Review: Gravity

Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

Although touted as an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride by numerous critics, I was disappointed to find that midway through Alfonso Cuarón’s space catastrophe Gravity I was slumped, sinking into my chair. No, this is not because the seats at the VUE in Leeds are extremely comfortable, which they are. The reason was that for all its acclaim I personally did not find anything thrilling about this visual juggernaut. With numerous nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, including an extremely heavy-handed shot of Sandra Bullock in the foetal position, Gravity does create tangents between itself and Kubrick’s masterpiece of the late 60s. Unfortunately for Gravity, these tangents become vehicles for comparison.

Yes, they are extremely different films that both happen to be set in space but the greatest lesson that could be learnt from the tone of 2001 is that less is more. You can get a lot more tension from a simple “open the pod bay doors, HAL” than you can from a billion tonnes of debris soaring through space. Striking in terms of its visuals but lacking a worthwhile screenplay, Gravity rushes through a 91 minute runtime to become one of the most disappointing movie-going experiences I have ever had.

In Gravity we see Mission Specialist Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) on her first space shuttle mission with seasoned veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney) who is taking part in his last mission. During a spacewalk repairing a panel on the Hubble Telescope, Housten (voiced by Ed Harris) alerts them that debris from a satellite destroyed by a Russian missile has caused a chain reactions destroying other satellites and creating a cloud of debris that is hurtling round the earth. The astronauts soon lose contact with Mission Control before their shuttle is catastrophically damaged. Stone and Kowalski now must find contact with Housten or directly return to Earth.

I am not disputing that Gravity is an achievement visually and for the first 15 minutes I was more than happy to allow the images to wash over me. In a blackened movie theatre, it is almost as if you are floating with Stone and Kowalski. Bullock and Clooney do have a good back-and-forth and some good chemistry but their relationship stops its maturation early and never really goes beyond the unsubtle sexual tension that is clearly there between them. This film doesn’t do subtlety though. It all becomes too much so that you can’t move to the edge of your seat in anticipation because there is no tension. There is only the oppression you get from being bombarded by explosions that would make Michael Bay blush. The plot is very “...and then this happened, and then this happened”. Life threatening peril is followed by more life threatening peril, leaving little time for introspection, character development or emotion. All emotion is shoehorned into the film through the most contrived dialogue I have heard in recent years. Clooney does well as the wise-cracking veteran and Bullock gives a competent performance embodying the human spirit and they do rise above the material on occasion but the characters are so underdeveloped and clichéd that they just don’t engage you. This is what makes Gravity so disappointing. It really feels Cuarón senior and junior did not care. The screenplay feels like an excuse to make a film, not the reason they’re making it.

Gravity feels like a missed opportunity at a true cinematic landmark. Imagine you’re at a rock concert. An electric guitar player of technical brilliance comes onstage. He is fast, frantic and furious in his playing; a real virtuoso. You enjoy the first minute of the solo and maybe the second. The player carries on for another 20 minutes. There is no discernible melodic phrasing and soon even the volume becomes too much. That is what Gravity is to me. It is simply a lot of “look at how good I am” direction and technical trickery without real substance. This is so much so that the film doesn’t produce tension but rather the feeling of a crushing oppression that slams you back into your seat.

Rating: 4/10