The closest that most of us ever get to experiencing space for ourselves

Rating: 9/10 (17 October 2013)

Gravity is a strange mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime. For me, the latter eclipsed the former almost all the way along: the beauty, wonder, and grandeur of the film let me quickly forgive the few truly facepalmy moments.
Let's start with the bad and get it out of the way. What little story there is here is completely linear, paper-thin, and relies on howlingly bad science to create a crisis and then howlingly bad science to resolve it. The few characters are presented as professional astronauts yet, as introduced, two of the three behave more like twenty-somethings on a package holiday. Did I mention how oh God the science is really bad? It's the astrodynamics that suffers the worst: all kinds of ludicrous orbital impossibilities are depicted. I know it's only a movie and supposed to be a fun way to spend 90-odd minutes, but I found this stuff as jarring as a movie set on terra firma where a hoodlum on a skateboard in New York snatches a handbag, darts off down the street, and in the next scene is swapping the skateboard for a bicycle in Beijing. It really is that bad (indeed, it's actually worse than that!)...
...except when the science is really good! The title "Gravity" is perhaps a little misleading because gravity doesn't (directly) play much part in the film. Rather, it's "Conservation of Angular Momentum" that's a recurring theme. For the most part, aside of one very very obvious and annoying gaffe, Newtonian mechanics are well respected, and I found the terror and desperation of characters in the grips of "the cold equations" palpable at times.
So what else does this movie do right? Well, for a start, I think it's the most beautiful cinematic depiction of space since "2001: A Space Odyssey": the cinematography is stunning in an "enlarge any frame and hang it on your wall" kind of way. It really has been 40 years since space has looked this good. The vistas of Earth from orbit are really breathtaking; in particular, a gorgeous panorama of Egypt sticks in my mind. As I was watching that sequence, I was wishing a little that all attempts at a story had just been excised from the finished film. Set to a mellow jazz or classical score, I think I could watch those spacescapes for hours and hours.
Finally, I found its depictions of real (or close to real) space hardware and working in microgravity really, really convincing and immersive. When a character loses a tool at a crucial moment, I (like they) had a very strong sense of panic about not ever ever getting it back. And it's the spacecraft of the film—a space shuttle, a Soyuz TMA, and a Shenzhou. all lovingly rendered and presented—that to me were perhaps the real stars of the show. To me, these felt like real spacecraft, and I felt like I was there aboard them.
I highly, highly recommend this movie. You might get into the survival story—I could take it or leave it, but I think it was credibly done—but watching this on the big screen in 3D is likely to be the closest that most of us ever get to experiencing space for ourselves.