Gravity

Talk with me about movies and eventually the subject of 3D and my total disdain for it will surface. A lot of people said they felt the same way until they saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo. I wouldn't know; I saw it in 2D on DVD and didn't feel like I'd missed out on anything. As far as I could tell, the movie was brilliant without it. There's no denying the technology is impressive, however, and maybe if I'd seen Hugo at the movies I'd be singing its three-dimensional praises like I'm about to do for this movie. It seems what we're seeing now is the end of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era and the beginning of the Wrath of Khan era. The tech demo is over. Now the artists can start playing with it, and next up to bat is Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity. I'm going to get something out of the way really quick: I loved Gravity. Bear that in mind as I say two things I never thought I would about a film that I loved:
1. You will only ever watch it once.
2. You will have wasted that one chance if you don't see it in 3D on an IMAX screen.

One of Gravity's greatest strengths is its simplicity. It's hard to be this simple, to strip away all temptations of deeper character complexities so that the audience may immediately empathise and identify with them. It's very important that the audience has this connection straight away in Gravity, because when Sandra Bullock's Ryan is cartwheeling through infinite space, we're supposed to be in that suit with her, wondering how the fuck we're going to survive this. Ryan is an impossibly rigid professional rookie on her first space walk who focuses unnecessarily on her job because she's haunted by the death of her daughter. George Clooney's Kowalski is an impossibly charming seasoned veteran on his last space walk who's never gotten over the view of Earth and likes listening to country music in his helmet. Ground Control is an impossibly warm and familiar voice on a routine space walk played by Ed Harris, the same Ground Control voice in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. We know people with these personalities, some of us may even be these people, and it's through that familiarity that we immediately impress ourselves upon them. You'll never stop and say, "They'd never do that" because the characters have zero complexity; they're driven completely by the compulsion to survive, which is exactly how you'd like to think you'd be.

On top of survival, Gravity deals with themes of rebirth. The death of Ryan's child resulted in a type of death for her as well. She confides in Kowalski that when she's on ground, at night she drives endlessly and listens to any radio station she can tune in to, so as to tune out her grief. She swallows herself in work so that she never has the ability to acknowledge mortality. Put simply, she's dead on the inside. And it's only when she's faced with the very real possibility of her own death that she realises her (and our) desire to survive. And so when the satellite is beset upon by the field of space debris ten minutes into the film, Ryan overcomes her emotional death by being born again. The evidence is everywhere: Kowalski somehow colliding with her after she tumbles way out into space, the way a single sperm in a few hundred million finds the egg, Ryan floating in anti-gravity and curling into the fetal position as she boards the ISS, finally back in the womb, even her going through labour as the landing pod hurtles down towards Earth, bringing her once again into the brave, new world. But perhaps the greatest example comes at the film's conclusion, when Ryan emerges from the pod, into water. She reaches land and, overwhelmed by the gravitational pull, can't even push herself up. She literally learns to crawl again, before she can walk.

So now that all of the pretentious theming discussion is concluded, we can start talking about the heeps sik graphix. Gravity could have been set anywhere. Alfonso Cuaron made a fucking genius decision to put it in space. When you're dealing with that much negative space (pun always intended), any foreground element is going to seem like it's coming out at you. When you pair that with what technology is capable of today, you're finally achieving those "GOSH! WOW!" moments you saw in those old, cheesy 3D movie ads. I'm unashamed to say during a scene where debris was rapidly colliding with objects and flying towards the camera, I flinched. A lot. But where Alfonso Cuaron truly excels with this is that he doesn't let the 3D just be a gimmick. It becomes an essential component to the emotional connection we have with the film. When Kowalski sacrifices himself, realising he and Ryan are going to float away into space if he doesn't release the tether holding the two of them together, he slowly recedes into the distance, forever a stark white spot on a black canvas. He's there. He's just right there, and it never feels like if we didn't just reach out a little further that we couldn't save him. But we can't, and neither can Ryan, and the visual effect makes it hurt that much more. Another brilliant example comes later, when Ryan has finally made radio contact with someone only to find they're unable to understand English. Language barriers are broken however, when Ryan hears the cries of a baby and the barking of a dog. Together, they bark and howl as Ryan resigns herself to death and allows the oxygen to be drained out of the pod. She begins to cry, and her tears collect into a single sphere that lifts off her face and into the foreground, taking the camera's focus and frosting up in front of us. I'm crying as I type this; it was a stunningly beautiful little moment achieved only by 3D.

Gravity reminded me a lot of Jaws. Apart from one direct reference, at its core I see them as very similar films for this reason: they're both about human beings struggling to survive an environment that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Most of Jaws takes place on the ocean. We're surrounded by it, it's very much a part of our existence, but we're completely out of our element in it. We're slower and unable to breathe in it. On the ocean, we're the inferior species to the shark. We desperately want to think we can survive the ocean though, and when we do, we feel like we've been born again, like our existence has been validated. In Gravity, the shark is replaced by the debris field. Completely unbiased and unforgiving, it hurtles around and around the Earth's circumference, wreaking havoc on whatever falls in its path every time it comes around again, just like the shark. But we're human. We're out of our element, but we're human. This life has meaning. We can get through anything. We're strong. We're survivors. We're The Goddamn Batman. Right? The credits for Gravity started rolling. I exhaled deeply and leaned forward. As I did, I realised that my hands were adhered to the arm rests, my back was sweating and the only thought running through my head was, "I made it." That's a pretty good endorsement of this film. It was an exhilarating, unbelievably tense, life-affirming examination of human survival that I will never watch again.

P.S. I couldn't find a place for it, but an all-too-brief heaping of praise has to be given to the sound design. The trailers would have you believe Gravity was going to ignore the audial restrictions of space, but that is not so. Space is silent, and we only hear environmental sounds through the vibrations that would be heard inside of the character's suits. As a result, drama is intensified through the soundtrack, an incredible ongoing instrumental score that occasionally sweeps into an overbearing cacophony as the film calls for it. Truly, it has to be heard to be believed.