Nice Shirt at The Movies

This past weekend saw the release of the hot new Alfonso Cuarón space film 'Gravity'. The following are a few thoughts after seeing the movie. 

The movie seemed to have the perfect ingredients for 'a great film'  - cult director, great cast, dreamy subject. It all added up to a rare thing at the cinema these days - an adult blockbuster. It was released in the US a month earlier than over here (we'll save the rant about why that still happens all the time for another blogpost) to one of the biggest October box office openings ever and to rave reviews.

The trailer looked amazing - A-MAZ-ING - not least because of the highly-illogical 2K resolution version of it you could watch on YouTube. 

If Gravity is as good a representation of space exploration as we're led to believe, it's amazing how everything looks a bit rubbish in space and breaks really easily.  

It surely had to deliver on the stratospheric hype behind it - we trust in Alfonso! Unfortunately though... it didn't quite manage it. 

Hate to say it, but the trailer is a big problem. Call it flogging the same dead horse that bolted a long long time ago, but again this is another case of trailer spoiling things by showing too much of the final film. If you've happened to have seen the trailer, you've probably seen a good third of the admittedly very tense action in the film. There's three big set pieces in the film, so by watching the trailer you've already knocked out one of them. 

(Having said that, there might be a vague whiff of ¡SPOILERS! in this review if you haven't seen it.)

This problem is amplified in this film particularly, as all the action is actually all very a bit... well, samey. The film is basically about bobbing about in space in varying degrees of peril, so once you've already been exposed to a good degree of it, there's not going to be too much else on offer.

"Bobbing about"

It's easy after a while to be desensitised to the peril, partly due to the trailer experience, but also due to the fact that by the time you've got quite a good way into the film, it's very obvious that the main character is going to survive, no matter what is thrown at her. By the time the film's big climax comes around, you're actually more exasperated by the inevitability of it all rather then left gasping at a miraculous space escape.

The most interesting scene is one where there's an unlikely reunion between the two main characters after you're lead to assume that one of them must have died. You sit up straight at this point at the possibility that finally, maybe, the film could go anywhere other then the increasingly obvious conclusion. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they be somewhere between the two, between the heaven(s) and the earth?

 No, actually, they're not. It just turns out that the scene is actually just a dream one of characters is having (paging Bobby Ewing in Dallas), so any intrigue is washed away like a bit of old seaweed at low tide, leaving you instead watching a boring and quite distracting backstory unfold further.

This backstory felt shoehorned in, feeling almost as though it had been shot afterwards and slotted into the film to give it that sense of meaning, life and spontaneity that is lacking from the film in general, tying back to the central conceit of the film that it is just a couple of people bobbing about in space a bit.

It's a real visual, visceral treat this film -  the scene with a deconstructing International Space Station is expletive-inducing and alone is worth going to see in IMAX. Even the relatively mundane-seeming spacewalk in the opening scene is enough to induce clammy palms, long before the intense drama fully kicks off. 

There has been lots of discussion about Gravity's scientific inaccuracies, so we've posted this diagram to hopefully help clear things up. 

It would have been amazing if the film could have maintained this tension and intrigue all the way  but unfortunately it doesn't, leaving the film a few stars short of a full constellation.