Alfonso Cuarón makes being stranded in space frighteningly immediate, with Sandra Bullock giving the spectacle someone worth worrying about. The dialogue sometimes insists on feelings she has already made clear, but this is a gripping survival thriller.
Gravity is a gripping survival thriller whose dialogue occasionally makes a simple situation sound more profound than it needs to. Alfonso Cuarón has enough to work with in the spectacle of people trying to move through space without coming to harm. The lack of a complicated plot is a sensible choice: the distance between a person and safety can provide all the drama required. He gives this problem his full attention for much of the film’s 91 minutes.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography makes that distance frighteningly difficult to judge. The long opening take lets the camera travel around the astronauts without supplying a steady viewpoint from which to assess their danger. We were frightened by the loss of a reliable sense of up or down. The effects remain convincing through these changes of perspective, so there is little chance to dismiss the danger as something happening inside a computer.
Editors Cuarón and Mark Sanger deserve credit for keeping those extended passages from feeling like demonstrations. The pace follows the difficulty of the task in front of the astronauts, allowing us to register effort before demanding the next alarm. Andy Nicholson’s production design helps us judge the distances involved, giving the astronauts’ movements a scale we can understand. The surroundings never become so busy that we lose sight of a body within them.
Sandra Bullock, as Ryan Stone, makes the physical business convincing enough to keep the film personal. Her movements suggest effort rather than the weightless ease the images might encourage us to expect. George Clooney, playing Matt Kowalski, is welcome company, but we watch Bullock more closely. She lets fear interrupt Stone’s thinking without making her seem incapable of it, and that is enough to keep us concerned.
The sound is just as important to the unease as the moving camera. Silence removes the usual reassurance of a busy soundtrack, and the shifts in sound draw us closer to the astronauts’ experience. Steven Price’s music is less persuasive when it presses for an emotional response that Bullock has already earned. At its most emphatic, it tells us how much to care.
The screenplay, by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, has the same weakness. It wants us to think about faith and the will to live, and it sometimes talks too much to make certain that we do. The sentiment is sincere, but the dialogue can be clumsy about explaining what Stone’s survival might mean. A survival thriller can work with a simple character; it becomes less convincing when that character has to tell us what we should be feeling.
See it on a large screen if possible, and in 3D if there is a choice. The extra depth helps make distance a problem we can feel, rather than a figure somebody has to explain. At home, a dark room and undivided attention will do more for it than any prior interest in space travel. Plan to leave the messages unanswered for a while.
