It’s probably not necessary to introduce Gravity at this point. Its nail-biting ad campaign that gave us images of a terrified Sandra Bullock floating through space doomed and alone was successful enough that the film has gone on to experience a more than impressive opening weekend. Chances are you’ve heard about the story that sees Bullock and George Clooney playing astronauts who get put in a series of deadly situations once their spacewalk goes wrong and they’re left stranded in space. Probably you’ve heard about the visuals and the 3D effects that work to make the film more of a theme park ride than it is your typical theatergoing experience. But, if you’re reading this, it would seem that you still want to hear more, so here we go.
With Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón has created eye candy so captivating and an immersive experience so total that it takes a good fifteen minutes or so to acclimate yourself to it. During the film’s opening moments you’re just so astounded at what you’re seeing that it doesn’t feel like a film anyone would ever be able to write a review of. How can you rationalize looking away from the screen long enough to take any notes, after all? Gravity affects you on such a physical level that it’s hard to compare it to very many other theatergoing experiences you’ve had. Due to the total immersion experienced when you see this thing on a huge screen with 3D effects, you literally move to the edge of your seat during the dangerous moments, you literally wince and jerk along with every threat that the characters face. The film would have been acceptable just as a showcase for cinematography, digital effects, and action scene crafting, but unfortunately it starts trying to do more than that after a while. It starts trying to flesh out its characters and it starts trying to be a meditation on life and humanity instead of just a thriller, and it ends up falling flat on its face with every new thing it tries.
Really, it can’t be emphasized enough how astounding Cuarón’s craftsmanship and the experience it creates through this movie are though. His technical touch is second to none. That scene from the trailers that happens early on, where Bullock’s character becomes untethered from the space junk they’re working on and finds herself spinning out of control and alone out in the blackness of space, is so much more effective than it would have been otherwise because of Cuarón’s willingness to hold a tight closeup on Bullock’s face for the entirety of the sequence. Not only are the images of Earth that are periodically reflected in her visor gorgeous, but the lengthy shot also works to put us directly in the moment alongside her, and it forces us to feel everything that she’s feeling for as long as she feels it. There’s a scene soon after where she’s attached to Clooney by a strap and being towed back, and we experience the whole sequence from a shot that puts us in her POV. This time around we’re not just made to feel what she’s feeling, but we’re physically put in the same position that she is, feeling what an impotent experience it is to be out in space, unable to even move, and completely at the mercy of someone else’s whims. That shit is nuts.
The way the film makes you feel like you’re on some sort of new Universal Studios ride is where its positive points end though. If we’re going to start addressing the negative points, probably we should start with the acting. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are both huge movie stars with well-defined personas, and boy do they lean on them here, and boy does that end up being detrimental to the film. We best know Clooney as being a laid back charmer, and he sticks to that so closely here that it just feels strange and off-putting watching him grin and wink his way through traumatic, deadly situations. On the other side of the coin, we best know Bullock as playing characters who are high strung and high maintenance, and she sticks so closely to that here that it feels like her acting is putting exclamation points at the end of sentences that really didn’t need them. There must have been a happy medium between the performances that these two actors provide, but neither ever manages to hit it. Perhaps going with unknowns would have been better for the film artistically, though there’s no telling what that would have meant for those big opening weekend numbers.
Though the acting is the most immediately visible of the film’s negatives, the writing has to be the most detrimental to its quality. Gravity is very simple, narratively. It’s a survival story. A very straightforward one. We don’t know much about the characters and we don’t need to know much about them. Their peril is so immediate and we’re made to feel it so viscerally that they essentially could have been anyone and we still would have cared about what happens to them. The film probably would have been successful if it had no dialogue at all. Unfortunately, it does have dialogue though, and it does try to tell us things about the characters’ histories, and it fails completely every time it does so. What’s that old Benjamin Franklin quote about opening your mouth and revealing that you’re a fool? Yeah, Gravity would have been better off staying silent.
The writing is so bad that Clooney’s character becomes an annoyance early on due to the way he’s always motor-mouthing unnatural, obviously crafted dialogue. Bullock is left hung out to dry several times when she’s forced to deliver lengthy monologues full of backstory that we don’t really need and that never develops her character past the point of being a clichéd figure in a melodrama. One of the many scenes where she thinks that she’s about to die and finds a transmission on her radio coming from Earth is especially bad. The sequence exists solely as a reason for her character to explicitly voice every emotion going through her head to the audience, it consequently plays as really lazy, clunky screenwriting that breaks the basic “show don’t tell” rule, and it proves to be far more intense material than an actress of Bullock’s capabilities is able to handle in the process. Gravity juxtaposes enough images of isolation and mortality alongside majestic images of the universe’s awe-inducing scope to be thematically deep enough already, and it didn’t need to keep opening its mouth, but unfortunately it does anyway.
The one thing the screenwriting does well is constantly come up with new threats, new deadly situations, new countdowns that the characters have to beat in order to stay alive, for it to be consistently tense all the way through to the end credits. This movie really does push what you’re willing to experience as far as anxiety goes to the limits, and in a good way. One has to wonder how much of that was taken care of during the writing process and how much came about during the story boarding process though. It’s not usually the case that a film’s script is its least essential component, but it’s certainly the case here.
What can’t be denied is that Gravity is the sort of movie that will have you physically cringing all the way through it. Unfortunately, half of the time that’s because the action scenes are so intense that you just can’t take it, and the other half of the time it’s because you’re so embarrassed by the acting you’re watching and the dialogue you’re hearing that you wish it all would just stop. This film is similar to Avatar in that it’s a great success for the 3D format and it’s a great example of how that format is able to thrust you completely into another world when it’s done right, but it’s also similar to Avatar in that, apart from the technical skill on display and the visuals that are produced, it’s simultaneously a film that’s full of one-note characters, clunky dialogue, and cartoonish drama. In Avatar, which was a big, silly, and surreal fantasy story, that wasn’t nearly as much of a problem, but here, where we’re being told a story that’s very much rooted in the reality of human mortality, the clumsiness of the writing becomes much more of a distraction and much more of a negative. See Gravity in IMAX 3D while you still can, because it really is a unique enough visual experience in that format that it should be experienced by everyone, but if you’re planning on catching up with it in a standard format on your TV at home, don’t bother. Likely you’re going to be left scratching your head and wondering what in the heck it was everyone who saw it in the theaters responded so well to in the first place.
