A Masterclass

Rating: 9/10 (15 November 2013)

This review will contain spoilers, and I really mean it.
Not many new films get me pumped up, at least not as many as I would like. The last time I was this eager to go to the cinema was a few years back when I was able to see Béla Tarr's "A torinói ló" (2011) and Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" (2011), both on the same day, actually. Before that perhaps David Lynch's "Inland Empire" (2006). I had read about Cuarón's ambitions, and considering "Children of Men" (2006) is just as masterly as they say and wrestles with just the kind of filmic issues I'm fond of (space, length of sequences, movement of camera), why wouldn't I have been over the moon to see this?
But really. After this first sequence of 17 minutes I was sold, and they could have done anything, and I mean anything, after that and I still would have had the time of my life. I have seen quite a few 3D films and never felt its use was cinematically necessary, but here it's more than justified, it's integral. The movement of the camera is gut-wrenching at times, and the sense of space is achieved through the use of 3D, not through gimmicks that emphasize the technology but through subtlety, often emphasizing the naturalness of the environment. I have a list of the most uplifting and lucid film moments, and that sequence has its place there.
Not that the film goes downhill after that. On the contrary, it's a cinematic masterclass in entertaining and cinematically profound filmmaking, condensed in 90 minutes. The camera soars in space, becoming a third character. We become weightless. In contrast, when we finally arrive to Earth the camera stays down on the ground, only able to glance upward, unable to rise and soar as it did because of gravity. Is there a film where something so naturally mundane to us as gravity is lifted up from its everyday context and given fresh relevance?
I think this makes a fine companion to Al Reinert's "For All Mankind" (1989), a profound study of space, our insignificant yet beautifully meaningful part in this vast universe, the importance of achieving space travel, becoming acquainted with an unknown and thus fearsome yet grand and immensely breathtaking world, the feeling one might have when gazing upon the Earth as we gaze upon the moon from our planet.
But space has no feelings for us. If we think of space in terms of its dangers, we often describe it as hostile. But it is not hostile, nor is it friendly. Space simply is. And that sense of loneliness and terror in helplessness is also grandly present in these films, as it should be. Of those of us who have ever thought about space and what it might feel like to be there, who hasn't also thought of how it might feel like when one is adrift, alone, facing the infinite-seeming blackness with no hope of return?