Gravity (5/5 Stars)

Gravity is why I love movies. Wow Wow Wow!

“Gravity,” the much-anticipated next feature of Director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien) meets expectations of goodness and powerfully surges past them into the realm of greatness. How great is this movie? I have no idea. And I don’t mean that facetiously. In many areas this movie is beyond the critique of lowly me. After all, how can I judge the technical aspects of a movie when I must admit that I have no idea how the majority of the movie was made? How did they do that? How??? Whatever the next step from Avatar was, this is it. See it in IMAX. See it in 3D. Please see it now while it is still in theaters.

The plot is very simple. Several astronauts are on a space shuttle mission to reservice the Hubble Telescope. On the space walk outside the shuttle are veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and rookie astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). Before anything even happens, the movie is a visual marvel. The view of Earth from space is fully realized. The laws of zero gravity and angular momentum are present in such a real way it makes a mockery of almost every other movie that takes place in space. (A great example is how in regular space movies, spaceships always seem to be stationary while in orbit. In “Gravity,” everything conforms to the reality that everything is moving at a blindingly fast rate around the earth.) It is made fully clear how close to death the astronauts are even before the real danger closes in. There is no air to breath around them. The temperature fluctuates from fatally hot to fatally cold. There is no sound. As we are told in a title before the movie, Life in Space is impossible.

Then disaster does strike. And how. As they are fixing the telescope, the astronauts are informed that a Russians have shot down one of their satellites in an exercise not meant to have any effect on the American mission. Unfortunately the debris from the first explosion hits a different satellite and causes a chain reaction that sends shrapnel towards the Americans. Much worse than that is the fact that the shrapnel is going much faster than the American shuttle or the International Space Station or Chinese Space Station. What this means since nothing in space ever slows down is that after hitting the astronauts a first time, the shrapnel will be back again in 90 minutes having gone all the way around the world and back.

The shrapnel hits the American space shuttle and the Hubble telescopic causing catastrophic damage. You may have seen all the science fiction movies ever made but you have never seen anything like this. Director Alfonso Cuaron continues his career long quest to take advantage of the suspense of real time. What that means is that he likes using long takes. Very long takes. Like the entire shrapnel attack is shown in one continuous shot. I haven’t the slightest idea how this was done. All I know is that someone somewhere was doing some serious physics work in a back room somewhere because everything happens with no movie magic cheating whatsoever. The result is absolutely terrifically horrific.

A long shot needs to be used correctly for the very reason that they are so impressive. Since they require much coordination they draw attention to themselves. Because of this, there needs to be a storytelling reason to use them lest the film literate believe its presence has more to do with the indulgent whims of an egotistical director going ‘look what I can do!’ Here, however, because they are used so frequently and in such a situation where obviously almost everything in the screen is not real (it looks very real but we must know they did not shoot this in space) any obviously indulgent exercises are impossible to find. I could not tell how they did these shots or even when they began or when they ended, so instead I focused on the story, which is what a long shot in the hands of a masterful director should do. In that way the directing truly complemented the movie in the best possible way. I would be absolutely gob-smacked if someone other than Alfonso Cuaron won the Oscar for Best Directing this year. And whatever category is responsible for everything else (Cinematography or Visual Effects or Production Design?) should be locks as well.

It what is a one-man show for most of the movie is Sandra Bullock, who finds herself in the best role of already impressive career. As an incredibly human counterpoint to the absurdly calm-under-immense-pressure presence of George Clooney (an actually realistic portrayal of a veteran astronaut, the astrophysicist Neil Degrasse-Tyson assures us), she provides the audience with the much relatable panic of someone thrown out into the vastness of space all alone. To make matters worse, she is thrown out into space going head over heels in a spin and, of course, as this is space and this movie has done it’s homework, the whole spinning head over heels never stops. Holy Cow. The rest of the movie deals with Dr. Ryan Stone trying to get her shit together under the enormous pressure of imminent death. At the core of the movie is an incredibly human theme of what it means to not quit on life in the worst of circumstances. I’m not giving any more of the plot away suffice to say you may find yourself unconsciously gripping the chairs of the theater seats as if your life depended on it.

Really all that is missing from this movie is a scene at the end where Stone shows up at mission control and everyone applauds. That is the only thing I felt this movie needed by the end: Thunderous applause.