Gravity (2013) Review

Two astronauts are servicing a telescope when debris from a destroyed satellite arrives at orbital velocity. The shuttle is gone, the crew is gone, and a medical engineer on her first mission is attached to nothing at all.

The 8 is for one of the most sustained pieces of technical filmmaking of the century and for a premise stripped to its bones. Survival, in a place with nothing to push against, where every solution costs fuel you cannot replace.

The two points come off for the writing. Every time the film puts silence and physics on screen it is extraordinary. Every time somebody speaks about grief or letting go it becomes ordinary, and it does the second thing more often than it needed to.

The Opening Shot Does the Contract

The film opens with roughly thirteen minutes of unbroken take. The camera drifts from the curve of the Earth to the shuttle, around the arm, onto Kowalski circling on a jetpack, in through a helmet visor and out again.

That shot is doing three jobs at once. It establishes the physical rules of the environment, it establishes that this film will not cut away from anything, and it establishes calm, so the arrival of the debris has somewhere to arrive from.

The lack of cuts is also a promise about honesty. In a conventionally edited action sequence the audience knows the geography can be cheated between shots. When the camera refuses to cut, everything you see is spatially true, and the danger is therefore measurable.

Emmanuel Lubezki shot it, and the technique behind it involved a purpose-built rig of LED panels that lit the actors’ faces with the moving image of the environment. It is the reason the reflections are correct and the reason the film cost around a hundred million dollars.

Physics as Plot Engine

Everything that happens after the debris strike is a consequence of a small number of rules stated early: objects in motion continue, there is no friction to help you, and thrust is finite.

That is a rare and valuable structure. The film almost never invents an obstacle. It applies a rule already established, and the audience can see the problem forming a few seconds before the character does, which is the definition of suspense.

The debris itself is on a ninety minute orbit, which gives the film a clock that requires no villain and no countdown timer on a screen. It will come back, at a knowable time, because that is what orbits do.

Where it cheats, it cheats visibly and I do not much mind. The distances between stations are absurd, the fire extinguisher is a stretch, and Kowalski’s detachment at the tether has been argued over by physicists for a decade. Those are three moments in a film that is otherwise ruthlessly consistent.

Consistency is what buys the cheats. A film that has spent forty minutes obeying its own rules has built enough credit to spend some, and the audience only notices the withdrawal afterward, on the drive home. A film that cheats early has no such account to draw on.

Bullock Carries It Almost Alone

Sandra Bullock is on screen for nearly the entire film and alone for most of it, frequently in a helmet, frequently with nothing to act against but a light rig.

The performance is physical before it is emotional. The best of it is her breathing, which does the work of the score for long stretches, and her hands, which are always doing something specific with a latch or a strap or a handhold.

George Clooney’s Kowalski is the film’s most contested element. He is calm, wry and endlessly talkative, and the character exists mostly to give Ryan somebody to hear. Clooney is good and the writing gives him anecdotes where it should have given him fewer words.

The mid-film sequence in the Soyuz where Ryan curls up in the airlock is the strongest thing Bullock does. No dialogue, no explanation, a body arranging itself into a shape the audience recognizes instantly. That is what this film can do when nobody is talking.

Bullock also had to learn to move wrong. Everything in the film is choreographed against instinct, since a body in free fall cannot correct itself the way a body on a floor can, and she spent months in rigs being manipulated by wires and robotic arms to produce it.

The Backstory Problem

Ryan Stone had a daughter who died, and the film tells you so in dialogue, returns to it in a hallucination, and closes on an image that resolves it.

None of that is needed. A woman clinging to the outside of a station with a finite oxygen supply is already a person with a reason to keep going or not. The film had built a situation where the will to live was the entire question and then supplied a therapeutic explanation for it.

The hallucination sequence is where this is most visible. It is well staged and well played, and it converts a survival film into a film about grief processing, complete with a stated lesson about choosing to live.

My objection is not that the theme is wrong. It is that the visuals already carried it. A person alone in a vacuum letting go of a handhold means everything the dialogue says, and it means it without permission from a script.

There is a commercial reason for it, and it is worth naming honestly. A ninety minute survival film with no backstory and almost no speech is a hard sell at a hundred million dollars, and the daughter is the element that makes it legible to a studio. That does not make it good, and it does explain it.

What It Won and What It Changed

Gravity took seven Academy Awards, including Best Director for Alfonso Cuaron, cinematography for Lubezki, editing, score, sound and visual effects. It cost around a hundred million dollars and made over seven hundred worldwide.

It also settled an argument about 3D. The format had been in decline as a gimmick applied after the fact, and this film used it as depth in an environment with no ground plane, which is the one situation where depth genuinely carries information.

The influence since is visible in a run of films about people in small pressurized boxes, and in the general acceptance that a virtual camera can move continuously through a scene without breaking the audience’s belief.

What has not been copied is the discipline. Gravity is ninety minutes long. Almost every film that took its lessons about spectacle also took another forty minutes of running time, and none of them earned it.

Cuaron spent something like four years on it, much of that waiting for tools that did not exist when he started. The film is often described as a technical breakthrough, and the more useful description is that it is a very old kind of story, a person against an indifferent environment, which happened to require new equipment to photograph.

Should you watch Gravity?

Yes, and see it as large and as loud as you can manage. This is a film about scale and about silence, and it loses most of its argument on a laptop. Go in for the physics and the breathing, and expect the dialogue to explain things you had already understood.

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