Verifica Introduction - overall impressionPlot summaryAnalysis - director
Conclusion - technical details
Analysis - film style
Analysis - actors
Plot summary
Introduction - overall impression
Director and co-writer Cuarón brilliantly manages to create both awe at his glorious space vistas, and knuckle-gobbling tension at what's happening in the foreground. It's like a bank heist in Reims cathedral – in space. You could find yourself asthmatically gasping with rapture and excitement at the same time. After it was over, I was 10 minutes into my tube ride home before I remembered to exhale.
Sandra Bullock plays a scientific engineer, Dr Ryan Stone, who after six months' specialist Nasa training has been allowed into space to attach a high-tech new scanning device to the Hubble telescope. She is under the watchful supervision of Matt Kowalski, a genial and grizzled space veteran played by George Clooney. The voice of Houston mission control is played by Ed Harris, in playful homage to Ron Howard's 1995 space-disaster classic Apollo 13. Only this time it is him telling them about the problem. Soon, a terrifying situation unfolds.
Clooney effectively concedes star status to Bullock and Stone's face, as she finally reveals the personal anguish she's brought up to space inside her, becomes gaunt and waxy and agonized: a very real 3D image of pure human pain. When she cries in zero-gravity, with real tears floating away from the face, it is a heart stopping spectacle. Kowalski's gallantry and Stone's yearning are compelling and unexpectedly romantic.
Alfonso Cuarón's incredibly exciting, visually amazing film is about two astronauts floating in space. The title refers to the one big thing almost entirely absent from the film: it's like The Seventh Seal being called Levity or Last Tango in Paris Chastity. With gorgeous, tilting planet Earth far below in its shimmering blue aura, a bulkily suited spaceman and spacewoman veer, swoop and swerve in woozy slo-mo as they go about their business tethered to the station, like foetuses still attached to their umbilical cords. The movie's final sequence hints at some massive cosmic rebirth; a sense that these people are the first or last human beings in the universe, like something by Kubrick.
have to abolish your own scepticism-gravity – suspending disbelief at the idea that Stone's training would have allowed her to be reasonably familiar with the control panels of Russian and Chinese spacecraft with their Cyrillic and Chinese letterings. Of course, these aspects may have been cunningly devised by Cuarón so that his movie can blast off in Russian and Chinese territories.
Is Gravity very deep or very shallow? Neither. It is a brilliant and inspired movie-cyclorama, requiring neither gravity nor gravitas. This is a glorious imaginary creation that engulfs you utterly, helped by superlative visual effects design from Tim Webber, cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and production design by Andy Nicholson. As you sit in the cinema auditorium, you too will feel the entertainment G-forces puckering and rippling your face
