Gravity (Warner Bros., PG-13)

It’s at once too commercial and not commercial enough.

A whole lot of people seem pretty anxious to see Gravity, perhaps because of what happened with director Alfonso Cuarón’s last directorial effort, Children of Men, back in 2006. Children of Men is an indisputable modern masterpiece, one of those films that it seems safe to assume people will still be watching and talking about decades from now, and yet its distributor, Universal Studios, seemed patently uninterested in marketing it at all. This resulted in the film grossing less than half of its production budget, and seeming like a financial failure until most of the population found out how good it was on DVD. So between knowing better than to miss out on a Cuarón film now and also since we’ve had to wait so long for his new one, anticipation for Gravity is at fever pitch.

But wait, Gravity stars George Clooney? And Sandra Bullock? Hm, that doesn’t sound promising. I like Clooney and hate Bullock, but neither really has much in the way of range, despite their respective Oscars. Still, we can all trust Cuarón to pull good performances out of them, right? Well, as it turns out, a great deal of the movie Bullock and Clooney register basically just as voices; Gravity takes place in outer space, of course, so they’re dressed up heavily in spacesuits, so their physical presence and recognizable nature is close to zero, apart from their voices. Given how special effects heavy this film is, sometimes it feels like an animated movie, where Clooney and Bullock are merely doing the voices of the main characters.

The plot here is that Clooney and Bullock are outside of their spacecraft when a shower of debris comes their way, destroying their ship and all of the crew, apart from them. The rest of the movie finds them trying to get back to Earth, by means of using Clooney’s jetpack to reach a nearby space station, and things like that.

One of the most memorable things about Children of Men was its cinematography, and some extremely complicated long takes, which the choreographed cinematography made possible. Gravity reteams Cuarón with his usual cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (who has also shot the three newest Terrence Malick movies—you know you’re doing something right as a cinematographer if Malick wants to work with you), and you can see they know they have expectations to live up to. Again, there are extremely long, choreographed shots, and some truly gorgeous work. That said, Gravity is so special effects heavy it gets unclear as to how much of the film’s beauty rests on Lubezki’s shoulders, given that he was presumably shooting against a greenscreen, and most of the aesthetically pleasing stuff came in later. A lot of his work actually reads like Benoît Debie’s work on Irreversible—long takes, and a floaty camera that rises and falls and loops and generally drifts around freely. Perhaps it makes more sense in the context of being in outer space, though.

Coming out of Gravity, my first instinct was that it would fail—it looks like it cost a kajillion dollars to make, and it’s at once too commercial and not commercial enough; I imagine a lot of its audience won’t like it for how abstract it can be sometimes, but another part of its audience won’t like it for a number of Hollywood concessions it makes (the cast aside, I’m not mentioning some fairly major plot points or the overall structure of the film, for fear of spoiling things). And while my feeling as to how a lot of the audience will react to it may still be accurate, imdb.com is reporting the film’s budget as being only $80 million, which is remarkably low given how good it looks—it looks exponentially better than Avatar, which cost three times that much to make. And yes, what I say above does mean that we can add Gravity to the very short list of films it’s worth shelling out the couple of extra dollars to see in 3-D, but that also means that if the movie doesn’t do well theatrically it won’t have as easy a time finding its audience on home video as Children of Men did—this movie will lose a lot on the transition from the big screen to the small screen. I say this about every movie, but it’s particularly applicable here: If you’re going to see Gravity, be sure to see it on the big screen. (And preferably in 3-D.) It’s going to feel weird driving your car home, the film is so immersive—perhaps take a walk or something in between the movie ending and your operating of any heavy machinery.

In the end, Gravity is a very good film, but not a great one. The best way I can think to put it is that it has a bit of Saving Private Ryan syndrome — in that film the war scenes were second-to-none, but the story wasn’t strong enough to really deserve them. In Gravity the depiction of outer space is second-to-none, but the story is again kind of lacking. | Pete Timmermann