It's no Jurassic Park

Rating: 1/10 (4 May 2018)

Gravity, in my opinion, is everything that is wrong with cinema today. The notion that a spectacle will more than make up for a void where a story should be is a ridiculous one, yet one that is employed time and again when making these 'blockbuster' films. I watched Gravity on a 15inch MacBook and it was so depressing that once it had ended I drank a bottle of cheap red wine mid afternoon and watched a weeks worth of Come Dine With Me so I didn't feel my whole Sunday was wasted. Would it have made the experience more enjoyable had the bits of satellite shrapnel floated around my front room and Sandra Bullock's heads up display really had been heads up? Probably. Would I have still got drunk and tried to forget about the whole thing afterwards? Definitely, only I wouldn't have had to wait until the morning to get a headache, cheers 3D. This film is painfully dull and yet it is set in space, the coolest location for a film in the world (joke). Just because you can CGI up a convincing globe doesn't mean that it's all I want to look at for two hours. Though arguably after the 110th thing goes wrong for whatever Sandra Bullock's character is called, and the film just becomes one long moan, you couldn't care less what you're looking at anyway.
The point however is not that Gravity is poor, the point is that cinema has become a waste of time. I learned nothing from Gravity other than the Russians are stupid, the Russians drink Vodka in space, the Russians don't put fuel in their space craft, and the Russian space suits aren't as white as the American ones. What was happening on screen didn't matter as I couldn't have cared less about the two astronauts. I didn't believe that that many things could go wrong for one woman, I didn't believe the escape module would sink, I didn't believe they'd let an emotionally unstable woman in to space, and I certainly didn't believe that when Sandra Bullock stood up at the end it merited the drama of when Dr Grant first saw the Diplodocus in Jurassic Park. I didn't believe any of these things because not once was I invited to care, because this is a shallow film from a poor storyteller that suffices only to prove what a shallow and poor audience bankrolls modern cinema.
One star, or infinite stars. Depending on how good your TV is.