No plans for Saturday evening?
Here is a very good movie I can recommend.
If you're a fan of Sandra Bullock and you don't mind George Clooney watch it!
a short review from New York Times:
“Life in
space is impossible.” That stark statement of scientific fact is one of the
first things to appear on screen in “Gravity,” but before long, it is
contradicted, or at least complicated. As our eyes (from behind 3-D glasses)
adjust to the vast darkness, illuminated by streaks of sunlight refracted
through the Earth’s atmosphere, we detect movement that is recognizably human
and hear familiar voices. Those tiny figures bouncing around on that floating
contraption — it looks like a mobile
suspended from a child’s bedroom ceiling — are people. Scientists. Astronauts. Movie
stars. (Sandra Bullock and George
Clooney in spacesuits, as Mission Specialist Ryan Stone and Mission Commander Matt
Kowalski; Ed Harris, unseen and unnamed, as “Houston” down below).
The defiance of impossibility is this movie’s theme and its reason for
being. But the main challenge facing the director, Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the script with his son Jonás), is not visualizing the unimaginable so much
as overcoming the audience’s assumption that we’ve seen it all before. After
more than 50 years, space travel has lost some of its luster, and movies are
partly to blame for our jadedness. It has been a long time since a filmmaker
conjured the awe of“2001: A Space Odyssey” or the terror of “Alien” or captured afresh the spooky
wonder of a trip outside our native atmosphere.
Mr. Cuarón succeeds by tethering almost
unfathomably complex techniques — both digital and analog — to a simple narrative. “Gravity” is less a science-fiction spectacle than
a Jack London tale in orbit. The usual genre baggage has been jettisoned: there
are no predatory extraterrestrials, no pompous flights of allegory, no
extravagant pseudo-epic gestures. Instead, there is a swift and buoyant story
of the struggle for survival in terrible, rapidly changing circumstances.
Cosmic questions about our place in the universe are not so much avoided as subordinated
to more pressing practical concerns. How do you outrun a storm of debris?
Launch a landing module without fuel? Decipher an instruction manual in Russian
or Chinese?
It has recently been observed that not all of the film’s
answers to these questions are strictly accurate. The course that Stone and
Kowalski plot from the Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space
Station would apparently not be feasible in real life. (On the other hand, I was
relieved to learn that a fire extinguisher really can serve as a makeshift
zero-G jetpack. Not a spoiler, just a word to the wise.) Surely, though, the
standard for a movie like this one is not realism but coherence. Every true
outlaw has a code. The laws of physics are no exception, and Mr. Cuarón violates them with ingenious and exuberant
rigor.
The accidental explosion of a communications satellite silences Houston
and, what’s worse, sends a blizzard of shrapnel hurtling toward the astronauts.
Quite a bit goes wrong. Straps connecting astronauts to the relative security
of their spacecraft are severed. Parachute lines foul engines. Fires break out
inside vessels, and stuff outside is smashed to pieces. Not everyone survives.
All of it — terrifyingly and marvelously — evades summary and confounds expectations. You
have to see it to believe it.
And what you see (through the exquisitely observant lenses of the great
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) defies
easy description. Stone and Kowalski’s orbital path is perched between the inky
infinite and the green, cloud-swept face of home. The perspective is dazzling
and jarring, and Mr. Cuarón allows a few moments of quiet, contemplative beauty to punctuate the
busy, desperate activity of staying alive. Kowalski, generally an irreverent
joker, pauses to savor the sun over the Ganges, and you may find yourself
picking out other geographical details. Look, there’s Italy, and the Nile
Valley. These reference points are as unsettling as they are reassuring,
because they are glimpsed from a vantage point that is newly and profoundly
alien.
That sense of estrangement owes a lot to Mr. Cuarón’s use of 3-D, which surpasses even what James
Cameron accomplished in the flight sequences of “Avatar.” More than that film (and more
than “Hugo” or “How to Train Your Dragon” or any other high-quality
recent specimens), “Gravity” treats 3-D as essential to the information it
wants to share. The reason for that is summed up in the title, which names an
obvious missing element. Nothing in the movie — not hand tools or chess pieces, human bodies or
cruise-ship-size space stations — rests within a stable vertical or horizontal plane. Neither does the movie
itself, which in a little more than 90 minutes rewrites the rules of cinema as
we have known them.
But maybe not quite all of them, come to think of it. The script is, at
times, weighed down by some heavy screenwriting clichés. Some are minor, like the fuel gauge that
reads full until the glass is tapped, causing the arrow to drop. More
cringe-inducing is the tragic back story stapled to Stone, a doctor on her
first trip into orbit. We would care about her even without the haunting memory
of a dead child, who inspires a maudlin monologue and a flight of orchestral
bathos in Steven Price’s otherwise canny and haunting score.
I will confess that the first time I saw “Gravity,” I found its talkiness
annoying. Not just Ms. Bullock’s perky-anxious soliloquizing, but also Mr.
Clooney’s gruff, regular-guy wisecracking. Doesn’t Stone say her favorite thing
about space is the silence?
But a second viewing changed my mind a bit. It’s not that the dialogue
improved — it will not be anyone’s
favorite part of the movie — but rather that its relation to that silence became clearer. Stone and
Kowalski jabber on, to themselves and each other and to Houston “in the blind,”
partly to keep the terror of their situation at bay, to fight the overwhelming
sense of how tiny and insignificant they are in the cosmos.
This assertion of identity is ridiculous and also, for that very reason,
affecting. For all of Mr. Cuarón’s formal wizardry and pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart. Much
as “Gravity” revels in the giddy, scary thrill of weightlessness, it is,
finally, about the longing to be pulled back down onto the crowded, watery
sphere where life is tedious, complicated, sad and possible.
“Gravity” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly
cautioned). Existential terror and the salty language it provokes.
Gravity
Opens on Friday.
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón; written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki;
edited by Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger; music by Steven Price; production design by Andy
Nicholson; costumes by Jany Temime; visual effects by Tim Webber; produced by
Alfonso Cuarón and David Heyman; released
by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.
WITH: Sandra
Bullock (Ryan Stone), George Clooney (Matt Kowalski) and Ed Harris (Voice of
Houston).
Review by By A. O. SCOTT
