I read one review of this stunning film that wondered why it was called Gravity (the review was in the Guardian - and it was positive) since most of the movie's scenes are set where there is a lack of gravity.
And there's the rub. At the altitude the film is set, Earth's gravity is almost as strong as it is here on the surface. It's just that the spacecraft and all the other debris are travelling so fast horizontally that they permanently fall around the planet, apparently weightless. But the reviewer doesn't understand this and thinks he knows how it should be up there. Stuck as we are in an environment where everything falls down, most of us are like the reviewer in that we have little idea how things work in the highly newtonian realm of spaceflight.
Gravity does dominate up there and I'll bet Director Alfonso Cuarón knows it. He and the team behind this movie seem to have researched the details of space flight very well indeed. Their work has a reality that is utterly compelling and believable. The lighting and textures of the ships, their components and, most important, of Earth itself are as if taken directly from the reams of photography that has come to us from recent actual space travellers. Yet Cuarón has carefully bent the truth enough to allow his story to play out so that it probably requires a geek to be able to pick holes in the technicalities.
I'm often described as a space geek and I saw much that I could pick at - in the physics, procedures or storyline. But I didn't care and neither should anyone else. This vicarious trip into the glorious vacuum above Earth was a treat, a reminder of our puny selves in a great universe that does not need nor care about our presence. The film accurately portrayed the beauty of our home and the place it has near our Sun while pointing out that we only get to exist off the planet by our intelligence and wits. This could also be true for our species on the planet if we want to maintain our civilisation.
The movie's first shot is very, very long, and bravely so, displaying Cuarón's sensitivity to the IMAX format. In it, Clooney and Bullock sadly start out as an annoying double act. He is seen showboating around the Shuttle and Hubble in a jetpack with a carefree wisecracking one-dimensionality that was in complete contrast to the film's spatial and metaphorical depth. No astronaut would ever act in such a cavalier fashion. Bullock, meanwhile, sets a tone of a barely professional astronaut who, at the drop of a space wrench, turns into a panicking insult to the intelligence of womanhood.
I struggled to buy into Bullock's character until the second half. Her daughter's backstory gave some 2001-esque depth and emotion to an otherwise simpering little girl of a character who did not display much of the toughness and competence I would have expected from anyone in the US astronaut corp. Only towards the end did she show the kind of thoughtful pluck drilled into these hard-nosed technocrats.
The claustrophobic quality of the spacecraft interiors inhabited by Bullock sat in awesome contrast to the infinite exteriors rendered by Cuarón's special effects team. This is perfect material for the Imax 3D format. Such care had been taken with the details. So many nods to real events in space flight - interior fires, flooded capsules, crashing Soyuz. I nearly cheered when I recognised the constellations in view over the night-time Earth.
The re-entry scene was stunningly realised. I felt like I really was seeing hardware passing through air at 5 miles per second. It was the visual highlight of a visually stunning movie. As I left the cinema, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, "That's what Imax 3D was made for." Amen, my friend.
