 |
| Bullock surviving in Gravity. |
«««« Gravity. Written by Alfonso
Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón.
Directed by Alfonso
Cuarón. At area theaters.
We've seen better days on the final frontier. The space shuttle is
now a museum piece. We can find no national consensus on what NASA's next
mission should be. At a time when access to space is essential for national
defense, global climate monitoring, and not getting squashed by space rocks,
NASA has been downgraded to a "non-essential" service. As of this
writing, almost the entire agency is shut down, a pawn in the ongoing budget
follies in Washington.
But
all is not lost. Into these dark times comes Alfonso Cuarón's magnificent Gravity,
a vivid reminder that leaving the planet still has the potential to blow minds.
Budgeted at a fraction of a real space mission—only $100 million—this movie may
inspire the most kids to become astronauts since the glory days of the space
race.
Thanks
to Star Wars and Star Trek, we tend to think space
travel is old hat. Of course, we're wrong: with the sound effects and laser
beams and spacecraft zipping around like WW2 fighter planes, neither of these
(and Star Wars in particular) have anything to do with the
reality of living and working in space. More than any movie since Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968), Gravity gets the experience
right, in all its strange and haunting glory. Space really is, like, another
world.
The
script (by Cuarón and
his son Jonás) is a concerto for two instruments. Sandra Bullock is rookie
astronaut Ryan Stone, on her first shuttle mission to service the Hubble
Telescope. She and veteran flyer Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are on a
spacewalk when things go terribly, fatally wrong. Nothing more need be said
about what happens, except to say that Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También) has spared no effort in getting the details right. From the
seamless simulation of zero gravity to how astronauts "hear" sounds
through the vibrations in their suits, it's hard to believe Gravity was
not actually shot in orbit.
Equally
important, Cuarón goes
into space only with the stuff he needs. This survival story has no extraneous
exposition, no spoon-fed sentiment, no manufactured love interest beyond,
perhaps, a few hints. We never see guys with pocket-protectors sweating it out
back in Mission Control. Like in Children of Men—and unlike the
jump-cutting norm--- Cuarón is stingy
with montage, preferring to present the action in a series of masterful long
takes. We might be tempted to call his approach "minimalist",
except that the film never feels like the least Cuarón could do. Sometimes his camera soars, Kubrick-style;
sometimes it flits into the character's helmets, literally looking through
their eyes. The film is full of details that should reward second and third
viewings, on the biggest screen you can find.
Clooney
is Clooney here, the modern incarnation of rough-hewn movie warhorses like Gary
Cooper or Burt Lancaster. His appeal is definitely post-feminist, however, as
his character is a supporting one only, dedicated to empowering his partner.
The star is really Bullock, as she develops her post-ingenue legacy of quirky
vulnerability wrapped around an iron core.
Critics
like this one have often complained that the potential of movie CGI is
theoretically limitless, but depressing in practice. Though filmmakers can now
visualize absolutely anything they want, they too often resort to the same old
dragons, hobbits, and terminators. With Gravity, Cuarón has at last given us
something truly new. Let's hope that, unlike NASA, he's on the cusp of a
beginning, not an end.
© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment