Critical Recommendation: Gravity

"Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night" - Sarah Williams

In a lot of ways, I feel like Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is a case study for how and where a critic's sensibilities and an audience member's sensibilities part ways, and so I hope you don't mind if I devote my ninetieth article to spitting in the face of a mere 3.9-out-of-5 star audience score on Google user reviews and explaining why Sandra Bullock's heavy breathing fest is, ironically enough, just about as close to a perfect movie as I've ever seen. Alongside The Martian and Interstellar, it's one of the greatest space movies ever made, and even though it doesn't flesh out some of its aspects as thoroughly as its two galactic and intergalactic compatriots do, it more than makes up for this by possessing by far the tightest writing of the lot, and frankly some of the tightest writing I've ever seen in any movie, set in outer space or not. Gravity is essentially an hour and a half of Sandra Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone, a first-time astronaut, trying to survive a catastrophic and unforeseen series of unfortunate events that occur while she's on a spacewalk. That's pretty much it, and to be honest, this is really refreshing in a world that is oversaturated with subplots that too often only detract from the value of a film. Cuarón wants to do one thing and one thing only with this movie, and that thing he wants to do is to tell an epic yet intimate story of survival. And man, what a story he tells. Best of all, he doesn't try to fit any other type of story in here and keeps the focus solely on Dr. Stone and her struggle to see even the next minute. But enough rambling from me talking about things that will probably only get doubled down on in later sections of the article. Let's start this review off properly.

As I said, Gravity follows first-time spacewalker Dr. Ryan Stone and the struggle of her and her astronaut colleague Matt Kowalski to survive after Explorer, the space shuttle they were dispatched in to do repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope, is hit by quickly-orbiting space debris courtesy of an old Russian spy satellite shot down by its owners.

I want to start by saying that the directing and execution of this movie are just otherworldly. If our characters are doing something in this movie or if something is happening to them, it's important to the plot in some way. Not a second of this film's runtime is wasted on subplots that get dropped later on or character arcs that go nowhere, and to put it concisely, Gravity is one of the most intentional movies I've ever seen, and this is definitely the film's greatest strength. Not even some of the greatest computer visuals ever put to screen distracted me from its narrative construction, although any film that devotes entire terabytes-large hard drives to rendering near-photorealistic solar panels getting shredded has my attention. I feel your pain, visual effects people, and more on that later. But back to the execution of the film. Gravity finds what works and then sticks to a really simple playbook with its plot, and while this approach is safe, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't effective. In fact, it's so effective that I'm not really sure there's anything I would add to this movie or take out of it, and even one plot point that bugged me for a while that had to do with a certain hallucination has actually grown on me the more I think about it. I hesitate to use the term perfect movie, but I don't know how else to express what I'm feeling. The writing in this movie is just flawless, and when combined with Cuarón's expert direction, Gravity is a true force to be reckoned with.

Another thing I love about Gravity is that it feels like it has genuine and dangerous stakes. The threats to Dr. Stone are immediate and very in-your-face, and this film doesn't really let audiences rest when Stone solves one problem before it throws her headlong into another problem of greater weight. And then, when it does let her and, by extension, us breathe, it only does so strategically to let you take in the true, uh, gravity of Stone's situation and the true vastness of space, and it does so in ways that just made me catch my breath at the beauty on display. Space is so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time, and Cuarón captures both in equally effective measure. As time goes on, the toll that this trial is taking on Stone becomes clear, and little snippets of her personal life that are revealed effectively put me in her space boots. I found myself caring about Stone's plight because the movie so clearly did, and because it did, it effectively portrayed it in ways both rudimentary and abstract.

And, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the visuals are dazzling and beautiful and really do evoke both an immediate sense of danger as well as a visceral feeling of isolation. Gravity has some of the best visual effects work I've ever seen in a movie, and I think that its VFX often flies under people's radar because what was rendered was stuff that exists in our world rather than aliens and such. In short, what we see in this movie with our eyes is dazzling. In detail, the line between cinematography and visual effects is very blurred in this movie, and the two complement each other wonderfully in ways that just wowed me and really made me contemplate the bigness of space. This movie contains a lot of long takes, and I don't even want to imagine the work that went into rendering them with the level of detail that's on display here. I don't want to imagine the precision and care that had to go into the practical shooting and lighting to prevent issues with rendering the light accurately. I don't want to imagine the planning that had to go into the long takes. I don't want to imagine the continuity. This kind of stuff just makes my head spin, and I imagine that the visual effects artists had a lot of sleepless nights, bad coffee, and panic attacks when something got misplaced on the digital desktop or the physical one. The scale of these visual effects is just unlike anything I've ever seen, and best of all, they added to the film's sense of realism and immersion rather than detracting from it, which is too rare of a commodity these days when it comes to science fiction cinema.

All things considered, I'm a little hard-pressed to put into words what Gravity did to me, and so I hope that you're satisfied with my attempts to do so. As Dr. Stone so effectively and concisely put it, "I hate space," and trust me, after the credits had rolled, I did too. Parents, if your kid wants to be an astronaut and you deem this to be a poor life decision, show them this movie, and then that should dissuade them of any notions they may have of signing up for NASA. But really, despite all the danger present in this film, the sheer beauty on display is equally magnificent, and once the credits had rolled on Gravity, I kind of knew that I had watched a once-in-a-lifetime film and a mighty well-made one at that. I'm probably never going to see another movie that makes me think and feel exactly like this one did again, and you know what? That's fine. I would include this movie in my "favorite movies" section on this blog, but I must say that oftentimes, it was very hard to enjoy simply because it was so well-made and terrifying, and played with my head too much for me to strictly speaking enjoy. But even if it's not the most fun movie of all time, Gravity is still a remarkable epic that captures the vastness and danger of space extremely effectively. That said, I do understand that some people weren't too fond of this movie when it first came out, despite its garnering near-universal critical acclaim. If you're one of those people, I would encourage you to go back and watch the movie again with the pacing in mind, and maybe you'll understand why I'm praising it so highly. And if you haven't seen this movie before, you know what to do. Gravity is a technical marvel that possesses an extremely impressive understanding of stories and why they work or don't work, and also happens to have a strangely intelligent grasp of the wonderful, mysterious, beautiful, and ethereal.

There's really nothing else like it out there.

Gravity - 10/10

Isaiah 40:12-14