Critics reviews

The fact that the cast and crew have all clearly brought their A game makes the abbreviated ambitions of the script all the more glaring and increasingly frustrating as Ryan prepares for a hail-mary attempt at returning home. Gravityultimately feels like a genre workout, one that convincingly sees the heroism and struggle of not letting go, but never transcends its basic (wo)man-versus-nature narrative.

Gravity, hailed by Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, and Kristin Thompson as a rare and groundbreaking fusion of Hollywood and experimental filmmaking, and not merely an extremely well-tooled amusement-park ride, is now being touted as a natural descendent of both Michael Snow's La région centrale as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey, as if its metaphysical and philosophical dimensions were somehow comparable.

Gravity should be hailed for its vividness and for the artful elasticity with which it manipulates our sense of orientation – our bodily experience of watching, of being quasi-literally ‘moved' by 3D imagery. But Cuarón ultimately sacrifices the promised ineffability for the easy payoff of cliffhanger thrills.

The whole of Gravity is a technical marvel, a sprawling, eye-gorging example of all that contemporary film photography and special-effects units can offer. It's just that the film is so remarkably banal, even embarrassing, on a dramatic level.

Aside from its apparently suspect science, Gravity has taken shots for the loquacity of the screenplay, though this is justified in the context of the story—keeping a running monologue up over radio increases the chances of making ‘SOS' contact with mission control—as well as being a pretty literalizing of the old saw "talking yourself down.

I won't spoil the details, but the ultimate message is more along the lines of ‘Never give up' and ‘Don't be a quitter', which comes perilously close to banality. What does that leave? Wondrous special effects, certainly. An evocation of space so seamless it doesn't even call attention to itself – it just feels natural, like they took their cameras hundreds of miles beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

The anxiety rarely abates even as the debris storms from broken-up satellites that plague the astronauts... provide the movie with its most visually enthralling moments. Maximum tension is derived from Bullock's repeated attempts to find something, anything to hold on to. In 2001, space has a majestic indifference. In Gravity, space is an active threat. The precariousness of existence is a visual constant.

Despite incorporating elements of fantasy and showcasing often thrilling craft, Cuarón's movies are weighed down by an oppressive and fundamentally irresolvable sense of melancholy. Unlike the superficially similar films of Steven Spielberg, which demonstrate an overriding conservatism, Cuarón's movies are driven by an impulse towards progress rather than recuperation, transformation instead of return.

Hypothetically, Gravity should improve with the cease-and-desist of Clooney's stubbly Buzz Lightyear act, which is some of the laziest acting he's done in years. But his absence—set up such that there's an ongoing possibility for his heroic return, which is not-so-skillfully exploited in a silly hallucination sequence—actually plays up a larger problem, namely the thinness of Bullock's character.

For all its stunning exteriors, it's really concerned with emotional interiors, and it goes about exploring them with simplicity and directness, letting the actors's faces and voices carry the burden of meaning. It's about what happens to the psyche as well as the body in the aftermath of catastrophe.

Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote that F.W. Murnau's Faust "integrates its dazzling special effects so seamlessly that they're indistinguishable from the film's narrative, poetry, and, above all, metaphysics." The same could be said of this awesome sci-fi spectacle by Alfonso Cuaron, which took several years to make but still feels spontaneous in its action and character development.

It's hard to recall a movie that's as viscerally thrilling and as deadly boring as "Gravity," a colossal and impressive exertion of brain power aimed at overriding—at obviating—the use of brain power... the movie involves a far more menacing emptiness than the physical void of outer space: the absence of ideas.