Every year in the fall, in the world of cinema, the awards hopefuls start to come out in their bids to becoming contenders – reaching hopefully for that ultimate golden statue named Oscar.
This year Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity opened at the Venice Film Festival in August to immense anticipation. Tales of his four-year long labour of love involving blood, sweat and tears, and the hype surrounding the groundbreaking effects and cinematography, created even in my fairly skeptical heart, a fair amount of excitement. And so it is with great delight that I went to see the film, available here now in 3D, and most importantly on the big screen.
I was not disappointed. Gravity is all that it has set out to be: a feat in cinematography, a step forward for cinema. Cuarón has always been far more interested in cinematic form than in narrative, so I will warn the viewers now that while the structure of the film is perfectly sound the actual dialogue is really rather hopeless. If you can accept this and move on, the film will astound you with its visual language and its success in portraying a world that most of us can only imagine in our fondest daydreams.
Gravity, if you don’t know already, is set in space – that final frontier, that great unknown. It opens with a view of our beautiful, glowing blue planet. As we are struck dumb by the Earth’s luminous beauty, we see a space station in orbit coming towards us. On this space station are Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and the astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney). Incidentally, for the sake of sheer trivia, there is also an unfortunate third astronaut who is hardly seen and barely heard who expires fairly quickly. It is just as we are settling into the uncanny but magical feeling that we are experiencing what it must be like to actually be in space that a number of terrifying things happen.
The space station is hit by debris from a Russian satellite, the extraneous astronaut is promptly killed and Stone becomes untethered from the station and is set spinning out into space in a terrifying uncontrolled trajectory that will leave you clutching your seat in an attempt to maintain your own sense of gravity - and therein lies the genius of the film.
As Stone and Kowalski struggle with every breath to try and reach a habitable space station and come back to our beloved home planet, we struggle with them, caught up in this amazing film that is able, through the maker’s genius, to bring us into their terrifying reality. And while all films require a rather large measure of identification with the subject in question, Gravity with its visceral cinematography is able to pull you in a manner that I’ve never quite experienced before.
Some films do become all they set out to be. With Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón, at least in my mind, has become a truly great director. One that struggles to realise his vision without compromise no matter how long it takes.
Watch trailer: