Grav­i­ty

The sci­ence fic­tion film to which Alfon­so Cuarón’s extra­or­di­nary Grav­i­ty bares the most strik­ing resem­blance is the ​‘What Hap­pens Dur­ing Ejac­u­la­tion?’ sequence in Woody Allen’s Every­thing You Always Want­ed to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask.

Here, instead of neb­bish Woody dressed in a white span­dex suit and crash hel­met, we have San­dra Bul­lock and George Clooney as the floun­der­ing sperm, placed in an against-all-odds sit­u­a­tion and dri­ven by a sin­gu­lar desire to be The One to pen­e­trate the skin of the glow­ing egg that is the Earth’s atmosphere.

On a super­fi­cial lev­el, this is your reg­u­lar, down-home dis­as­ter movie in which we join a trio of plucky, ban­ter­ing astro­nauts dur­ing a rou­tine space walk which goes very south very quick­ly. Their trio swift­ly becomes a two­some and the remain­der of the film com­pris­es a cat­a­logue of micro-sec­ond clutch­es and grabs for a life­line of any sort.

Yet – and some may find this side of the film a mite on-the-nose – Grav­i­ty oper­ates as a bold (pos­si­bly even eccen­tric) and majes­ti­cal­ly ren­dered para­ble on the won­ders of cre­ation, with a very spe­cif­ic focus on the details of repro­duc­tion. Imagery of umbil­i­cal chords, foetal posi­tions, wombs and char­ac­ters tri­umphant­ly sur­fac­ing from the amni­ot­ic riv­er sit sur­pris­ing­ly com­fort­ably against a visu­al back­drop of decay­ing space sta­tions and an infi­nite shroud of nothingness.

Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, Grav­i­ty takes Cuarón’s cre­ative part­ner­ship with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Emmanuel Lubez­ki to its breath­tak­ing nat­ur­al con­clu­sion. The visu­al schema of the film is clear­ly inspired by the minute­ly orches­trat­ed (and occa­sion­al­ly con­tro­ver­sial) sequence shots that fea­tured in his 2006 film, Chil­dren of Men.

And while in that film the mas­tery of tech­nique threat­ened to choke the human dra­ma and come across as need­less show­boat­ing, the zero grav­i­ty set­ting makes the casu­al employ­ment of these sin­u­ous and inno­v­a­tive long takes far more dra­mat­i­cal­ly coher­ent while fus­ing much more tight­ly with the essen­tials of the sto­ry. The expe­ri­ence of free float­ing in space is cen­tral to the film’s suc­cess, and Lubezki’s cam­era itself feels like a rogue crew mem­ber (dare we say it, God?) observ­ing the fol­ly of his hap­less charges.

It’s been sev­en years since Chil­dren of Men, and bar the odd pro­duc­tion gig, Cuarón has not direct­ed a film since. Yet with­in the first three min­utes of the film is plain to see that no time has been wast­ed and that the direc­tor and his cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er were beaver­ing away cre­at­ing some­thing a bit new and a bit dif­fer­ent. Now let’s not be going all crazy and call­ing it a new visu­al lan­guage or any­thing – De Pal­ma was half way here with his severe­ly under­rat­ed Mis­sion To Mars, from which this cribs more than a few key sequences – but this film, par­tic­u­lar­ly its look, needs to be seen to be believed.

There are ref­er­ences to all man­ner of space movies, both new and old. Clooney’s char­ac­ter, Matt Kowal­s­ki, feels like he might have once been a crew mem­ber of the Dark Star, while Bullock’s Dr Ryan Stone gets out of one par­tic­u­lar­ly tight scrape by using a fire extin­guish­er to enact a full-bore homage to WALL‑E. While Clooney gets to spew his cus­tom­ary wiseacre pat­ter, it’s Bul­lock who’s the cast­ing mas­ter­stroke here, bring­ing a mild­ly bland every­woman tinge (or, the sort of per­son you could actu­al­ly imag­ine work­ing for NASA) to the stock super-hero­ics required of her character.

CG-incar­na­tions of their bod­ies do much of the heavy lift­ing as they’re flung around like rag dolls or yo-yos. Yet lat­er in the film dur­ing a rare moment when you can actu­al­ly see the actors’ faces, Bul­lock gets to deliv­er a dev­as­tat­ing mono­logue about the melan­choly feel­ing of star­ing death direct­ly in the eyes that, frankly, would not have been out of place in a Woody Allen movie.