During a particularly eye-popping scene in the astonishing new space thriller Gravity, I thought I saw my boyfriend, who was sitting next to me in the theater, yawn. For that fraction of a second, I questioned everything I knew about him, our relationship, and most damningly, his taste in movies. When I turned to look, however, I realized that his jaw was simply hanging open.
It's a far more appropriate response to one of the most astonishing cinematic spectacles ever created.
"How in the hell did they do that?" we wondered, walking out of the theater later. This is the sort of movie that inspires those kinds of conversations, that kind of awe. And if you're the sort of movie viewer who would rather walk into an extremely memorable movie experience completely cold, then do yourself a favor: Stop reading now, buy a ticket to see the movie this weekend in 3-D (IMAX preferred), and get ready to have your mind blown.
Minor spoilers for Gravity follow.
The movie is a sort of minimalist mobile, hung over the crib of the Earth, with only three things dangling from it: astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a biomedical engineer on her first mission in space; Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a veteran rocket jockey; and … some other guy. (Technically his name is Shariff, but let’s just say that he gets plucked off the mobile a little bit too early for it to really matter.)
After a deadly debris field -- damn those Russians! -- catastrophically damages the satellite and cuts off all communication between the astronauts and Earth, we’re left with two actors in a one-room play, albeit a room the size of the universe. The story is as small and personal as the setting is vast, and the movie's sense of space somehow captures those contradictions of scale: the agoraphobia of darkness extending infinitely in every direction, and the claustrophobia of being sealed inside tiny suits and shuttles that are the only insulation from instant death.
Space, as the opening sequence of the movie reminds us, is a place where the temperature can vacillate between -260 to 150 degrees, where there is no oxygen, where there is no sound. In short, "life is impossible." It’s a sentiment shared on multiple levels by Dr. Stone, a quiet, withdrawn woman who is difficult to love at the beginning of the movie, particularly compared to the jocular, talkative Kowalski, who jets around her like a kid on a zero-G rope swing, telling off-color stories about ex-wives and playing country music.
It's not long before we learn the reason for her stoicism: She lost a daughter in a terrifyingly mundane accident -- falling down on the playground -- and has never quite recovered from it. Stone mentions there’s no one who would mourn her if she didn’t come back, and we get the sense that she detached from the world long before she started floating above it.
It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for depression, or for grief: untethered and abandoned in a void so large that it boggles the mind, or simply shuts it down. You can tell, at times, that the idea of drifting away seems tempting to Stone, as if she could simply fall asleep in the infinite, inky snowbank of space. Much of the film is Stone’s struggle, both literally and figuratively, between when to hold on to things and when to let them go. For her part, Bullock acts the hell out of it, carrying almost the entire film on her shoulders in a transformative performance that seems destined for award nominations.
The characters spend a lot of time talking to themselves -- and to each other -- to literally fill the space, the way you turn on the TV in an empty house to feel like you’re not alone. If there’s any weakness in the film, it’s the on-the-nose dialogue that sometimes emerges from these monologues, which end up simply telling us what the film has already shown us. Still, this thematic rib-poking doesn’t meaningfully detract from either the film’s emotional impact or its staggering visual grandeur.
If ever there were a movie to see in 3-D, this is it. Where other 3-D films delight in shoving objects unexpectedly towards the viewer, here it’s far more powerful to see them falling away. With no gravity to anchor them, every character is just one firm shove away from hurtling into space forever, with nothing to slow them down. There’s a devastating long shot where something essential drifts away from Dr. Stone, receding from an image that fills the screen to a tiny speck. And in 3-D you feel every inch of the distance, growing slowly along with the sickening realization that it has been lost forever.
The zero-G environment is remarkable, and the way characters move through it feels alternately weightless and heavy, like moving through liquid; we see the lithe Bullock glide through the portals of a space station with the grace of a swimmer, while outside in space cables and cords splay out as languid as seaweed before snapping back like whips. There’s a breath and pulse to all of it, a rhythm that feels cyclical. Even the debris field -- the primary antagonist, aside from the deadliness of space -- has its own deadly orbit, reappearing to terrorize our heroes every 90 minutes as it hurtles its way around the earth.
Be warned: For all its dazzling cinematography, this is a tense, anxious thriller; once it begins, there’s little relief until the credits start rolling. If you have dreams later about Gravity, chances are they’ll be nightmares about fumbling, endlessly and fruitlessly for handholds on spacecraft that you can never quite grasp before you tumble into nothingness.
But rarely has that nightmare been so gorgeous to behold, or so unexpectedly life-affirming. I left the theater feeling like I'd witnessed something so incredible that I wanted to tug on the sleeve of the person next to me and say, "Did you see that?!" If you'd like to have an answer to that question when everyone is talking about Gravity come Monday, then I say to you again: Go buy a ticket. There are many things to say about this film, but the tl;dr version is this is a movie that demands to be beheld. So behold it, already.
