{"id":1087,"date":"2013-10-13T02:21:01","date_gmt":"2013-10-13T02:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bryanbuser.com\/365moviesbyday\/?p=1087"},"modified":"2022-11-10T01:07:02","modified_gmt":"2022-11-10T01:07:02","slug":"gravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/365moviesbyday.bryanbuser.com\/gravity\/","title":{"rendered":"Gravity (2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gravity\"Okay…here we go. Gravity<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a> and Elysium<\/em><\/a>. 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<\/em> 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.
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Gravity is an A or an A-. I have less than 30 movies that I put into that A+ category.\u00a0Gravity<\/em>\u00a0had the potential to be there. Director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien<\/em>) 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\u00a0Solaris<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Contact<\/em>. Both movies were longer and duller than they needed to be.\u00a0Contact<\/em>, 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\u00a0I Am Legend<\/em>. 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\u00a0Cast Away<\/em>, where he was the only character on screen for a good hour and a half. Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, Crash)<\/em>\u00a0will 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.<\/p>\n

***Spoilers***<\/p>\n

So both Bullock and George Clooney (Michael Clayton, Up In The Air<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Plot 9.5\/10
\nCharacter Development 7\/10
\nCharacter Chemistry 8.5\/10
\nActing 9.5\/10
\nScreenplay 9\/10
\nDirecting \u00a08.5\/10
\nCinematography 10\/10 (best of the year)
\nSound 10\/10
\nHook and Reel 10\/10
\nUniversal Relevance 9\/10
\n91%<\/p>\n

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