Gravity

Good acting not enough to rescue an elegant, foolish film.

From user Ace3TT at this site. Fair use.

Gravity (2013). Grade: C+

What is Alfonso Cuarón thinking?

I enjoyed his Y tu mamá también; you couldn’t pay me enough to watch Ethan Hawke and Gweneth Paltrow in Great Expectations. (I mean, you probably could, I come pretty cheap, but I doubt you will.) His Harry Potter movie was the best looking of the bunch; it was also a Harry Potter movie. Children of Men and Roma had strong stories sometimes overpowered by the visuals — in one case in Roma, I thought this was really cruel. And his recent Disclaimer for the Cupertino Channel was awful.

In short, I never know what Cuarón is thinking, or how much he’s thinking it. (Very like his countryman and contemporary Guillermo del Toro, in that way!)

Here, perhaps never in the history of film has so much loving effort gone into a movie so considered and so dumb. Stunning visuals and sound design are betrayed by a basic plot about how Earth orbit works that strains credulity to its breaking point, then unhooks credulity and casts it adrift into space.

Characters go from one familiar orbiting thing to another and it looks like they’re just all a few football fields apart. Uh-uh. No. And there’s a key dramatic scene which violates Newton’s First Law. And everyone zips around in spacesuits with jetpacks way too quickly. I’m not asking that this be 2001, but don’t ask me to swallow QUITE so much, will ya?

Oh, and Sandra Bullock plays a woman whose kid recently died, and so she’s numb to all emotion (until she’s not). Don’t they have psychological testing for NASA missions? Methinks they do.

Bullock is good and affecting here. (Although, when her helmet comes off, her hair doesn’t get quite as poofy as it would a a similarly-coiffed woman in orbit.) Per Wiki, it seems that Bullock was about 10th in line for the role. I’m glad they picked her, she’s very relatable. You need her to carry the second half.

And George Clooney almost saves the show as the guy you'd want around when you're in a lifeboat, it's leaking, and there are sharks in the water. And on that level, as a simple outdoor (VERY outdoor) survival movie, Gravity works emotionally. But, my God, the plot is goofy.

Cuarón apparently wrote this with his son in three weeks. I wish they’d put more effort into it. Could it have been possible to make this story work without all the strains on logic? I’m not sure. But certainly they must have known that this was stretching plausibility a whole lot.

Ed Harris (from The Right Stuff and Apollo 13) is around for a brief time as the voice of Mission Control. You’ll miss him when he’s gone. There’s a moment later when a despairing Bullock makes radio contact with an earthbound Inuit who doesn’t understand a word she’s saying. Be sure and check out the DVD extra titled “Aningaaq” where we see this scene from the Inuit man’s point of view. It’s a nice short, directed by son Jonás Cuarón.

Are the effects (mostly) great? Sure. They’re by British company Framestore, which certainly has a long list of credits… not many good movies, though. (Chicken Run and Paddington 2 were neat.) That’s not a reflection on Framestore in any way… it’s just that most movies heavily reliant on visual effects aren’t going to be very good. (After all, what was the best thing in 2001? The pissy, jealous computer!) One thing I will hand to Cuarón: it’s almost always clear what’s going on during the effects shots and action sequences. Frequently, in heavily-CGI movies, those sequences are an incoherent mess!

If you like, you can watch Neal deGrasse Tyson describe some things he liked/found wrong in the movie, here:

I want to know more about those “tears in space” experiments! Those sound nifty.

I saw this in the theater, was dazzled by the effects, bought the Blu-Ray, and have never enjoyed the movie since. And I've tried. Oh, well. It’s really too bad, because Bullock and Clooney are giving their damndest here — would that they had a better script to go on. Maybe next time.