Gravity : Sandra Bullock + George Clooney Are Perfect Orgasm

Dr. Ryan Stone is a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky. But on a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone - tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness. The deafening silence tells them they have lost any link to Earth...and any chance for rescue. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into the terrifying expanse of space.

Guardian Review

There's a sequence in Stanley Kubrick's epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the cranky supercomputer Hal throws a space pod at astronaut Frank Poole, sending him spinning silently through the empty void. This sequence is effectively expanded to feature-film length in Alfonso Cuarón's eye-boggling Gravity, which hurls Sandra Bullock and George Clooney into the abyss after their Hubble-attached shuttle is hit by an avalanche of space debris. Swirling among scattered shards of ever-circling extraterrestrial junk, our unfeasibly good-looking heroes must get a grip on anything that will offer them safe re-entry into Earth's atmosphere or drift ever further into the depths of space – cold, dark and utterly alone.

  
Created through a painstaking combination of physical and digital performance that disintegrates the divide between live action and animation, Gravity boasts a level of sheer visual invention that would have left Stanley Kubrick's head spinning. Aided by the wizards at London's Framestore, Gravity invites us to gaze in awe at the cinematic spectacle of space, to marvel at the weighty mysteries of this big-screen cosmos. And marvel you will, as director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki opens a Pandora's paintbox of light, bouncing the brilliant reflections of celestial bodies around the virtual set with a clear, crisp precision that not even the darkening effect of 3D glasses can dampen. Honestly, if you're not mesmerised by the look of Gravity, then it may be time for you to stop going to the cinema.

While the shots may be long – the opening breathtakingly so – the narrative and running time are kinetically stripped down, throwing a handful of ideas playfully into the air and then cutting before they have time to fall thuddingly to the ground. As is standard, outer space becomes inner space, the emptiness of the void signalling an emptiness within the characters, which they must battle to return to the bosom of mother Earth. Just as The Ninth Configuration, with its visions of a lunar crucifixion, wrestled with the existential loneliness of the godless void, so Gravity presents space as a yawning limbo from which only transcendence (philosophical, religious, musical) can save us.

Significant, too, that parent/child relationships are once again at the heart of the matter. Just as Sigourney Weaver's Ripley strove symbolically to reunite herself with her lost daughter in (the director's cut of) Aliens and Jodie Foster's Dr Ellie Arroway longed for the rebirth of her father in Contact, so Sandra Bullock's Dr Ryan Stone must face her own parental ghosts in order to make the redemptive leap of faith across the vast distances of orbiting satellites. (This is a recurrent theme in Cuarón's work, from the oedipal substitutions of Y tu mamá también to the miraculous second-coming nativity of Children of Men.)
GRAVITY The level of visual invention in Gravity ‘would have left Stanley Kubrick’s head spinning’. Photograph: Allstar

While Billy Bragg may have famously sung that "it's wrong to wish on space hardware", Cuarón's script (co-written with his son, Jonás, further cementing the parent/child theme) positively insists that we do just that. Indeed, the phrase "in the blind", with which Stone punctuates her increasingly isolated radio transmissions, achieves an almost incantatory level of repetition, sounding more and more like a well-worn prayer mantra than a disciplined distress signal.

That the script should embrace such unashamedly expository allegory is entirely fitting. For all its A-list production values, this retains the crowd-pleasing essence of a rip-roaring B-picture, closer in tone to the sublime sentimentality of Silent Running or the grand pop philosophy of David Bowie's Space Oddity (Duncan Jones's Moon lurks in the background too) than the stern straight-facedness of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pairing of an uptight rookie and a garrulous old lag is almost parodically off the peg, with Clooney's salty dialogue drifting into pastiche generic buddy-movie shtick. And while Cuarón's eye may be looking for an authenticity that would make Nasa wonder how he sneaked cameras on to its satellites, his heart clearly yearns for the fantastical, wedded to the wild dreams of one who watched the moon landings on live TV as a kid and then grew up to direct the very best Harry Potter movie via the timeless enchantment of A Little Princess. For all its visual verisimilitude, this is as far-fetched as the flying broomsticks of a quidditch match or the temporal jinks of a time-turner spell. Anyone looking for comparisons with the likes of Solaris should skip the ponderous stodge of Tarkovsky and proceed posthaste to the slim-trim popularism of the Clooney/Soderbergh remake, which was shorter, snappier and infinitely more fun.

And what of the 3D? I once claimed (only partly flippantly) that stereoscopic cinema was only really good for scenes of people falling down large holes or waving pointy things out of the screen, so unless you were making a movie about a crack team of sky-diving harpoonists you were on a hiding to nothing. Ironically, with its free-falling/floating characters and jaggedy space debris, Gravity fits that description pretty closely, meaning that for the first (and perhaps only) time I acknowledge a film that positively demands to be seen in 3D.

This is not an unalloyed endorsement; unlike Hugo or Life of Pi, both of which worked perfectly well (maybe even better) in 2D, I fear that Gravity may lose some of its experiential raison d'etre if stripped of its meticulously orchestrated stereoscopy, exposing a lack of narrative depth, looking a little (how shall I put this?) flat. Like the Imax space documentaries to which it also owes a debt, Gravity needs to overwhelm you; to engulf you; to surround you; to discombobulate you.

It is, in the best sense, a fairground ride of a film, ideally experienced on the biggest screen available, sweeping you off your feet, turning you upside down, spinning you right round like a record, baby, before dropping you back down to Earth; wobbly legged, jaw dropped and appropriately light-headed.