Gravity is a technically well-done, but empty and forced experience

Rating: 5/10 (25 January 2017)

The most impressive thing about Gravity is its visual effects. The spacescape looks nice, very convincingly brought to life. But the visual niceness is hampered by the officiousness of the rest of the production. From the outset, Cuaron's misguided sensibility harms the film. A writing scrawl informs us there is no sound in space, all while a soundtrack and sound effects blare over it. This inability to appreciate silence is frequent in the film. Cuaron will tire you as he constantly pans to images of the earth with the musical score offering up angelic 'aaaahs'. The most ridiculous comes when Sandra Bullock's character, Dr. Stone, tells Clooney she loves the silence of space- as the score swells. It's time like this that I wonder how much thought Cuaron really puts into his storytelling.
It's this hammy approach that has always made me indifferent at best to Cuaron as a film-maker. Gravity attempts to flirt with themes of spirituality and survival, but they lack weight, meaning. It's all just empty pontifications between the next screeching action scene. Gravity has been called an art film by some. Which is really absurd to me; it's an action film, and not a very memorable one at that. Cuaron uses the downtime between his chaotic sequences to try to 'build' characters. His astronauts are incompetent and unprofessional, making it extremely hard to feel much sympathy for them. He adds cliché upon cliché, eventually going with the 'dead daughter' route for Dr. Stone. Worse still, Gravity pushes suspension of belief to impossible levels. The script contrives to throw as many terrible things as can possibly be imagined at Dr. Stone, and then contrives just as many absurd things to get her out of those situations. By the half-hour mark I was exhausted, and spent the rest of the film in a state of comatose.
There are pieces of the film that are entertaining, some shots that are nice to look at. But Cuaron heavily cribs the language of other space-films, the most obvious of such being the now overdone 'foetal' symbolism. George Clooney plays Clooney. Bullock is one of the most egregious examples of a damsel-in-distress as I've ever seen: her role is to cry and wail and fail, until Clooney – whether his character is real or coming in a vision – tells her exactly what to do. Gravity has a bizarrely sexist narrative that seems to have gone unnoticed.
Gravity is uninterested, I think, in finding substance. Cuaron obsesses over long-takes and digitally creating impressive spectacle, but his characters and themes both remain underdeveloped, almost like an afterthought. It's hard to distinguish Gravity from any other run-of-the-mill disaster piece. For me, it's a dry run of a film, with an unfortunately forced sentimentality that put me right off.