Gravity (2013)

My friends wouldn't trust me with a twenty pound note so I doubt it would be smart for either Alfonso Cuarón or Warner Bros Pictures to listen to my financial advice, although that's what follows anyway: if Cuarón wanted to hold my attention and childlike sense of awe (and most likely make a lot less money) then he should have 1) cut down what stands as a 91 minute film by at least half an hour, possibly more - anyone who's seen the movie will know this wouldn't cut out anything crucial to the plot, and 2) market it as an "experience" not a movie. Watching Gravity reminded me a lot of a 3D animated short about talking robots I saw at Disneyland when I was a kid (over 10 years ago so red-green glasses 3D) only with a lot of un-needed material turning it from an experience into a film.

Which is a way of saying there's some good movie in here (enough that not seeing Gravity would officially count as "missing out" although not enough to watch it again after that). It's a film so excited in itself - a film of pure visual splendor - that it captures the magical aura of being a kid in Disneyland and being ushered into a dark cinema to view the red-green future of technology. Some images will stick with you: one astronaut tethered to another, pulling the other along; the camera panned back so the tether stretches across the center of the earth, itself now a giant black orb with the seams of sunrise coming over the top. Beautiful. The visuals work so well because the technology, seamless, gives the impression of a film actually filmed in space, not just bringing to life the imagination of some over-fantastical director (like, say, Avatar).

People love to throw the term 'like a roller coaster' at films, cliché as it is it fits Gravity; Cuarón's focus on shooting in unbroken tracking shots giving the feeling of being strapped in. Sit back and enjoy. But roller coasters are moving while the rollercoastee stays static; movies - through process of adaptation - have become something we dissect and try to participate in (it's why people pay for a movie then feel the need to pick out continuity flaws). This is where Gravity fails: in one moment as our lead is trying to repair part of a space station the camera looks from behind so we can see one of her tools, crucial for the job, slowly start to float away without her noticing. I imagine in 3D it floats dangerously far out of her reach. She turns round and strains to grab it just in time. Any pleasures here are purely aesthetic. Gravity works in its grandest moments; extended sections of watching Sandra Bullock do very little feel like padding.

The story is simple: a group of astronauts doing what seems a routine job on some space equipment. A storm hits, killing one crew member and leaving Ryan (Sandra Bullock) - technical expert but pretty unexperienced with the general rules of space survival; and Matt (George Clooney) the laid back safety man. Clooney's presence, frequently annoying, is the warmest thing in space. Things mostly follow Ryan as she tries to make her way to a far off station to get to the escape pods. As I say, there's a lot of good stuff in Gravity, just not enough to make it a great movie (although it should go on the list with Lawrence of Arabia of films to see on a cinema screen).