Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Gravity’ (2nd review)

In one of his first major films since Harry Potter and pals found out their favorite Hogwarts professor was a werewolf, director Alfonso Cuarón has paired the most elemental plot I’ve ever seen with visuals you must experience in the theater to believe.

Gravity’s trailer is probably the simplest and yet most gripping movie teaser I’ve ever seen. Without telling us anything else about the movie’s characters or story, it shows a desperate astronaut spinning free of her space station after an accident, trying desperately to grasp something, anything, before the endless floating blackness of outer space draws her to her to death. I immediately vowed that there was no way I’d to be able to watch that.

But eventually, the hype got to me.

Robert Redford, too

Gravity stars Sandra Bullock as a rookie space station scientist and George Clooney in a supporting role as a roguish NASA veteran going for the spacewalk record. Suffice it to say that it the story is a fundamental odyssey of survival whose stunning, how’d-they-do-that visuals are as much a futuristic setting as a primordial celebration of birth, destruction and rebirth.

When the credits rolled, I had half a bag of peanut M&Ms clutched in my fist. Once the movie got started, I was so afraid they’d lodge in my throat that I could barely eat them.

Solo man-against-the-elements stories (on or off planet Earth) seem popular lately. One of the trailers that preceded Gravity promoted latest Robert Redford’s latest film, All Is Lost, which pits the aging hero against an angry sea when his sailboat gets swamped. It’ll be the second movie in as many years to star one person fighting for survival in a boat (see Life of Pi).

Hiker without a cell phone?

“I’m not feeling the loss,” my husband whispered to me as the All Is Lost preview faded out. “That was self-inflicted.”

He has a point, I must admit. Nobody would like his grandfather— even one as ruggedly handsome as Robert Redford— to sail way out on the ocean all by himself. Upon reaching his mid-80s, my own grandfather donated his beloved sailboat to charity because the whole family realized that solo sails just aren’t a good idea any more, however healthy Papa seems.

I experienced similar feelings about 127 Hours, which starred James Franco as a real-life hiker who gets himself stuck after a rock fall in a remote canyon, leaving him unable to escape until he saws off his own arm. Since the real-life protagonist— now a famous author and motivational speaker— lacked the foresight to bring a cell phone or even tell a single person where he was going, I have a hard time conjuring any sympathy for the circumstances of his horrible amputation.

Yen for solitude

Similarly, should outer-space disaster zones like Gravity’s make us ask what the hell we think we’re doing out in the realm of zero oxygen, anyway?

But apparently humans will never stop venturing alone into life’s most dangerous corners, or glorifying those who do.

Perhaps extreme solo survival stories like Gravity are a sort of cry for help in the heaving seas of social media. Does our increasingly sleepless, hyperconnected modern world make us crave solitude so much that imagining ourselves spinning off into space, trapped in a canyon or marooned at sea is a nice respite from our smartphones? We might be facing death, but at least nobody can call or text us for a few days.

Whatever the reason, do yourself the favor of seeing Gravity in the theater— in glorious, bank-breaking 3-D if possible. You won’t be disappointed when you come back to Earth.

To read another review by AJ Sabatini, click here.