is lost in the moment as he yawns fiercely after he says this. A big yawn, too. Hands on the back of his head, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide open kind of yawn. He might be the hardest working man in Hollywood. He certainly is today doing these madcap press outings.

After we part ways, he heads off to a set of roundtable interviews with whole squadrons of young college journalists. His day isn't even over yet. When he's done with those, it's back on a car, then back on a plane and off to another city to start the whole thing over again. It's a relentless cycle, but Trejo pushes onward with a smile and a yawn.

Science, survival collide in high-orbit thriller

In what might be my favorite shot of any movie this entire year, a somersaulting astronaut is sent careening into deep space as the Earth slowly comes between her and the sun. Darkness envelops the tiny human satellite and a beautiful shot frames the terror: a silhouette twirling against a vast field of stars, a lone helmet light stirring through the Milky Way. The immensity of space is beyond our comprehension until you see someone drifting out into it helplessly.

Alfonso Cuarón’s terrifying space thriller Gravity plays on those fears and so many more within its claustrophobic setting in the most inhospitable environment mankind has dared enter. The irony of that sentence is that space is the least claustrophobic place a person can be. Even light takes years to touch something. But the blackness of that expanse is crushing, and it creeps over you, as if being slowly submerged in crude oil. Astronauts may be all alone up there, but the universe is bearing down on them inside those helmets, cockpits or capsules.

Remember when Top Gun caused a huge bump in Navy and Air Force recruitment? NASA will not see a similar spike from Gravity. If anything, audiences will leave theaters and hug a tree, a concrete pillar, a bike rack — anything that doesn’t spin away with the slightest tap. I found myself wincing at the action, and leaning into dramatic grasps for handles and hatches. The movie will rattle your nerves and give you chills.

The film begins in space during a routine space walk as astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) checklist their way through a repair mission for the Hubble space telescope. Cuarón, trying to out-do his camera marathons from his equally brilliant Children of Men, opens Gravity with what must be a 20-minute unbroken shot. The camera floats in and out of helmets, around the shuttle and alongside Kowalski as he attempts to break a space walk record. The sequence looks like one continuous shot, but it’s dozens of shots digitally mashed together into one seamless spectacle of cinematography.

The film features very little exposition — at only 90 minutes, there’s not time for it — and gets to the point somewhat quickly. A Russian satellite has exploded high in Earth’s orbit creating a cascading chain reaction of exploding satellites on a collision course with the shuttle, Hubble and the astronauts. The debris field, now moving 20,000 mph, slams into the shuttle killing those onboard and sending Kowalski and Stone twirling out into space. What happens next is the bulk of Gravity: the astronauts must survive.

Technically, the movie is a masterpiece of special effects. Maybe you’ve seen explosions before, but never like this. At one point, a space station explodes, sending razor-sharp pieces of debris out in every direction. No smoke, no fire, no Michael Bay-style slow motion; the effect is terrifying in its realism. Even simple scenes — of Bullock free-floating as she skips the upper atmosphere or of frost icing over a capsule window — are remarkable stand-alone pieces of film-art. Also, notice the sound effects, or lack thereof. Alien taught us that “In space no one can hear you scream.” Gravity teaches a similar lesson: “In space, no one can hear your ride home exploding.” Despite all the high-octane space-action, the most abundant sound effect is Bullock’s desperate panting in her helmet, and it makes for a riveting and authentic experience.

Scientifically, Gravity covers all its bases. Cuarón seems to have a firm grasp on the physics of space, and only rarely does he break some rules. One instance where he fudges really irked me, but only because it requires us to believe that an astronaut could “fall” in space, when, in fact, the astronaut should have remained in place by the same ropes and straps that secured the other character. If I say any more it would be spoilerish, but you’ll know it when you come to it because the science doesn’t add up quite right. Mostly, though, space has never looked this fantastic. Even more impressive is how Cuarón was able to weave a survival tale around all of it, with Bullock’s Stone character floating from American shuttle to Russian space station to Chinese re-entry capsule. I never once felt that Gravity was unbelievable.

The movie is lightly tinted with some humor, much of which comes from George Clooney acting very George Clooneyish. Bullock, though, anchors the plot — even amid a cheap and cloying subplot involving her past — as she floats from calamity to calamity. Poor girl doesn’t catch a break. When Stone isn’t dodging American-made meteorites, untangling a deployed parachute from a space module or spinning into the vast beyond, she’s fighting with her oxygen levels, a zero-gravity fire or crippling cold. Not since Sally Hardesty braved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has one character been in such non-stop peril. Bullock shines, though, much of it because she has the right acoustic timbre for the material. You can sense fear in her panicky voice, and that’s a valuable trait to give this film’s main character.

Gravity is a straightforward survival movie, one of impeccable detail and pacing, one that you simply must see. Yet even as it dispensed thrills left and right, I felt a deeper awe and wonder for the cosmos above us. It all goes back to that shot, the one of the astronaut drifting into a star-speckled oblivion. Such a beautiful shot, and so unspeakably terrifying.