Ever since I was little, I’ve been illogically frightened by the idea of space. I remember fixating on the spinning Universal Studios logo that preceded some of my childhood movies and feeling a terrified thrill at seeing what was possibly my first image of earth in space. The incredible smallness of human existence might have been at the core of my dread, but I mostly remember a kind of visual vertigo when I looked at the corners of the screen that the earth graphic didn’t fill. The background was black and studded with stars like the night sky, but unlike the night sky it was possible, deep and dangerous.
Since then I’ve only felt the same kind of visual vertigo when I’ve stood at the foot of great mountains, or looked down from great heights. I believe that the sensation has to do with how certain physical phenomena confrontationally and thoroughly confound perspective. When I first stood in the Court of the Patriarchs in Zion National Park and looked up at the mountains, I saw unachievable altitudes filled with rock, altitudes that in my Michigan hometown were nothing but unpunctuated flat sky above flat ground. When I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite, I saw from impossible altitudes the impossible depths of Yosemite Valley, depths that in my hometown were complacently filled with rock and sediment. Outer space is in many ways the ultimate mountain or valley, the ultimate confounding perspective, that sight that exists so far from any hometown, so lost to any scale.
When a movie takes place in space, often the entity of space itself is ignored in favor of character and action, and space functions as a black backdrop for the same kinds of explosions and fight scenes that might take place on earth. Even when the laws of space are obeyed (air locks, space suits, shuttles), space is a set of rules and not a visual, physical presence. I can’t help but see space movies as a kind of noir genre just because of the loneliness, the coldness and the infinity that space implies, a desolation that often penetrates the story (Moon, Alien, Prometheus, 2001: A Space Odyssey). But although movies have used space to evoke effective moods, no visual conception of space has ever confounded or stunned me quite like that first view of the Universal logo when I was five or six years old – until this October’s release of Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
When I saw the trailer for Gravity, now Cuarón’s first world-wide box office hit, I was drawn in by how directly it played to my fears and fascinations with space. Instead of a hodge-podge of scenes set to tense music, for a minute and thirty seconds the trailer showcases a clip of the most climactic scene in the movie – an astronaut, Sandra Bullock, is attached to the large protruding arm of a shuttle, 372 miles above the earth according to text on the screen. Suddenly, the shuttle is hit by debris (from a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite), and is sent spinning with devastating speed, rotating wildly with the cartoonish physics of a carnival ride. As the shuttle sheds pieces, the arm itself is knocked off of the shuttle and spins end over end, carrying Bullock away from the structure and into space. Amid her rhythmic gasping we hear a voice in her headset urging her to ‘detach’ – she fumbles, then releases herself and goes tumbling away into darkness, the camera perspective inside her helmet confirming both her terror and the truth of her report: ‘I see nothing.’ The trailer ended and I realized that somewhere between Bullock’s amplified gasps, I had stopped breathing.
The scene from the trailer is just as breath-taking in the actual movie, especially as the careful integration of 3-D technology works to place the viewer directly inside of Cuarón’s realization of space. Here, the earth is no pale blue dot. Our blue and white orb is vast but unreliable, as it alternately takes up the entire shot (the two astronauts float in the dizzying grey area of ‘in front of’ and ‘above’) half of the shot, (George Clooney’s Matt Kowalski remarks on the sunrise), and none of the shot (structures disintegrate against blackness, the astronauts struggle towards a distant space station). Cuarón captures the feeling of space using innovative motion-capture techniques, filming the actors in what I’ve only heard described as a giant mechanical cage. However claustrophobic filming must have been for Bullock and Clooney, the results are utterly breath-taking. Cuarón thoroughly transforms the flatly star-studded night sky into exactly that which astounded me conceptually before visual technology could really show it to me– a space with depth, motion, and possibility.
Nervous first time mission specialist Ryan Stone (Bullock) and cocky veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney), the sole survivors of the first barrage of debris, battle space by separating themselves from it with space suits, oxygen tanks, and damaged shuttles. Explosions are often the cheap currency of action movies, generally used as the cheerful and expected accompaniment to an ass-kicking hero (or heroes, see: the damage to New York City in The Avengers), with no follow up on the devastating damages they might incur. In Gravity this action movie rule is reversed. Every explosion, every destroyed piece of equipment, takes away more life-saving structure and brings the enemy, in the form of nothingness and death, a little closer. Debris hits our heroes at stunningly high speeds and from nauseating depths, once functional machinery disintegrates dizzyingly around the camera, and space itself is ever-moving, deep and dark.
Gravity is worth seeing for its stunning cinematography, but isn’t flawless. Although the actors inject their much-needed movie star charm, the characters are as flat as Cuarón’s space is deep. Kowalski is wisecracking and confident to a weary fault, smooth, simple, and without a personal detail or flaw. In contrast, Stone’s one personal detail, coaxed out by Kowalski, feels trite and almost unnecessary – her young daughter died, and ever since, it’s implied, her life has been in a state of suspension. This plot point is supposed to connect us to Stone’s humanity, to make us understand that she perhaps has been emotionally ‘floating in space’ for a long time, and to lend motivation to her otherwise primitive struggle for survival. But it feels tired, both because the past personal tragedy is a cheap device to introduce depth to a character, and because the script does a weak job connecting the tragedy to Stone’s struggle. As long as we’ve abstracted this far, why can’t fighting to survive be enough? Furthermore, the dialogue is surprisingly bad, especially considering Cuarón’s history of excellent scripts, and the score distracting as it tries to make up for the lack of sound (explosions don’t make noise in space) with pointed, directive swells. But Gravity only seems to fail when it tries to elaborate beyond truly excellent visual storytelling. As much as it has been criticized, its failings are small because what it does well – conceptualizing the movement, perspective and terror of outer space – is a good 85% of the movie.
See it. It’s no Life of Pi, where Ang Lee’s storytelling and visual effects were so beautifully integrated as to be poetic, but neither is it Avatar, where impressive visual effects were discounted heavily by a stale plot and script. It’s innovative, visually stunning, and, regardless of its flaws, unlike anything I’ve seen before.
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