The Film of the Year and the Future of Cinema

Rating: 10/10 (9 November 2013)

The Film of the Year, Gravity is simply a wonderful, astonishing and sensational experience that will leave you perched on the edge of your seat throughout its lean and mean 90 minute running time. In Hollywood parlance, it is also a game changer in much the same way that films like 2001, Jaws, Star Wars, Die Hard, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and Avatar et al changed the face of film making and storytelling forever. The Lumière brothers will be turning in their grave in delight because Gravity is exactly what they envisaged cinema to be – a big, bold, larger-than-life visceral experience. It is also what 3D was created for and for once, does the format full justice and more so when viewed on IMAX screens. Suffice to say, it will Hoover up all the technical prizes in awards season and put Sandra Bullock up for Best Actress in a head-to-head with Cate Blanchett for her role in Blue Jasmine – perhaps a more accomplished work but Ms Bullock is America's sweetheart and there is no denying the power of her performance which is at once heartbreaking and profound. Alfonso Cuarón was always a visionary as his early Hollywood work on Children of Men showed, but this film is surely his finest moment and has at once, catapulted him into the same technical sphere as George Lucas and James Cameron as geniuses and visionaries of their craft. Cameron called Gravity 'the best film ever made about space' and he is not wrong.
Like all the best films, the idea is simplicity itself. Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, an accomplished scientist who has made her inaugural journey into space to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. She is aided by Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), the avuncular captain of the Space Shuttle, and another more experienced scientist, Shariff (Phaldut Sharma). Disaster strikes as debris from a Russian satellite destroyed by a missile strike hurtles and careers into the path of the American mission. What follows in the ensuing 70 minutes is a tense, gripping and heart pounding survival story that will leave you breaking into spontaneous applause at the end credits.
The tag line for the 1978 version of Superman was 'You'll believe a man can fly'. Well, you'll believe that you're in space, not the space of Star War or Star Trek, but the grounded reality of space as we know it. The experience of working in the vacuum that is space is stupendously realised as you spin, hurtle, fly, crash and bounce along with the characters. In fact the effects are so good that I'm surprised that it doesn't induce benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) in the audience.
Gravity is such an enormous technical achievement that in the quieter moments you feel yourself being humbled by the achievements of mankind (the exploration of space) and wishing that you were better at science in school. You'll also marvel at the breathtaking beauty of some of the shots and two stand long in the mind – a wide panoramic shot of Bullock and Clooney stretched out into space, tenuously tethered by the straps of a giant Stars and Stripes flag caught on the International Space Station and the onset of the Aurora Borealis on the Earth's atmosphere as day turns into night. Yup, in those moments of quiet wonderment, you'll be ruminating on life, the universe and the existence of God and especially the latter when your eyeballs are blistered with images of such searing and startling beauty that you question whether a Big Bang really did create life, the universe and nature – I did anyway. At the end of the film, you realise that you have witnessed an important pivotal moment in the history of film and that film making, cinema and entertainment will never be the same again. In short, you have seen the future and life as we know it will never be the same again.