The most striking moment of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity comes when Dr. Ryan Stone, portrayed mostly convincingly by Sandra Bullocks, finally makes her way to partial safety of interior of the International Space Station, free of the ropes from the prematurely deployed Soyuze parachute yet unaccompanied by her lone extraterrestrial companion, fellow astronaut and self-sacrificer Matt Kowalski (played by George Clooney). Stone peels off her space suit, revealing a shorthaired, worried looking Bullock, and assumes the fetal position. The camera spins around: there is no up or down. She has just experienced the destruction of her ship and the loss of two of her fellow spacewalkers, and is reentering the womb of the mother space.
As an emotional journey, Gravity excels. While a bit heavy-handed at times, the film puts the audience in a state of mind not often felt: complete helplessness. Stone is so alone in the vast emptiness of space, with not even Houston (voiced by Ed Harris, star of 1983 space classic The Right Stuff) to talk to. Space is a lonely and dangerous place, even more so when debris from a damaged Russian satellite is speeding around the globe and passing you every 90 minutes, destroying everything in its path. Gravity excellently contrasts the wide open of space with the narrowness and focus of the human mind, creating a feeling of fear not felt in recent movies. The attempt of realism (lack of air friction, silent explosions), completely worked for this film, even heightening the terror.
The 17-minute opening shot depicts the whole first act of the play, and from the start a distinct shooting style is established. As opposed to previous long shots of Cuaron’s films, which are one angle following a set routine, the shots of Gravity combine several types of shots using the floating, gravity-free aspect of space to float the camera between them in a continuous take. This mood set by the style is perfect, the camera (and the audience through it’s lens) is almost transformed into another astronaut floating through space. This also supports the flip-flop in the film between relative calm and chaos, as the camera can float lazily during the calm and soar and maneuver during the chaos.
Yet at the same time, and relative to the magnificence of the visual aspects, Gravity fails badly. Written by Cuaron and his son Jonas, the script is cliched and has poor character development. The audience is not lead on to Stone’s rough past; they are forced-fed the information and then made to accept it without further mention. There is no buildup to the sadness of her character, the film spends as little time as possible addressing key character information.
Clooney plays the same aging, sarcastic, smooth-talking character as he has been known to play. His character Kowalksi, the calm-under-pressure veteran, has little to no background and hardly changes as a character. He seems constantly uninvolved, only worried about breaking a space-walk record, while Stone, who unrealistically was launched into space without complete training, flies about in terror. And when Kowalksi is released into space to his death, it is almost as if he comes full circle. He is purely an astronaut, not a scientist or doctor, and it is hinted that he has nothing left for him back home, so a death in space seems perfect for him.
