The Hero Quest in Space

Rating: 10/10 (23 January 2014)

While I was captivated by the Gravity's masterful cinematography, midway through the film I realized that it is really not a sci-fi movie about space, or about being an astronaut, but rather a representation of the classic quest myth as described by Northrop Frye and further defined as the monomyth by Joseph Campbell.
Our hero, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), has struggled on earth with a great loss, her daughter's death, and is numb to life. She must travel to the "underworld," in this case outer space and battle her demons in order to redeem herself and recover her ability to live. As in the classic myth, she has a mentor, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), who guides her through her trials, but in the end she must fight alone to win her battle and return to life.
We see her floating in the space station as a fetus, and in the final scene she is reborn, nearly drowning in the process and emerging from the sea as if from a womb, even having to learn to walk again, stumbling on the beach. But she has survived the challenges and has now been restored to life. The setting in space is tangential to the theme; space and the astronaut's technologies are secondary, merely an updated setting for the archetypal hero quest myth. The movie is lyrical, and while a technological tour de force, more importantly Gravity arouses primal emotions by way of its structure as a universal myth.