Gravity (2013) Review
8/10
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 a sustained piece of technical filmmaking I’d put near the top of anything made this century, and for a premise stripped to its bones. Survival, in a place with nothing to push against, where every solution costs fuel you can’t replace.
Gravity grabs me by the collar with its silence and then loosens its grip every time somebody talks.
The two points come off for the writing. When the film puts silence and physics on screen it’s thrilling, and when somebody speaks about grief or letting go it goes ordinary. It does the second thing more often than it needed to, and that’s what keeps a film I admire this much out of the 9s.
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 won’t 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’s the reason the reflections are correct and the reason the film cost around a hundred million dollars.
An opening sequence should teach the rules of the world before it applies any pressure. The audience can’t feel danger in a system whose limits they don’t understand.
Long uninterrupted stretches buy credibility that you spend later. A film or a chapter that’s never cheated can ask for a great deal more when the crisis arrives, because the reader has no reason to suspect the ground.
Establish calm at a length that feels slightly excessive. Thirteen minutes is a long time to spend on people working, and the entire remainder of the film is paid for by it.
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’s no friction to help you, and thrust is finite.
That’s 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. That’s the definition of suspense.
The debris itself is on a ninety minute orbit. That gives the film a clock that requires no villain and no countdown timer on a screen. It’ll come back, at a knowable time, because that’s what orbits do.
Where it cheats, it cheats visibly and I don’t 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’s otherwise ruthlessly consistent.
Consistency is what buys the cheats. A film that’s 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’s emotional. The best of it is her breathing, which replaces the score for long stretches, and her hands. They’re 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’s 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’s what this film can do when nobody is talking.
That airlock image is the one I’d point to if somebody asked why this rates an 8. Bullock does more with a curled-up body than the script does with every speech it hands her. Bullock also had to learn to move wrong. Everything in the film is choreographed against instinct, since a body in free fall can’t correct itself the way a body on a floor can, and she spent months in rigs while wires and robotic arms manipulated her to produce it.
A character alone on the page is a test of physical specificity. Without dialogue you’ve only what she does with her hands, her breath and her attention, and vague description dies immediately in that setting.
Resist supplying a companion purely to enable speech. If your protagonist is isolated, the isolation is the subject, and a talkative partner is a device for avoiding it. Where you must have exposition, put it in procedure. A character reading a checklist aloud is credible. A character explaining her own emotional history to a colleague in a crisis isn’t.
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’s 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 that the visuals already made the point. 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’s a commercial reason for it. 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. I understand the numbers. I still wish Cuaron had trusted the image of her letting go, because that’s the version of this film I’d have rated higher.
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. That’s the one situation where depth 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 hasn’t 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 didn’t exist when he started. The film is often described as a technical breakthrough, and the more useful description is that it’s a very old kind of story, a person against an indifferent environment. That happened to require new equipment to photograph.
Technique is only impressive while it’s invisible as technique. The long takes here work because they’re answering a story problem about spatial honesty, and the moment a long take exists to be admired it stops functioning. Ninety minutes is a decision. A premise this narrow can’t support more, and the willingness to stop is why the film holds together where its imitators sprawl.
The general form: know what your idea can carry. A single strong constraint produces a short, dense work. Stretching it produces a long, thin one, and no amount of craft repairs the ratio.
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’d already understood.
It gets an 8 from me because the film is so sure of its physics and so nervous about its silence. Every wordless minute of Bullock drifting, breathing and grabbing at handholds is as good as the medium gets. Every time the script stops to explain Ryan’s grief, the film shrinks a little, and those scenes account for the whole gap between this and a 10.
