Gravity: The Power of Writing on Display

I have an unexplainable condition where I stop breathing when characters in movies stop breathing. Throughout my movie watching experiences, this has been problematic, but never too troubling. Titanic was very hard for me, as was the scene in Day After Tomorrow when Jake Gyllenhaal almost drowns in the cold water, but I made it through with mild discomfort. I’m sure you can imagine my distress during Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which is almost entirely centered on astronauts with rapidly diminishing oxygen levels. I almost died, and I say that in the nicest way possible.

Gravity was breathtaking in the sense that the visuals were absolutely stunning as well as breathtaking in the sense that it causes so much anxiety that audience members have trouble breathing. Many were catching their breath as they left the theater (myself included). It felt like I was running on 1% oxygen for the entire film.

I should have known that seeing Gravity was going to be an intense and physical experience; the trailers, while immensely beautiful, were almost enough to give me a heart attack. But, however shocking, the trailers didn’t really give any clues as to what the plot could possibly entail aside from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney floating hopelessly through space. I did wonder how Cuarón would fill 90 minutes of screen time with two floating actors, but Gravity delivered much, much more.

The story begins with Clooney’s Matt Kowalski talking to Mission Control while zooming around the space shuttle named Explorer. Kowalski is an experienced astronaut on his last mission, bent on beating the record for longest spacewalk. He jokes around with the people at Mission Control and is always telling stories, even though he has apparently told them many times before.

We then meet Bullock’s Ryan Stone, a medical engineer who is clearly not in her element. She feels nauseous while working outside the spacecraft, trying to correctly install her new software so that she can finally go home.

There is another crewmember that bounces around after finishing his job, but the audience only gets a few glimpses of him before things go awry. Mission Control informs Kowalski that a Russian satellite has exploded and that the debris is speeding towards them. In a frantic anti-gravity action sequence, the astronauts desperately try to make their way to the air lock. Of course, from the trailers, we already know they don’t make it, causing Stone to drift, with Kowalski the only astronaut with thrusts and steering capabilities.

After the initial destruction, Kowalski resorts to cracking a joke, saying that now he’ll definitely break the spacewalking record. There’s only so much his jokes can do to comfort Stone, whose oxygen continues to drop rapidly, and pretty soon Kowalski’s jokes stop. It is a serious situation, after all.

It was a great idea for Alfonso Cuarón and his brother, Jonas Cuarón, to include Kowalski’s humor in their script because Gravity could easily become one of the most depressing movies ever made. I mean, dying alone in a silent, endless universe seems to be a pretty bleak end, and for the characters in the film it becomes a bleak reality.            

Bullock carries the film to the very end. Her character is very rough around the edges; she is hardened and almost unlikeable, especially compared to Clooney’s charismatic character. But as the film progresses, and we see Stone desperately try to survive in the void as shrapnel and debris orbit past her every 90 minutes. She is forced to push through her painful past that is slowly revealed to the audience through her conversations with Kowalski.

For a film that relies on shock-factor and stunning visual effects, Gravity sports a script that is both complex and very simple at the same time. The Cuaróns have created a story that works with its environment—space itself is largely empty (aside from the celestial bodies and, in this story, the scraps from exploded satellites) as is the script. That isn’t to say that the script is lacking in any way. It perfectly creates characters without ever leaving the current situation and going into flashback. Stone and Kowalski work with what they have, which is limited oxygen and a highly stressful situation. Therefore the statements are short and mostly breathless, with Bullock and Clooney constantly aware of what they can say just by breathing differently. Gravity gives us two of the most thoughtful performances in the film circuit this year, and I think Bullock might be on her way to an Oscar nomination.

The film truly is a sight to see, whether in regular 2D, 3D, or IMAX 3D. Thankfully it was full of something other than visual effects: characters and substance. Unlike its visually stunning counterpart Avatar, Gravity gives less crazy sci-fi and more realistic characters and emotions. My palms were sweaty and I was tense during the entire movie, but I left knowing that I had just witnessed some remarkable and innovative filmmaking, and that’s all you can really ask for from a trip to the theater.