Gravity Review

Gravity Review: A commendably well-made survival story with spectacular visual effects and a poignant performance from Sandra Bullock. Don’t miss it!

Rating: ****

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a commendably well-made survival story. The film is relatively simple in the philosophical themes it explores, and it never reaches the heights of last year’s Best Director Oscar Winner Ang Lee’s‘Life of Pi’, or Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Cast Away’. Even then, Gravity is a welcome move in the ‘survival adventure’ genre for multiple reasons.

Thankfully, the film does without aliens, zombies or any other nefarious creatures that seem a staple of most survival films today, such as ‘World War Z’ or ‘Elysium’. It’s set in space, yet it can’t exactly be labeled ‘sci fi’. The theatre patron in from of me came for Gravity expecting it to be a ‘sci-fi action’ film, and so did many others, I guess. It has humans, astronauts to be specific, who work at a space station revolving around Earth’s massive orbit. The film isn’t set very distant in the future, the characters don’t have Spock-like ears, and the team isn’t escaping from some strange alien race. They are simply doing their job like normal humans, like you and I, except in space. It shall be a little crude to put a ‘sci fi’ stamp on it.

The film stars Sandra Bullock, last seen in the enjoyable summer hit ‘The Heat’. The success or otherwise of Sandra’s performances depend largely on the films she is cast in, as basically her characters aren’t as varied as those of Meryl Streep’s or Cate Blanchett’s. She can do justice to an emotion in almost any film, but if that film’s something like ‘All About Steve’ or ‘The Proposal, you hardly bother to take her seriously. Her performance in Gravity works largely because she’s performing in an exceedingly good film, and her ‘moments’ do really shine and move you to tears. There’s a point where her character Ryan Stone, having lost contact with everybody after the Hubble Space Telescope she’s servicing as a mission specialist (her first job, that too!) is hit by the debris from a Russian strike on a defunct satellite, is alone inside a Soviet spacecraft named Soyuz with nobody to help her.

While trying to get in contact with somebody on Earth, the radio frequency only catches a conversation between a man with an odd name and his barking dog. Ryan is overwhelmed with grief and this point and begins howling like an animal – the radio frquency could probably be the last sound she hears on Earth before she dies silently in space, losing the opportunity to bid a final goodbye to her loved ones. Sandra captures this moment beautifully, and it’s easily the high-point of this film, and she has the ‘3D-space’ to help her. The tears don’t flow but float in space in zero gravity, and 3D lends a poignant power by highlighting a tear. The entire auditorium was dead silent at this point, except for a couple of sniffles (from men). No dramatic sound-effects or close-ups and no ‘“acting”’ at this point in the film, just the power of silence.

During the action sequences, however, Cuarón gives Sandra lines a mighty lot of clichéd lines you wouldn’t want from a film that sustains its quieter moments so well. Ryan goes “No! No! No! No!” once, and calls a space station heading towards Earth her ‘last ride’ that’ll decide her fate. Like any obedient actress, Sandra utters these lines

with the conviction of an action hero (All feminists wanting films depicting woman empowerment should flock to theatres), but not of the woman with three-dimensional qualities we saw crying silently in the spaceship a few moments before. It’s Alfonso and co-writer Jonás Cuarón at fault here, as their work sometimes feels hurried and focused on the situation than the character facing them; had they really given a thought on what ‘Ryan Stone’ would’ve said during the action sequences instead of what’s usually said by characters at such points in action films, they would’ve done better justice to the film and Bullock’s performance.

There’s George Clooney to support Sandra’s character in the film. He plays Matt Kowasky, a veteran astronaut and a fine raconteur who accompanies Ryan and an engineer Shariff (whose face we see for the first time after its blown up in the accident) to space. He puts on the air of an extremely calm and serene being, usually reserved for veteran actor Morgan Freeman. His character also has a symbolic function as the movie progresses, and that’s perhaps why his character behaves the way he does. It’s a little difficult seeing someone so tensionless even in grave peril (except Freeman, of course, because he’s God, you know?), and I wished Clooney’s character, since only human, could’ve acted like one instead of a symbol.

The visual effects are beyond brilliant, but the fact that they’re set in space makes them sparser than the colorful splendor served in Life of Pi. Nevertheless, the opening shot of the majestic earth from above taking up two-third of the screen, the rest taken up by space, as the space shuttle with the protagonists gradually appears from afar is a sight to behold. If you’ve seen Life of Pi, you’d remember those shots taken from the sky that capture the small boat in the ocean below; Gravity has similar extremely long shots where the characters only appear as dots on screen. In another film, this would’ve probably been dust particles given 3D effects, but here, these dots are of the greatest gravity.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!