Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris (vocal role), Phaldut Sharma (vocal role), Orto Ignatiussen (vocal role), Amy Warren (vocal role)
Rated PG-13 for intense perilous sequences, some disturbing images and brief strong language.
Nominated for 10 Academy Awards:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actress- Sandra Bullock
Best Cinematography
Best Production Design
Best Film Editing
Best Original Score
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
Best Visual Effects
No matter which film wins on Oscar night, I can't imagine that anything will outlast GRAVITY, my pick for best movie of 2013. I loved 12 YEARS A SLAVE, but I don't see this as a JURASSIC PARK vs. SCHINDLER'S LIST in 1993 sort of thing; GRAVITY has an accessibility that appeals to wider audiences and carries enough weight to maintain academic respect as well. It's one of the most intense movies that I've seen in years, but more importantly, it's a smart, visually enthralling, emotional powerhouse that's also an incredibly new experience with age-old, life-affirming themes. I love the hell out of this movie.
The story is deceitfully simple, and that deception has been the primary source of its critics, but make no mistake, its simplicity is merely a veil.
Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a medical engineer and first-time astronaut, the Mission Specialist on Space Shuttle mission STS-157 to service the Hubble Space Telescope. While on a spacewalk working on the Hubble, the mission crew, lead by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) on his final mission, receives notification from Mission Control in Houston (voiced by Ed Harris) that the Russians have just destroyed one of their own defunct satellites. Inadvertently, the satellite debris has gained momentum, tearing through everything in its path and forming a cloud of space debris moving at extreme velocity. With only the slightest warning, the crew of the Space Shuttle Explorer are suddenly bombarded by a lethal hail of space junk that obliterates everything in its path, shredding through Explorer like it was paper and leaving a hole where one astronaut's face had been; Dr. Ryan Stone and Lt. Matt Kowalski are the sole remaining survivors of Mission STS-157. With no spacecraft and running dangerously low on oxygen, with only a thruster pack running low on fuel to move about, Stone and Kowalski are tethered together with 90 minutes to get to the International Space Station 900 miles away before the debris cloud makes a full orbit to wreak havoc on them again.
Mild Spoilers Ensue:
GRAVITY is as much and more a thrill than anything else, but it's also an extremely moving human story about coming to terms with death and suffering while choosing life. The central character, Dr. Stone, is on a collision course with death, despairing over the death of her daughter in a playground accident, explaining how she just drives, blankly listening to the radio and trying to forget her pain. In space, she is faced with choosing death, as the opening titles read: "At 600KM above planet Earth the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing to carry sound. No air pressure. No oxygen. Life in space is impossible." That may not be a bad way to shake up your audience at the start, but it has a dual point; space is death, Earth is life, and as the recurring catastrophes of life (in this extreme case being an orbiting cloud of death by space debris and every malfunction possible) make their devastating cycle, Dr. Stone has to choose between the cold peace of death or the warm will of life. It's a story that ambitiously takes on human existence, how in spite of the relentless odds against life, the repetition of life's bombardment by the elements, the extremities can be overcome and life learns, evolves and is re-born. GRAVITY isn't exactly very sneaky about it either, injecting womb-like imagery and a rousing "Evolution of Man" scene, as a character crawls from smothering water and steps onto land while Steven Price's score bursts into a jubilant movement of percussion and choral voices.
With 10 Academy Award nominations, GRAVITY is tied with AMERICAN HUSTLE for the most nominations of the year, but of those two, only GRAVITY is a real frontrunner. AMERICAN HUSTLE is sort of a "nominations frontrunner", but is unlikely to make a big mark when the winners are announced. GRAVITY's real competition is 12 YEARS A SLAVE, a more traditional Oscar film than GRAVITY, and a very good and extremely important film in its own right. Strictly in terms of which is a better case of film and filmmaking, GRAVITY is the better, but 12 YEARS bears a special importance, so these two have been making equally strong cases ever since their releases in October 2013. At this year's Producers Guild of America Awards, a strong indicator of the Oscar's Best Picture intentions, for the first time ever, there was a tie for the PGA's Best Theatrical Feature Award between the two, emphasizing the extreme closeness of this year's awards. It would be totally deserving if GRAVITY won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but I'm guessing 12 YEARS A SLAVE will pull through narrowly in the end. It certainly would be a talking point though if the Academy came to a tie on Best Picture, which would be totally unprecedented, but then again, with the Academy using a preferential ballot system (voters list the nominees for Best Picture with number one as their top pick and two as their second pick and so on) it would be practically impossible.
Last year, while ARGO won Best Picture, it was LIFE OF PI that won the usual Best Picture counterpart award, Best Director, as well as winning the most awards that night with four. Although the Best Director award was primarily due to ARGO failing to garner the nomination (a rare occurrence for the Best Picture winner), I'm betting on something similar this year, with a Best Director win for GRAVITY, after sweeping the technical categories, which would put it on top for quantity.
Speaking of technical categories, I thought LIFE OF PI was visually astounding last year, but for visual effects advancements, GRAVITY is the most astounding since at least AVATAR almost five years ago, and perhaps even unmatched since The Lord of the Rings trilogy a decade ago. GRAVITY is a visual novelty. It doesn't really look like a novelty though (certainly a mark of great visual effects work) because it is used to show things that we feel like we've seen before in various astronaut documentary footage and photos that we've had since the 1960s, but everything in it had to created down here on Earth. Pre-production began work way back in 2010 and was expected to be a fairly standard quick production with heavy post-production for computer effects, but Spanish director Alfonso Cuaron (known for directing HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN), producer David Heyman (known for producing all eight Harry Potter films) and the rest of the production crew soon discovered the film required extensive technological developments that had never been need before. There just haven't been any previous films featuring extended shots of live actors in zero-gravity environments, and figuring out how to make it work required inventing new shooting rigs, utilizing precise high-speed robotic camera arms, specialized lighting equipment, suspension rigs and extensive computer-generated imagery and animation. I know the film's $100 million budget sounds like an awful lot, and it is, but eight of the other top ten highest-grossing movies of 2013 cost from as low as $130 million to as high as $225 million, and none of them faced as extensive technological innovations as GRAVITY. It certainly helps to have such a small cast when you need to pay for everything else.
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| Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone in GRAVITY. |
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