Lieutenant Matt Kowalski is in charge of a five-person mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to install Dr. Ryan Stone's new monitoring equipment. Everything is going fine until mission control announces that a Russian satellite has blown up and the debris may be heading their way. That is quickly upgraded to abandon the Hubble and flee the scene to stay alive, which is promptly followed by Kowalski and Stone drifting in space in radio silence, the only survivors of a routine maintenance mission to space gone horribly wrong.
Alfonso Cuarón has crafted his true masterpiece in Gravity. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock create believable characters in Kowalksi and Stone, but it is Cuarón who is the star of the production. Everything is about a deft director handling his own screenplay (written with his son Jonás Cuarón) with incredible style and urgency.
Five time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life, Children of Men) helps create some of the finest moments of 3D cinema ever projected on a screen. If nothing else, Gravity evokes its haunting terror by showcasing just how vast space is. The screen falls back for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to sell the narrative of two astronauts drifting through space with only the slightest chance of survival.
Consider Gravity a space disaster horror/action/character study/inspiring drama hybrid woven into a tight 91 minute tapestry of terror, joy, sorrow, and beauty. For most of the running time, we do not get a clear view of the characters. We hear them, but we do not directly see their faces straight on. Cuarón chooses to craft his film around the physical presence of the actors on his set rather than focus on them. Dr. Stone starts to get more play about halfway through with plot developments, but even then she's mostly secondary in the visual presentation of the film.
This is all about telling a narrative through action and emptiness, not emotional confrontations or visible interactions. It's quite telling that the device to connect the two drifting astronauts is a long tether that forces Lt. Kowalksi to use a reflective surface on his spacesuit to check if Dr. Stone is still following him. The characters are reacting to the environment around them at all times even if they're proactively working on a solution to their peril.
Massive set pieces of exploding space stations and barely functioning escape pods fill and expand the space of the theater while the surviving astronauts flit through the cracks and hang on for their lives. The precision of the effects triggers an unavoidable sense of the sublime. They're beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. You don't want to look for fear of watching another astronaut take his last breath but the deep void of Cuarón's eternally expanding vision of space pulls you in.
Gravity's innovation doesn't come from telling a new story or presenting new characters. It comes from such a brutally honest vision of the perils of space exploration. Tiny little details in every scene telegraph the massive catastrophe yet to come. The astronauts are at the mercy of the void of space, so focused on their own mortality in the moment that they forget that time and life have no meaning above the atmosphere of Earth. The film starts as a car crash you cannot avoid rubbernecking at and slowly transforms into the self-actualization of a woman who has given up on a life outside of work. The climax is not the final action sequence but a harrowing monologue of utter despair.
Alfonso Cuarón knows how to make you care about people in an action film. What he does here that is so remarkable is make an empathetic action film driven by the environment instead of the characters. The story would not exist without Lt. Kowalksi and Dr. Stone, but the film would not exist without the effort to honestly explore how dangerous space can be.
Rating: 10/10
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