Save me Keanu!

Rating: Null/10 (26 March 2015)

Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity" stars Sandra Bullock as Doctor Ryan Stone, a biomedical engineer. As the film opens, Stone is repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. Accompanying her on this spacewalk is Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney).
Cuaron quickly sketches Stone and Kowalski's personalities. Stone hates space, human connection, is depressed and is grieving for her deceased daughter. Kowalski, in contrast, is a dapper astronaut with a mega-watt smile. He loves life, people and zero-gravity space optimism. You got problems? Kowalksi's got your back.
When orbital debris destroys Stone's NASA shuttle, "Gravity" quickly morphs into a frenetic action movie. Here we watch as Stone and Kowalski, with limited oxygen supplies, make a beeline for the International Space Station. Along the way Kowalksi attempts to cheer Stone up, but she resists his pep talks. Nihilistic, grief-stricken and with no one home waiting for her, Stone already has one foot in the grave.
Upon arriving at the ISS, Kowalski sacrifices his life to get Stone into the station. Once there, more debris peppers the ISS, forcing Stone to hastily evacuate. She hops aboard a Soviet Soyuz module and aims it at the Tiangong, a Chinese space station.
Because she's stuck in the worse damn day of her life, Stone quickly realises that the Soyuz module has no fuel. She attempts communication with Earth, but reaches only lonely Eskimos and their sickly dogs. Resigned to her fate, Stone slips deeper into depression. Luckily a ghostly apparition of Kowalksi appears. Thanks to the power of motivational speaking, this apparition empowers Stone, fills her with self-belief, a desire for connection, vague spirituality and faith in humanity. Reinvigorated by mansplaining, Stone becomes determined to live! Kiss my butt, Newtonian physics!
"Gravity" climaxes with Stone using a fire extinguisher to propel her toward the Tiangong. Whilst the Chinese station rapidly deorbits, Stone scrambles into its Shenzhou module and returns to Earth. Her landing is a success, but her module touches-down in a lake. Weighed down by her bulky spacesuit, which she frantically tears off, Stone almost drowns. To resist the pull of gravity, the weight of grief, Stone must thus symbolically remove her excess baggage. As the film ends, Stone's been reborn.
Cuaron signals Stone's transformation with much hokey symbolism: Stone is "reborn" from the fetal position, sits alongside pictures of St Christopher (the patron saint of travellers) and eventually emerges from water like a recently baptised baby, or a newly evolved creature pulling itself out of the primordial soup. Stone's very name signifies a heavy object, a burdened heart that wants only to succumb to gravity's depressing, all consuming vortex. Ironically, its the very forces pulling her toward death which usher Stone away from the darkness of space and back into Earth's loving embrace.
Alfonso Cuaron has always loved elaborate long-takes. In "Gravity" he pushes this infatuation to its limit, his plot reverse engineered for the sole purpose of indulging in zany, zero-G camera-work. This camera-work is mostly intrusive, self-conscious and distracting. Master directors know when to cut, how to compose an image, hold a frame and how to juggle medium, close and long shots. Cuaron, though, bludgeons you with superfluous technique. His shots aren't elegant, just long. Aren't clever, just long-winded. Aren't beautiful, just expensive. And rather than majestic, sublime, claustrophobic or suffocating, his space and spaces feel like zillion dollar Hollywood plastic. Compare to "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff", where man's orbital tin-buckets feel like real, perilous places.
Though "Gravity" boasts a clever race-against-time plot, in which our hero leapfrogs from safe haven to safe haven, the film's "thriller" sequences are nevertheless mostly silly. Stone uses fire-extinguishers like WALL-E, Clooney's sacrifice is cribbed from "Mission to Mars" minus the opera, and the film's shots of bouncing astronauts, exploding machines and flailing arms seem goofy rather than "authentic". With more CGI than pixel-poster-boy "Avatar", "Gravity" never feels more than a blue-screen show-reel made slick by a budget that dwarfs most real space-missions. Stick Keanu Reeves in here, re-title it "Speed 3" and inject a sense of humour, and "Gravity" might play better. But Cuaron wants to make "serious art", a desire which his film is not grave enough to sustain. The film features Ed Harris as the voice of NASA Mission Control. Harris also appeared in "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff".
7.5/10 – See "Wings of Hope".