- Location: Regal Auburn Stadium 17
- Well, I guess kids aren't going to dream of becoming astronauts anymore. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity delivers a terrifying version of spacewalks gone wrong and the sort of disaster pandemonium usually reserved for Michael Bay movies. But let me be clear: you would never mistake Gravity for a Michael Bay product, even though it was shot in 3D. Like Cuarón's brilliant Children of Men, this is film whose every scene evinces meticulous, patient construction. From its riveting marathon 13-minute-long opening shot to its final image of Earth in long-awaited closeup, it's obvious that Cuarón is in control, even if everything else seems to be spiraling out of control.
- As far as plot and character summaries go, this one should be easy. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is an introspective medical scientist, Lt. Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) is a gregarious military veteran, and both of them are astronauts. By the time the breathtaking first shot ends, they are the only two members of a shuttle crew alive after a Russian satellite detonation suddenly renders a Hubble repair mission far deadlier than it should have been. Stuck in space with a damaged shuttle, the two seek to make their way to the International Space Station before the debris comes back around, but there's a problem: momentum. You want to get somewhere, you have to fire your rockets. Maybe Kowalski shouldn't have wasted so much of his propellant hot-dogging around at the beginning of the film.
- Much to the horror of physics students everywhere, it's not just linear momentum, either. Angular momentum soon proves to just as challenging an obstacle, too, every time one of the two tethered astronauts tries to grab hold of something. Eventually, Kowalski solves their myriad physics problems by cutting himself lose, although we have to wonder if we've really seen the last of him. As the increasingly despondent Dr. Stone ponders her life while evading such hazards as zero-g fires, low oxygen tank levels, and treacherous airlock entries, even she begins to wonder whether it's all worth the effort.
- While there is a human interest story at the heart of Gravity, it's completely obvious that both the director and I are more interested in the visual experience, and boy is it a doozy. There are relatively few new films that must be seen at the theater, but this is one of them and yes, 3D is required. Like Avatar, Hugo, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the only other recent films that merited their third dimension, Gravity realizes that the true purpose of 3D is using depth to visually reinforce a theme, and in this case it's to emphasize just how far astronauts are from home. Perhaps the true indication of this film's greatness is that, unlike Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'm not even inclined to detail those few aspects of physics that the film gets wrong, especially when it got so many others right. Instead, I'm just happy to sit and watch this truly marvelous visual spectacle for 90 minutes and, at the end, to be glad that it was them up there and not me.
- Ed Harris apparently provided the voice of Mission Control. I like to think that he was still wearing the vest.
