Okay…here we go. Gravity had the potential to be the greatest movie of 2013. It was a very, very good movie and will finish in my Top 10 of 2013 by the time everything is said and done. My preliminary thought is that it currently will be my #3 for the year, behind World War Z and Elysium. What do these three movies, in my opinion, have in common? Originality. I thought that, in a time where there Hollywood seems to be lacking great original ideas that aren’t based on true stories, these three movies achieved just that. I loved World War Z. I do not think it will end year #1, but it will be tough. It was an amazing, adrenalin-pumping story that had an awesome twist. Gravity aimed for the same, albeit in a slightly different way. Was it as successful? Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I will discuss, in-depth, the one or two major problems I had with this movie and will give you plenty of warning before I get there so that you can skip this section if you have not seen this movie yet.
Gravity is an A or an A-. I have less than 30 movies that I put into that A+ category. Gravity had the potential to be there. Director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien) realized a couple of potential pitfalls. The first was a movie based in outer space. For every commercial and critical success like Alien, some movies had such hype going in that they ultimately failed to deliver. The two big ones I can think of (that I both liked) were Solaris and Contact. Both movies were longer and duller than they needed to be. Contact, with its two-and-a-half-hour running time, was particularly brutal. Cuaron, who also co-wrote this movie, kept this movie short. But even at 91 minutes, it did drag out in several scenes. Part of that had to do with the fact that there are really just two characters in this movie. The other problem is just that. There are just two characters in this movie. For a good portion of this movie, there is just one character. This is challenging for both the director and the actor. It is not impossible. Will Smith was very good as the only character for more than 75% of I Am Legend. Granted, he had the mutants he was combating during a good portion of that. Tom Hanks earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance in Cast Away, where he was the only character on screen for a good hour and a half. Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, Crash) will likely earn a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance as Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer on her first space mission. Nevertheless, as great as she was (and she was great), it wasn’t perfect. I will touch on this more when I get into the spoilers, which will start now.
***Spoilers***
So both Bullock and George Clooney (Michael Clayton, Up In The Air) were brilliant. If they hadn’t of been, the movie wouldn’t have succeeded. The imagery was unbelievable. You felt like you were up in space with these two characters from the first minute until the end. When things start to go bad, you feel like you are up there with them and you, too, are about today. While medical engineer Stone is attempting to fix a faulty transmission card on the Hubble Space Telescope. It is her first mission, and she feels queasy and under the weather. Ryan Stone is a very serious person and a stark contrast to Clooney’s Matt Kowalski, the jovial spacecraft captain on his final mission. Matt is relaxed, upbeat, and conversational. While Ryan diligently works on fixing the transmission card so that Houston can receive the transmission, Matt floats happily in orbit. The third member of their crew, Shariff (Phaldut Sharma), is having just as much fun as he works on a different part of the space station.
When a Russian satellite self-destructs, causing a chain reaction of debris flying at them, the trio has no choice but to brace and hope for the best. The space station is destroyed, the debris kills Shariff, and Ryan drifts aimlessly into space, certain that she is about to die. When Matt slowly reels her in and saves her life multiple times, we sense him as a person. He is a wonderful, selfless man. He has fun but can be serious when he needs to be. When he says to her, “This is an order,” we see that he can go from fun and goofy to serious in less than a heartbeat.
Okay, so with that said, he’s awesome, and she’s very serious. She talks briefly about her desire we do not know why. But then he gets her to speak of her home and what she likes to do. Why is this the first time they are having this conversation if it’s just been the two of them and Shariff living together for more than a week, I don’t know. But we learn that Ryan’s daughter died when she was four years old after hitting her head from a fall at a playground. Bullock’s Ryan is supposed to be a depressed woman. This is understandable, but this hasn’t been shown yet. We see her as serious but certainly not depressed. This isn’t even a consideration until he lets go over to save her life when they reach the International Space Station. He is encouraging and remains cool under pressure. When he is guiding her to the International Space Station, and she is freaking out, he is calm and collected even though he is scared out of his mind. He knows there is no sense in freaking her out even more than she is. Still, I don’t see her thinking that he is some voice of reason or someone in her life who has been her mentor forever. They’ve known each other for maybe a week and apparently had no meaningful conversation. So when Ryan is left alone, and Matt is the one person she is thinking about in her attempt to want to live or die, I kept thinking to myself, can somebody have influenced someone else as much as he did in less than an hour? No.
When Ryan was left alone in the International Space Station, thinking she was going to die, I felt for her. And when she is thinking about her daughter, I first saw how miserable she was and how she had never moved past that terrible day in her life. But why did it take 2/3rds of the way through the movie to even know that she was much of a mess as she was? And when Matt reappears in her mind when she is decided to give up, I loved the entire scene. I thought it was fantastic. But it was not built on anything. Again, how could he have so much influence in encouraging her to live when they hardly knew each other? Sure, she saw him risk his life and then, ultimately, sacrifice his life to save her, and maybe part of her thought was that she had to keep fighting to live because of him. But it would have been perfect if the two had had some connection before this. It’s almost like they didn’t know each other before the debris wrecks their space station. I don’t fault the actors one bit. They were brilliant. I don’t know how much of the blame goes on Cuaron. There was so much brilliance in the movie. The visuals and sound were amazing. The imagery was great. I liked how when Ryan peels off her space suit, we see the rebirth of her character and how, when she puts it back on, it signifies she is once again ready to fight. However, if only two characters were in this movie, I would have known each other more deeply than I did.
The other quick and minor problem I had was the fire in the International Space Station. It was forced on us to show what would happen when Ryan used the fire extinguisher to put it out. She learned through this that she could use the extinguisher as a power source. I know it’s minor, but it was obvious it was thrown in there because it needed to be.
So to sum it up into thirds…I loved the first 30 minutes. Everything built so slowly and purposefully that you were on the edge of your seat, just waiting for the next third to happen. The middle 30 minutes could have been better. The last 30 minutes were awesome. Seeing Bullock react to hearing the dog bark and the baby die on the radio was heartbreaking. The conversation with Clooney was awesome and would have been unique if I felt he had earned that sort of influence over Bullock and they had some relationship that seemed believable to me. That’s my issue with the film. Fix this and have me buy into their relationship, I’m sold. I did love her will to live after they had the conversation. I loved what she told Matt about her daughter Sarah and how she was finally letting go. And how she fought on her voyage back to earth and out of the pod once it landed in the lake was fantastic. Her sheer joy when she was feeling the mud on the banks of the river was extraordinary…yet how was she able to change so drastically in basically an hour when she seemed content in giving up right before?
Plot 9.5/10
Character Development 7/10
Character Chemistry 8.5/10
Acting 9.5/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing 8.5/10
Cinematography 10/10 (best of the year)
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
91%
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I too loved this movie, and had similar complaints to yours. But I wasn’t quite as harsh in certain areas…for example: the development between Clooney and Bullock was decidedly lacking. Not only would they have spent the previous week together, but crews train exclusively together for the mission for months and months prior to launch…they would not have been strangers in space; but these discussions needed to happen on screen to fit into the window of the movie. They had to develop each character as best as possible within the confines of the story (almost every movie has this inherant problem) even though in real life, they would have been developed over a long period of time. Because of this, I gave a little bit of a pass on the simple dialouge.
To the issue of his influence over her, I didn’t have too big of a problem, because I feel that it’s actually pretty true to life. The problem is that the trust that they have put into each other (over the previous months of training and time together) wasn’t explored directly in any fashion in the movie. He would have known her potential weakness, and she would have known to turn and listen to him in a moment of self doubt. I see these same interactions at the fire house and on fire calls. I may not know someone extremely well, but I trust in their training and leadership, and when the shit hits the fan, it’s time to listent to those with more experience. This is a natural reaction that I saw with the movie.
My biggest problem with the film was actually the acting. I thought that Clooney was a little arrogant – not his character, but his voice. It was the same voice that we have heard in almost every one of his films (and he is perhaps my favorite actor, by the way). I am not a big Bullock fan anyway, but I thought that she did pretty good in this movie and would be deserving of the award nomitions that are sure to come her way – but I thought that she was rather annoying for many scenes. I don’t know if it was the character, or her slight overacting in the panic moments, but she was pretty dang good in the simple moments of the movie – like the last 30 as you stated.
The fire? Lame. But her tears floating away as bubbles? Brilliant. The movie had some downs, but it also had bigger ups. The originality of the movie in a time of non-orginality stood in stark contrast to most of the movies being made today. That coupled with the amazing sound and visuals will keep this as a top movie of the year.
PS – Awesome to see the love of movies and your willingness to share! Brings back vivid memories of Springfield Mall.
So I will weigh in as well here (I already shared my comments directly with the author but will post for the benefit of the discussion). I was thoroughly disappointed by the movie. I went in with much higher expectations than seeing something akin to a “summer blockbuster” given all the great critical reviews, but felt like a summer blockbuster is exactly what I got. Clearly the film was visually stunning and I have no qualms with any academy awards given in the relevant fields (cinematography? Visual effects?), but this did not make up for a story and characters that were underdeveloped, unrealistic, and, at worst, cloying. First, the unrealistic part. The interwebs has articles covering all of the physics flaws with the movie, and even to a non-scientist they are glaring. I can’t imagine you’d easily be able to see one space station from another, let alone hop between them so easily. I get that this is a movie and that we can be asked to set aside belief in service of plot, so I wouldn’t have had a big problem with this if the plot or characters were great, but they weren’t. We learn Sandra bullock lost a daughter almost as an aside with no background on her life before/after… It was there for no other purpose than to pull on heartstrings. Clooney was, as Oren points out, the same guy he is in every movie… Charming, calm, self-confident. There’s no differentiation of this character from his other roles (and I like him a lot too). The idea that she’d magically get the idea to use the lander from clooney in a near-death dream was ridiculous, and I think we all pretty much knew more or less how the ending would turn out from 1/3 of the way into the movie. I’m glad I watched it for the visuals on the big screen alone, but candidly I’ve seen better plot development in any number of Shaquille oneill movies that we saw together at Springfield mall. My ratings:
Plot 5/10
Character Development 4/10
Character Chemistry 8/10
Acting 7/10 (I think the faults are more with the script than the actors, though I do not see bullocks performance as anything close to oscar winning like others say)
Screenplay 5/10
Directing 7/10 (again flaws w script more than direction)
Cinematography 10/10 (can’t argue here)
Sound 8/10 (a little cloying at times)
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
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