Cult-Movie Review: Gravity (2013)

The Academy has spoken, and Gravity (2013) has earned seven Oscars.

These awards are for: Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón).

I won’t quibble with those honors, because Gravity is a white-knuckle and immersing experience.

It’s like a “You are There” or “I Survived” close-up view of a very, very bad day in Earth orbit.

Part of what makes film in general so valuable a medium is its ability to take us to new places, and into new situations, and then to visualize them in convincing terms.

Undeniably, Gravity is astounding in its capacity to achieve this end.

Gravity is also the latest in a long-line of “space disaster” flicks like Marooned (1969) and Apollo 13 (1995), both of which also did well at Oscar time, and were also superbly visualized for their eras. All three films are grounded in contemporary reality, unlike, say Star Trek, for instance.

Gravity’s greatest creative achievement, however, I believe, is the way that it immediately -- and visually -- explores the “rules” (or Physics) of life in space, and then adheres to those rules in harrowing situation after harrowing situation.

Very quickly, viewers begin to understand that life in space means understanding a whole new playbook. 

Commendably, audiences learn this fact exactly as Sandra Bullock’s astronaut, Ryan Stone, learns it. We gain our “space legs” -- our experience -- as she does, and that makes for some incredibly impactful and highly cinematic moments.  We feel bonded to her character because we go through the ringer with her.

Meanwhile, George Clooney is the “seen-it-all” voice of experience and reason, a source of comfort when the debris is hurtling at us (and Stone), willy-nilly. He is a wonderful presence in the film: laid-back, charming, and utterly re-assuring.

Although a visceral, convincing, and utterly involving movie experience, Gravity proves notably less impressive on two important fronts.

Both are outside the visual or so-called traditional “technical” considerations.

First, the film relies on Lifetime TV-Movie-styled storytelling when there is simply no need to do so. 

Specifically, it provides Bullock’s Stone an all-too predictable (and trite) “tragic” back-story that undercuts the film’s sense of hard reality. 

The second concern is one of implication, frankly, and is, I believe, a symptom of our narcissistic times. 

Both Marooned and Apollo 13 concerned endangered astronauts and the best of humanity engaged in solving seemingly unsolvable problems.

The idea in both efforts was that though space might be a dangerous place, it is worth exploring for our species as a whole.

These films, in some sense, are about the space program, and the important fact of its continuance. 

Missions may fail, and -- God forbid -- astronauts may die. 

But we don’t stop exploring when we experience a setback. We don’t stop pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. Instead, we mourn, and then push forward again.

Gravity has no such larger global point to make beyond Ryan Stone’s soap opera back-story. She learns to “walk again” literally, after the death of her daughter and the harrowing events in space. 

But meanwhile, every significant technological asset in space is utterly destroyed in a single day, setting the progress of mankind back at least a decade.

So while it’s rewarding in a personal sense that Stone utilizes this crisis to find her true north again, it is sad that this personal achievement comes at such a high cost for mankind.

It is also sad that Gravity makes no notation of this fact.

Essentially then, Gravity is an extremely well-made Hollywood blockbuster, and ultimately that is precisely how it plays. It is entertaining, exciting as Hell, visually-adroit, and occasionally quite moving.

But ultimately it’s a bit facile and superficial too. All the hosannas -- and 3-D -- in the world can't hide that fact.

“Life in Space is Impossible”

In Earth’s orbit, the space shuttle Explorer conducts a repair mission on the Hubble Telescope.

Leading the way is Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), an engineer who installs a prototype scanner in the Hubble under the watchful eye of veteran mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney).

Mission Control in Houston soon warns the team, however, that the Russians have unexpectedly launched a missile to destroy a Cold War satellite, and that the subsequent debris field could squelch communications, and adversely impact the repair mission.

The mission is consequently aborted as a tidal wave of deadly shrapnel rockets through space and destroys the Explorer, killing most of her crew. 

Stone and Kowalski survive the debris storm, and use his thruster pack to attempt to reach the International Space Station in 90 minutes, the interval until the debris field reaches their position a second time.

Kowalski is lost en route, leaving Stone to board the space station, and get to an escape module: a Soyuz. 

The vessel’s parachute, however, has already deployed, leaving it incapable of re-entry and tangled on its moorings. 

Stone must summon all of her survival instincts and endurance to free the Soyuz from the station and make her way to a Chinese space station, Tiangong, where another escape pod -- presumably functional --awaits.

“I Hate Space...”

Gravity certainly has some incredible wonders to show its audience, from how our beautiful planet looks from orbit, to the (frightening) way a fire can spread rapidly in zero gravity (in energetic little spheres…).

From start to finish, the film’s visualizations are incredibly impressive, and Gravity alternates meaningfully between a sense of wonder, and a sense of heart-pounding, relentless danger.

There’s also a sense of the spiritual here, and some visual metaphor too.

Ryan Stone has left Earth -- and her feelings -- behind because of the senseless death of her four-year old daughter. The girl fell playing tag on the playground and died.

Accordingly, Stone has now traveled as far away from her ‘feelings” as she possibly can…all the way to Earth orbit. 

When the disaster strikes the shuttle crew, Gravity provides a visual symbol for the meaningless of Stone’s current life: she spins in space, adrift, unable to stop her endless rotation, unable to break out of her current “mode” of existence. 

She’s just…spinning in place.

Then, just look at the impressive scene in which Stone reaches the space station, after just having begun the process of learning to “live” in space. It’s like she is re-born, and the imagery reflects the womb, with Stone curled-up in the fetal position.

Late in the film, following this re-birth, Stone has a strange experience involving a “visitor” or “guest” (think: Solaris) that could be a delusion, or could be a sign that we all exist beyond our lives, beyond our technology.

This acknowledgment that we are more than just “mortal” is the very thing that permits Stone to make her peace about her child’s death, and continue the struggle to survive. 

Finally, when Stone lands on Earth, she at last feels the full weight of “gravity” regarding her child’s death.

But she doesn’t cower. She doesn’t retreat.  She stands up…and walks on her own two feet. She doesn’t let the “gravity” of her sadness pull her down or defeat her.

I love that the movie thinks in terms of symbolic imagery, and I found many of these visuals quite beautiful indeed.  It is rare for a science-based movie to feature a woman in a leading role, and so I applaud Gravity for making Dr. Stone the center of the action. I also applaud Bullock's brilliant performance. She deserved her Oscar Nomination and then some.

My major concern with this through-line with the dead child, as noted above, is that it is extremely facile and -- truth be told -- a bit schmaltzy.

Why is it not sufficient to feature an astronaut who endures this terrible crisis in space, and who must keep surviving one threat after the other simply because of humanity’s all important survival-instinct? 

Why must we contextualize this brilliant woman in terms of a traditional role (being a Mom), and not her role as a scientist at the top of her field, and a capable astronaut to boot?

Instead, the movie plays relentlessly on the heart-strings.

We get a child’s (meaningless) death -- a child who apparently broke on impact like a china doll -- and quite frankly, we’ve seen all this a million times before.

Just off the top of my head, I remember seeing the dead-child plot-line in Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Stargate (1994) and in Children of Men (2005) too. I'm sure there are others.

My point is that this manufactured drama is familiar, and over-done, and therefore works against the real inherent drama of the situation, which involves surviving a very bad day in space.  

Isn’t the desire to get back home to your living family enough drama?

All the impressive visual symbolism I mentioned (and admired...) could still have been in play without the hackneyed losing-a-child back-story.

On another front, Gravity also provides as vivid a demonstration of the hazards of space junk as we are likely to see at the movies in some time. 

Russian authorities launch a missile that scatters debris, and the toll on human life and equipment is staggering. One missile launch costs two space stations, one space shuttle, and a crew of four, I believe. It’s horrifying, and yet the movie doesn’t really linger on any of the destruction’s impact except as it relates to Stone’s individual ability to get back to Earth, and her personal crisis. 

I guess I worry a little about a movie like Gravity because it does such a fine, nerve-shattering job of showing how inhospitable and dangerous space is.

People will, I’m afraid, give up on the final frontier because survival looks so difficult.  

And if one launch from a rogue state can destroy all our space assets in a period of four or five hours, is it really worth it to devote resources there?  

That’s the kind of question I’m afraid some viewers will ask after a viewing.

And Gravity has no response. 

It doesn't tell us that, in the end, all the death and destruction considered, space is still worth the risk.  

Instead, the film’s title cards all accentuate the danger of life in space, and the film’s special effects do a remarkable, even unforgettable job of showing us how unlikely continued human survival is in this zone. 

So we high-tail it back to Earth, I suppose? To grapple with our “inner” demons?  To get a better handle on our personal sense of spirituality?  

I fear that this is the unacknowledged message of Gravity. That Stone’s brush with death in space merely reminds her that she needs to have her feet planted squarely on the ground, to start over a “real” and "meaningful" human life.

I have never read any comment by any astronaut in history that would support that idea.

Would it have been so difficult, I wonder, to have the character reflect on the idea that her journey in space -- and work there -- was worthwhile?   If her new prototype saved a thousand lives on Earth, could that have counterbalanced the loss of her daughter? 

You don't make a war movie without a soldier noting the honor of defending your country. You shouldn't make a realistic, contemporary space film without noting the dedication and honor of the astronauts, either.

Although this will no doubt read as sacrilege to some (and perhaps even the Academy…), a modest little found-footage SF film from last year, Europa Report better and more profoundly captured the sense of dedication that astronauts so often boast in the face of certain death. 

As we see in that film, those astronauts know that they may soon die, but that what they learn in space will be preserved for the future. They thus make a choice…for the common good.

That’s a key point about the milieu of life in space that Gravity just never gets around to exploring, except in Kowalski's heroic sacrifice.

You don’t go to the stars just to resolve a personal crisis. You do it to extend the boundaries of knowledge.

You don’t go all the way to space just to tell another chapter in your individual story.

You do it to write the next chapter in human history.

For all its visual aplomb, Gravity just doesn’t get to that destination. 

By being so determinedly a “personal” and "spiritual" story -- the consequences and space stations be damned -- this well-made and nerve-wracking film just doesn’t have much that's very deep or universal to say about the cosmos, or mankind’s place in it. 

Instead, it’s a conventional surviving-against-the-odds, disaster story, and a brilliantly vetted one at that. 

But it could be set at sea, or on a mountaintop, or anywhere else where life is dangerous, for that matter. 

So while Gravity may be one giant leap for the mental health of one Ryan Stone, it’s actually a small and ultimately trivial step in terms of mankind, and his ongoing drama to tame the stars.

Like so many movies made today, Gravity is, ultimately, disposable, once the adrenaline rush wears off. It is undeniably immersing in the moment, and the performances are strong. The special effects are indeed great, but in five years they will look dated and a new generation will judge the film not on shock and awe, but what Gravity has to tell it. 

And I'm afraid, Gravity may be judged forgettable in terms of lasting or deep impact.