Gravity attempts
to portray what astronauts would actually encounter on space missions, how
space walks would actually unfold, and the hostility of the environment of
space towards anything resembling Earthling life.
The
ninety or so minutes of Gravity are
the linear unfolding of a series of destructive events in the lives of
Astronauts Ryan (Sandra Bullock) and Kowalski (George Clooney).
Director’s Alfonso Cuarón’s hones in on these destructive
events, treating them as a single, passing moment in time. A moment of crisis.
As
far as doing anything in space is ever considered routine, Gravity opens with a group of
astronauts undertaking what seem to be standard, routine repairs to the outside
of their ship. The tone is jovial, if not a little tense as Clooney zips around
the ship’s vicinity with a jet pack jokingly. He wants to break the current
space walk record of seventy-five minutes. But Mission Control suddenly issues
a warning. A massive field of space debris is headed straight for them.
From
here on, only chaos reigns as Cuarón begins to
eliminate all probable positive outcomes, one by one. After the astronaut’s
ship is destroyed beyond repair Ryan and Kowalski attempt to propel themselves
a floatable distance
to a space station. As they push forward through space’s vacuum, towards their
beacon of hope, space’s vastness and hostility are emphasized, along with their
minisculity; “I hate space,” says Ryan somewhat lightheartedly. This comes
after she has just been precariously saved from a perpetual spinning away into
deep space, a particularly claustrophobic moment of the film,
Gravity has
all the individual parts of a film rated high, near a 10, but once the parts
are assembled, the whole is not equal to the parts. Even though the film is
shot in space, and is set to depict a realistic portrayal of how events like
these could take place, the film is really just about Ryan, a single human’s
struggle to survive, and then with this revelation the epic space setting
becomes incidental.
Problem:
Ryan is not an interesting character. She seems ill prepared for such a
dangerous space mission, and when she talks about her daughter, in a moment
that I assume is used to attempt to ground the film in reality by showing us
the why, we don’t care about her
daughter. The current situation at hand is much more interesting. Including
this talk about life back home was a mistake that took me out of the moment. I
don’t care about Earth here; I care about this amazing crisis taking place just
above Earth. A space movie should emphasize themes bigger than the individual.
The mission should be more important than the life of the astronaut. Simply
making it back to Earth alive is not an exciting enough conclusion.
Although
maybe the best of her career, Bullock still delivers a subpar portrayal of a
character that is herself subpar. I loved Cuarón’s Children of Men and I feel here Cuarón’s work is great. From
a technical perspective, Cuarón’s filmmaking is
incredible, the cinematography stunning, the portrayal of space amazing, so
what went wrong? Besides a storyline that fails to transcend human matters, a
factor that Cuarón may have been able to
gloss over under different circumstances, when a film centers on a single
actor, and that actor is Sandra Bullock, to quote Yeats, “Things fall apart; the
center cannot hold.”
Verdict
7/10
