Gravity
Rated PG-13 (Space is scary.)
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Written by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonas Cuaron
**** out of ****
Wow.
Let me elaborate: Holy wow.
If you'll indulge me for a bit, I have a little story to tell you about me.
From my earliest memories, I have always wanted to be an astronaut. There was never any question in my mind that it was what I was going to be when I grew up. Then, one day in third grade, Mr. Saathoff, the janitor, came into the classroom (reading, I believe, with Mrs. Wood), and told us that the space shuttle, Challenger, had exploded. This news completely broke my heart. Completely.
Now that I'm older, I understand that accidents like that happen, but it doesn't lessen the sorrow that I felt when Columbia exploded on re-entry, or that I will feel the next time a spacecraft is lost.
Nor does it diminish my desire to go to space.
Space is huge and dangerous. Your body rebels in zero G, there is next to nothing to protect you from radiation, micrometeorites are zipping around at tens of thousands of miles an hour, and everything up there is amazing.
If you have any fear of drowning, or have problems with vertigo, do NOT go to this movie. If you are prone to motion sickness, you should skip the 3D version.
That being said, damn. Just... Just holy crap.
I'm sure you can put the story together from the trailers. Captain Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) is on his last shuttle mission. Mission Specialist (usually NASA shorthand for "dead weight") Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock and her legs (I'm sorry, but they are amazing legs)) is installing a piece of equipment that she has designed onto the Hubble Space Telescope. The Russians used a missile test to destroy one of their obsolete spy satellites, and the debris causes everything to go wrong.
The film is event, rather than character, driven, but, since there are only two characters in the film, we bond with them. Hard. You know how some people watch horror movies and tell the characters what to do and not do? Yeah. I did that here.
Roger Ebert once described the Indiana Jones movies as "one damn thing after another", and that's what Cuaron has here. In a movie like that, the pacing is critical. The audience needs time to breathe. Not too much, but just enough. Cuaron has this nailed here.
The special effects are stunning. I don't know if any part of the movie was filmed in the Vomit Comet or not, but I doubt it. Here's why :
The cinematic language of the film is established right at the top with a 15 - minute long single (or so cleverly edited to appear so) uninterrupted take. There are no quick shots. There is at least one shot that, when I realized what was going on, made me smile, like the scene in "Contact" that looked like a Steadicam shot of young Ellie running through her house, only to end with her opening the medicine cabinet with a mirrored door, as if the entire shot was an impossible reflection.
I'm a gigantic nerd, so, while watching the astronauts, I was paying attention to the physics of motion. I know that, in a stable orbit of Earth, one circuit takes roughly 90 minutes. I'm going to say that James Cameron has some SERIOUS competition in the scientific accuracy and plausibility department. Again, wow.
I don't think anyone but Clooney could have played the captain. He's the right age to be plausible in the role, and he's handsome and cocksure enough to fit our (my) idea of what an astronaut is. Bullock carries most of the weight of the story, and does it well. She's not an astronaut, but she's not incompetent. She's had training, but she has to think things through.
I saw the 2D version, because of my problems with motion sickness. (I watched "Cloverfield" by looking at the ceiling of the theatre and listening to the dialogue.) However, I think that this might be one to pay the extra money to see in 3D, simply because it would make it that more immersive and scary.
Wow.
