A Space Film that's Down to Earth

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2014)

Gravity opens in space, greatest yonder, the camera's gaze on earth's big blue sea, hovering about in liquid infinity. Slowly, the astronauts come into view. Kowalski is George Clooney's seasoned veteran of the stars, and the soothing voice of reason to Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), the medical engineer who's just been contracted to install an important device thing on the Hubble telescope's important device thing so that man can continue to make giant leaps for mankind.
While spacewalking and telling a story about one of his exes, charming Kowalski and Stone get news that, due to a Russian vessel's collision with a satellite somewhere else in earth's orbit, shards of debris now hurdle toward them at the velocity of a "speeding bullet" (and are circling the earth at the rate of one orbit per this film's running time). The mood turns on a dime from leisurely work to utter urgency. The action in the coming scenes is flawlessly executed and the filmmakers utilize the actors, camera and the synthesized setting to maximum effect.
At the crux of Alfonso Cuaron's new movie - a slim 91 minutes and the most worthwhile time I've spent in a cinema this year - there's a particularly arresting image during a zero-G tussle between the astronauts and their attempt to stabilize themselves amidst the speeding debris' unmitigated havoc. In a heartbreaking exchange between Stone and Kowalski, the camera captures a wide shot of the two astronauts and a tangle of slight nylon ribbons barely touched by the sun, holding Ryan and Kowalski together. It's a beautiful, fleeting moment. The ribbons and bodies are outstretched for just a moment, showing the complete desperation their situation foretells.
Newton's laws of motion were never made so abundantly clear, especially in a story where the burden of gravity is non-existent. For instance, the tethers attaching the astronauts to their vessels are never at rest, continually in captivating, sinuous motion like sea snakes. When we see Stone and Kowalski moving through space seeking refuge in one of their stations or pods, we have no idea of their rate of speed until they get closer and need to latch onto something - which will keep them from being in perpetual orbit themselves, until another object comes along and causes an equal and opposite reaction.
Aesthetically speaking, the zero gravity world of space allows for endless aesthetic choices. Since space is a vacuum, we hear none of the astronauts' exo-shuttle actions, except their dialog. This allows for not only the imagery to take center stage - as opposed to films dominated by dialog - but it makes what they DO say to be ever more significant, like those last few molecules of breathable oxygen in their suits. It also renders all of the debris' destruction a silent matter, begging the presence of music, here composed by Steven Price (a relatively unknown musician/composer until now). Price's score is a form of controlled chaos - a powerful analog, living and breathing structure with steep, raw and ominous synthesizer crescendos and manic strings - almost a character itself within the larger purpose it serves.
Visually, there are countless opportunities for a filmmaker to use the blackness of space, and the fluid movement that zero-G allows, to cinematic advantage. When Stone initially gets flung from her safety line, she flies into the depths of dark space in the center of the screen, getting smaller and smaller, and then when the screen is blackest we then see her careening back towards the camera, her peril none the lesser. Yet Cuaron, to his credit, doesn't necessarily need to take advantage of this. In other scenes he lets the camera drift about, sometimes slowly panning or floating between characters and within their cavernous structures, and then sometimes witnessing the chaos of the orbiting debris, all seemingly without many cuts at all. This greatly aids the story into a very cohesive, seamless whole, going from whistle-while-you-work to dire fight for survival. Cuaron is no stranger to this mellifluous style. In his previous feature Children of God, he does much the same thing, gliding a camera following Clive Owen through 9 minutes worth of bob-and-weave, bullet-and-bomb traffic. Emanuelle Lubeszki is the cinematographer in both films (in addition to Malick's Tree of Life) and may very well be nominated for his work here this Oscar season.
Of course none of this technique and style hold much weight without the stellar performances of the leads making it a story worth a damn. Clooney is an apt, semi-optimistic romantic and attractive enough to make Stone wonder about a lost loved one, but Bullock becomes the emotional reserve into which Gravity invests it's lasting power. She is the emotional element, the fourth dimension space cannot occupy.
There are the expected homages to cinema's forbears - numerous shots of floating pens and a womb-like Sandra Bullock a la Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some of the more tragic scenes of falling bodies recall DePalma's underrated Mission to Mars, a criminally overlooked contender to the space film canon. Ultimately, though, Gravity holds it's own. Cuaron conjures images of floating fire in once scene and a remarkable close-up of one of Stone's tears in a later scene. Just as he's aware of how tall an order a space movie is, he is ecstatic yet tactful about showing the genre's possibilities. After all, in so many ways, filmmaking is about quality control.
Although some of the music choices near the end suggest happy ending resolve, and the end is a bit over-the-top down to earth, Gravity is an astronomical achievement. Ultimately, it's a movie that is less about everything than past cinematic odysseys, so there are no unanswered questions, which is perhaps the reason for its digestibility among the common viewership. It does pose some important questions about ourselves and our unfathomable universe. It will move you and it will make you glad you're on solid ground.