Gravity (2013)
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Dr Ryan Stone, an engineer on her first space mission, and Matt Kowalski, an astronaut on his final expedition, have to survive in space after they are hit by debris while spacewalking.
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56 films that influenced Gravity
What critics say influenced Gravity
It's had inevitable comparisons to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Every scene aspires to be the “open the pod bay door, HAL” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the scientists struggle to stay tethered to each other and to board what remains of their vessels.
Until now space on film, with the exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey, has seemed strangely grounded but here, thanks to the craft employed in capturing its physical reality, it becomes a character in its own right.
This enthralling tale of survival in space will open up young audiences' eyes to the excitement of out-of-this-world exploration – and make older audiences remember the wonder they felt at "2001: A Space Odyssey."
The greatest artistic debt, of course, is owed to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," which dared to use silence, serenity and space—screen space as well as space space—as never before.
All too many extraterrestrial spectacles, from 2001: A Space Odyssey downward, have sought to explain the mysteries of "up there" using spiritual metaphors.
As the tagline for Alien reminds us, in space nobody can hear you scream, and for Stone - stranded more than 500 km above Earth - this causes her to confront buried trauma from her past and find the inner strength to reinforce her bid for survival.
Alien reminded us that in space, no one can hear you scream; here Price orchestrates a throbbing series of low-end synthesizer movements that move in and out of the action like a character.
The evocation of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien ("In space, no one can hear you scream") is apt: Gravity is a bit like Alien without the alien, replacing it with existential despair that's just as likely to take a fatal bite out of the heroine.
The two actors are sensational: Clooney, looking amusingly like Buzz Lightyear, with a haunting chivalry beneath his bluster, and Bullock, as desperate and resourceful and anxious and brave, and as primed to live, as Sigourney Weaver in the last half of Alien .
Like Alien or Open Water , it creates a queasy sense of there's nothing you can do dread.
For all intents and purposes Gravity was to be the film that would not only be a game changer in the upcoming awards season (still to be determined) but would join the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien as a pivotal sci-fi set in space.
Some readers may be concerned about the pace of “Gravity” because its timeless science-fiction influences clearly owe a debt to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the smaller Douglas Trumbull triumph “Silent Running.”
For all its A-list production values, this retains the crowd-pleasing essence of a rip-roaring B-picture, closer in tone to the sublime sentimentality of Silent Running or the grand pop philosophy of David Bowie's Space Oddity (Duncan Jones's Moon lurks in the background too) than the stern straight-facedness of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"Gravity" evokes that silent classic and others—including Maya Deren's experimental short "Meshes of the Afternoon," whose most analyzed sequence, a series of shots boiling evolution down to four gestures, might have influenced the unabashedly metaphorical closing scene of Cuarón's movie.
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But what Avatar achieved—and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Life of Pi and now Gravity, each outdoing its predecessor in the filmmaker’s eternal quest to astonish us—represents a triumph of digital technology and human artistry.
Even James Cameron – notorious egomaniac – conceded defeat after a viewing, declaring it “the best space photography ever done,” before likely returning to his Avatar caves and whipping his workers to render Pandora doubly nice.
And the astonishingly immersive 3D (all achieved via a post-production conversion) pushes beyond even Avatar – explaining why James Cameron has dubbed this “the best space film ever”.
And it is nowhere near as simple as the CGI work being top-notch – it is, but there are plenty of recent movies driven by great CGI that still look largely unconvincing (Avatar and Life of Pi spring immediately to mind).
His groundbreaking “Avatar” opened the book on the modern artistic use of 3-D, and this film is the next chapter — the most accomplished, persuasive use of that technology we’ve seen from then until now.
As Gunning says in relation to Méliès’s 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon, ‘The story simply provides a frame upon which to string a demonstration of the magical possibilities of the cinema.’
…by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón's eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity --a title that doesn't reference the Ray Bradbury story "Kaleidoscope," to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name "Stone"), or any real meat at the heart of the story.
(It was a four-year project for Cuarón, whose last released feature was 2006’s “Children of Men.”) George Clooney plays a comic caricature of the flyboy rake, harking all the way back to “The Right Stuff.”
The director was Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican whose last film “Children of Men” I held in high regard even though I had problems with the dystopian themes that originated with the original material, a P.D. James novel.
The masterful extended shot he pulled off in "Children of Men" is matched by the virtuoso work here.
This is not to say that Gravity is a masterpiece: Unlike Cuarón’s extraordinary Children of Men , it doesn’t quite pull off its ambitious effort to combine formal inventiveness, heart-pounding action, and intimate human storytelling.
The screenwriters, director Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También) and his son, Jonás Cuarón, are evidently on a mission to set up the perfect combination of heroic physical action and those brief, insightful moments that give a character depth.
Many audiences have compared Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” to the indie horror film “ Open Water .”
The set-up resembles “Open Water” in space.
Like Alien or Open Water , it creates a queasy sense of there's nothing you can do dread.
The “survival” genre, with films like Gravity, 127 Hours, Buried, and Open Water, are an evolution of the Irwin Allen era disaster movies.
At first glance a minimalist survival nail-biter on the order of, say, Cast Away or Open Water, Gravity ratchets up the terror by observing the pitiless logic of physics.
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Early on, when Kowalski asks Stone what she likes best about space, she responds: "The silence."
Cuarón has made no secret of his goal, which was to summon up the visual and metaphysical tradition of space-travel classics like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” while translating it into an idiom that a 21st-century mass audience can understand.