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Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Four Stars |
By Jonathan Fisher
“I hate space.”
So says medical engineer Ryan Stone in Gravity. And well she may. Innately, all humans are. Of course,
it’s quite humbling to stand down here on terra firma, watch a few episodes of
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and look up at
the night sky, the uncountable distant galaxies and far away suns. The reality
of existence in space, however, is another thing. Space is empty. Think about
that concept. Empty. No atmosphere,
no sound, certainly no life apart from what we have flung up there in
spacesuits designed to mimic the conditions under which we can survive. No sign,
as Sagan once said, of help from elsewhere coming to save us from ourselves.
That innate discomfort humans have with space is what Gravity is about, and we the audience
instinctively understand that, which is why this movie is such a white-knuckle
experience. This film explores, to coin a phrase by Neil DeGasse Tyson, the
many ways in which the universe is trying to kill us. Sandra Bullock is Ryan
Stone, who along with astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and a small crew
is in orbit around Earth, on a mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Kowalksi
and Stone are really the only two characters we get to know in the early going –
Kowalski as a playful flirt and experienced astronaut, Stone as an uptight
engineer with little experience in the vacuum. Kowalski, Stone and a third
astronaut are on a spacewalk when disaster strikes.
A nearby Russian satellite self-destructs, and a storm of
space debris (yes, this movie also acts as something of a commentary on the
little-understood problem of space junk) flies towards our heroes’ space
station. In the initial blitz, the third colleague on the spacewalk is killed,
and the space station’s hull is compromised, killing another two crew members.
This means Kowalksi and Stone are alone in the emptiness of space, communications
with Houston severed, with nothing but malfunctioning human-made technology to
help them get home. Oh, how our cleverness and self-proclaimed genius pales
when faced with the empty horror of life outside our blue planet.
Gravity is
directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who previously directed the excellent Children of Men as well as the third
instalment of the Harry Potter series.
His is an elegant, unhurried directorial style, and Gravity is better for it. Cuaron is an eminently visual director,
and it’s remarkable how engrossing he makes a simple sequence of Stone taking
off her space suit when she, at last, reaches an airlock. (there’s also, I
think, a reference to 2001: A Space
Odyssey in the framing of the final, beautiful shot in that sequence as Stone
falls asleep)
The action set pieces are tense and horrifying; Cuaron
lingers on just how little control our heroes have in this harsh environment.
He also focuses on the shared humanity of these two astronauts, which forms the
core of Gravity’s emotional punch. We
don’t get to know either character all that well, but we gain a basic
understanding of what they’re all about, and when it comes down to it, they’re
likable. That’s important in a movie like this – Gravity wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the last bastions of
humanity in this disaster were a pair of jerks.
Gravity is
probably the strongest of the science-fiction films of 2013 thus far. It
doesn’t present a stylistic and creative vision of a dystopian future. It isn’t
wall-to-wall with special effects that call attention to themselves. It allows
space for the instinctive fear of what exists outside our tenuous atmosphere,
while also airing our sense of humility – when Kowalski is faced with his fate,
spinning helplessly in orbit, he – visible to us as a mere speck of a homo
sapien set against the vast emptiness of space and the enormity of Earth –
remarks on the beautiful sunset over the Ganges.
Gravity is in some
ways one of the least showy science fiction movies in recent memory, but also
one of the most audacious. It is set essentially in the here and now, focuses
on a realistic set of parameters and problems astronauts could be faced with,
and seeks to explore a powerful question – outside of a planet that we have
become masters of (and are poisoning as fast as we can with a kind of perverse
glee), how do we humans reconcile our timidity in the face of a vast, powerful
and indifferent universe?
