It’s easy to hate Hollywood. The bloated budgets, the endless franchising, the inexplicable devotion to names like Michael Bay (Pain & Gain) and Adam Sandler (Grown Ups 2) — it’s enough to make even casual film fans drop to their knees and weep for the injustice of the world.
But then, every so often, comes a movie like Gravity. It’s a Hollywood movie to its core, an $80 million CGI extravaganza set in outer space, starring A-listers Sandra Bullock (The Heat) and George Clooney (The Descendants). It’s big. It’s loud. And it’s really, really good. So good, in fact, that it made me want to strap Michael Bay down, A Clockwork Orange-style, and force him to watch it over and over again until he wept at the realization that, for all his money and creative freedom, he never made this.
Writer-director Alfonso Cuarón already has two masterpieces under his belt — Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También — and Gravity will likely go down in history as his third. It lacks the depth of theme and character of his previous films, but that’s part of its power: It’s a survival story, pure and simple, honed to so fine a point you could cut diamond with it.
Bullock and Clooney star as Stone and Kowalski, a pair of NASA astronauts who get stranded in orbit when a cloud of satellite debris wrecks their shuttle. They spend the movie’s 90 minutes trying to find a way back to Earth, fleeing from one rapidly collapsing safe haven to the next, as Cuarón, ever the cruel master of fate, piles threat upon threat and dilemma upon dilemma. It’s so nerve-racking, it makes Apollo 13 look like The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars.
Much of the credit for the film’s unbearable tension goes to Bullock, who takes Stone’s sometimes-thin characterization as a nervous newbie and turns it around into a career performance. Rarely do actors force the audience to empathize with pure panic as well as she does.
But the lion’s share must go to Cuarón. Gravity is one of the most astounding visual experiences of this or any year, as immersive as Avatar and twice as tense. (Plus there’s no stupid Pocahontas plot.) Cuarón uses his signature long takes to craft the most terrifying cinematic roller-coaster ride imaginable, sending his camera careening nauseatingly through collapsing space stations and floating into the dark, lonely void. It’s a film that will mess with claustrophobes, acrophobes and tachophobes in equal measure.
It’s a relentless film, but Cuarón retains his knack for crafting images of beautiful simplicity, too. An astronaut, curled in a zero-g fetal position, taking their first breath of oxygen after suffocating on carbon dioxide; desperate prayers reflected in a floating tear; the aurora borealis seen from hundreds of kilometers above Earth — Gravity is just as powerful in its quiet moments as it is in its loudest. Just don’t get too complacent — it’s liable to roar back to life right when you’re getting comfortable.
As with Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and all of the best films about space, Gravity captures the simultaneous terror and wonder of outer space, a place we’re drawn to on an almost primal level that nevertheless remains fundamentally unlivable, a place where even the laws of physics seem to have turned hostile. It’s a movie that has room for both the awe of witnessing sunrise over the Sinai and the horror of feeling the last tether between safety and infinity snap.
Ultimately, attempting to describe Gravity is a futile endeavor. It has to be experienced, preferably on the largest screen available. See it in 3-D. See it in IMAX. It’s worth the extra cash — not only because it’s one of the most visceral movies you’ll ever see, but because it’s the rare instance where everyone involved deserves to get filthy rich.
[ READ MORE: Celebrating the career of Alfonso Cuarón, director of Gravity ]
