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.
