Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Talent: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris
Release Date: 7th November 2013
One hundred kilometres above the surface of the Earth, a rudimentary repair of the Hubble Space Telescope goes awry when a cloud of debris, caused by the planned destruction of a Russian communications satellite, falls into orbit with our protagonists, astronauts Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). Their shuttle destroyed, the pair must improvise a re-entry, with only abandoned Russian and Chinese vessels nearby and oxygen levels in their space suits lowering, before the debris cloud completes another orbit and threatens them again.
Alfonso Cuarón’s last directorial feature, 2006’s Children of Men, matched a personal story of survival against a broader vision of sci-fi apocalypse, while maintaining both in a constant process of interpenetration. There, the film narrative, as we’re given to understand it, was constantly subject to the incremental advance of the wider world, or to the vagaries of blind chance: recall Clive Owen’s Theo narrowly avoiding being killed in an explosion on a busy street in the film’s opening sequence. We were being told a story, but one subject to machinations (and other stories) above and beyond its own limits. 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También contained similar moments of what might loosely be called transcendent social realism, Cuarón’s wandering camera taking pains to establish a sense of social, economic and cultural difference between its young, bourgeois protagonists and the ‘backdrop’ of rural Mexico, the people who serve them along the way, and even adjacent political demonstrations. With Gravity, which is set entirely in space, society’s spectral presence makes itself felt only through personal information and anecdotes shared by Kowalski and Stone, (diegetic) music and—though not for very long—radio contact with mission control.
In the film’s opening—and most adventurous—sequence, Cuarón skillfully establishes his extraterrestrial setting as something of great beauty, but also potentially terrifying. His camera floats gracefully through 360° of movement, swooping and pivoting and managing to be at once exhilarating and nauseating. Cuarón is at his most playful in the early stages, and it is there that the film’s trumpeted IMAX 3-D is put to best effect, with framing directed less by the movement of its characters than by the necessary axislessness of space. This, along with clever sound production—the moment the in-comms music is turned off to aid Stone’s concentration is undeniably breathtaking—makes for an atmospheric sequence, plagued by a sense of dread that’s ironised by the space-weary Kowalski’s repeatedly joking: ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this mission.’ When disaster eventually strikes, however, we enter altogether more familiar territory, both with respect to plot, and the aesthetics of an action film.
Despite the vastness of outer space in which our protagonists must fashion their escape/re-entry, all the set-pieces seem to take place as though guided by rails. The parameters have been set out for us: the debris cloud will have completed an orbit in 90 minutes, the Russian shuttle is over there (arbitrary), which must be used to travel to the Chinese space station there, from which a successful re-entry may be attempted. The universe has suddenly become very small indeed: the filmic space in which a certain set of goals must be completed to ensure survival. David Thomson wonders at how stories told through film can achieve such profound affect with their audience when, behind it all, or out of frame, it’s just actors hitting their marks on a dolled-up soundstage; with Gravity, the inverse of this seems true: three familiar acts performed in front of a black curtain, with additional material by Mitch Albom. The sense of danger inherent an endless space—on which the film has essentially grounded its appeal—is undermined the more we sense we’re in a Hollywood story of self-realisation and, of the latter, Cuarón doesn’t let us forget it.
Gravity is plagued by the sort of sentimental humanism that wins Oscars, but offers little by way of genuine insight or illumination. Feel as though you can’t go on? You must! You’ve got to try! These sentiments are empty of meaning for precisely the same reason they are perceived as universal. If Cuarón’s previous work has tended towards a reimagining of genre (apocalyptic sci-fi, teen road movie) within a wider social matrix, then his latest represents something undeniably worse, but potentially more interesting: the struggle of a tired narrative format to reassert its contemporary relevance by referring to its bearded Mephisto as infinity. The result is a film as platitudinous as it is briefly and assuredly exciting; despite pretensions to the contrary, Gravity seems inextricably bound to the dual moorings of banal humanism and narrative cliché: it seems odd to remark this of a science-fiction film in 2013, but look, you can see the strings!
Words: Oisín Murphy Hall
