Gravity remains a stunning visual achievement, but the film’s thin plot and heavy-handed themes leave too much empty space, bordering on boring.
Space is beautiful. The opening segments of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity make that abundantly clear. As he and Sandra Bullock’s Dr. Ryan Stone service the Hubble telescope, George Clooney’s Matt Kowalski looks around and says, “you gotta admit one thing: you can’t beat the view.” And it’s hard to beat the view of the film itself, a stunning technical achievement by all accounts. But space is also empty, or at least it probably feels that way as you float through it aimlessly. And unfortunately, despite its beauty, Gravity suffers from that same feeling of empty space.
I want to lean in on how remarkable the film is on a technical level before I dive into its myriad story problems. Cuarón and company captured one of the most authentic depictions of space I’ve seen on film. Inspired by images taken by NASA and other space agencies, the shots of the beautiful blue of the earth’s oceans, with Stone and Kowalski suspended in open space, evoke a sense of awe and wonder towards our universe and its scope. Attempting these effects paid off. Cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki, special effects supervisor Neil Corbould, Cuarón, and many others deserve credit for what they achieved. Cuarón’s images throughout his filmography are often fluid, utilizing long takes and extensive character movement, pairing nicely with the beauty and specific movements that come with being in space.
All this makes Gravity’s narrative shortcomings that much more frustrating. After the film’s staggering 13-minute opening shot, when the audience receives some good character building and banter from Bullock and Clooney, along with some tense disaster action, the film quickly begins to lose momentum. Once Stone is left to fend for herself, Bullock is asked to carry the rest of the movie on her own. To her enormous credit, Bullock does come close to pulling it off. Her performance here remains one of her best. A potent scene where she cries confronting her own mortality is nearly enough to make up for some of the blunt, heavy-handed dialogue that sometimes springs from her interactions with Clooney.
Unfortunately, Bullock simply can’t elevate something that isn’t there, and her character on the page seems to be lacking the nuance required to carry the plot forward. As is, the audience gets the occasional incredible image, but large chunks of this 90-minute film go nowhere thematically. Themes about loss and isolation are present here, but not layered.
To put it in musical terms, Cuarón’s best works have both a smooth rhythm and profound lyrics. They look a certain way, they move a certain way, and they deliver themes in a certain way. His characters are complicated and are written in a way that allows us to discover new strengths and flaws within them (and by extension, within ourselves). Gravity has the rhythm, but it doesn’t have the lyrics. It looks and feels like a Cuarón film, but the characters are too one-dimensional, and the plot too thin, for it to have much of a lasting impact after the credits roll.
Think of the great space movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Solaris. Interstellar. Those films use the setting to deeply and subtly explore themes of loneliness and isolation, using the vastness of the universe as their backdrop. Space is a metaphor for the human journey and progress (in 2001), a look into the human mind (in Solaris), and the distance human love can travel (in Interstellar). The empty space in Gravity, though trying to attempt deeper thematic connections, comes across as simply a physical obstacle the characters must overcome. Each of these other films take narrative risks, messing with time and space in ways that revolutionized storytelling and served a deeper purpose.
Gravity simply doesn’t have the nuance required to add itself to the legacy of great space movies. It’s beautiful, dazzling even. But that beauty ultimately rings hollow. Empty.
Gravity is now available to watch on digital and VOD, and on DVD & Blu-Ray.
