Gravity (***1/4)

A sci-fi movie that’s not an action movie, Gravity combines otherworldly visuals with a down-to-earth story. The time is the near future. The place is not so far, near-earth orbit, where a repair of the ship system’s electronics is taking place. The people are played by George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, and a couple of other people who are not movie stars. Guess who disappears from the story as debris from a space accident, traveling thousands of miles per hour, creates disaster and, in the space equivalent of the cell phone falling in the toilet, prevents communication with the NASA folks on the ground. In this future, the US manned space program is up and running again, along with the Russian and Chinese ones.

Relatively original for a big-budget film (despite similarities to a Ray Bradbury story), this is based on a screenplay by director Alfonso Cuarón (his first feature since 2006’s Children of Men) and his son Jonás. I can’t vouch for the scientific veracity of the plot, but it at least seemed credible. (Though I wonder, would an astronaut running short on oxygen be encouraged to talk a lot? And, would a mission commander really not know where his crew member lived, or whether she was married?) The opening is silent, with a subtitled reminder that, contra so many other space films, sound does not carry in a vacuum. (The movie does not rigidly adhere to this truth later.) As for the two characters, each basically has one personality characteristic: he’s a smooth talker, and she’s a grieving loner, though she also does, even with short hair, remind me of characters played by Sandra Bullock in earthbound roles. This is somewhat of a disappointment coming from Cuarón, who created the rich character-driven comedy Y Tu Mamá También.

Visually, the film is frequently stunning, at least in the 3D version I saw. The whizzing-toward-me space shrapnel actually had me ducking my head, but perhaps more impressive are the less-showy long shots of the actors moving in space in their near-weightless state, the space vehicles growing ever larger as they neared, the blue, green, and brown earth sometimes in view. I almost wished I would have been watching the film on a smaller screen so that the actors would have appeared to be the same size as in real life. Even so, this is great as a 3D film (worth making a point to see that way), pretty good as sci-fi, and intermittently good as suspense drama.

IMDb link

viewed 9/10/13 7:30 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and posted 9/13/13