Have you ever stared into the blue sky and reached out with your imagination, only to find yourself intimidated by the magnitude of the galactic bodies and the fear of being alone amongst all that vastness of space? If you haven't, go watch director Alfonso Cuaron's space disaster film Gravity, and you'll understand what I mean.
The story envisioned by Jonas and his father director Cuaron is quite simple. A team of spacewalking astronauts servicing the Hubble Telescope are caught in a shower of space debris. All but two of them are killed when their workstation is destroyed in the first wave of high speed satellite fragments. The two survivors, portrayed by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, need to drift through space to reach other functioning space stations. And they need to be quick about it, because the debris will keep coming back to bug them as long as they stay in the near-Earth orbit.
Setting the story in space, the director needs to overcome numerous challenges. First and foremost is the presentation of the zero gravity environments, and thanks to visual effects supervisor Tim Webber and 3D designer Chris Parks, Gravity provides the most authentic experience. When I stepped out of the cinema, my head hurt a little as if it was still spinning, like the astronauts in the dark space. But that's nothing compared to what I felt while inside the theatre: as I sat there marveling at the IMAX screen, the images reminded me of all the fear and loneliness that I felt when staring at and spirit walking in the profound universe as a child: the fear and loneliness that I'd coaxed myself to forget was brought back to life by the powerful images of Cuaron's Gravity.
But the film is much more than a mere collection of computer-generated images. Considering the number and quality of long takes, I would say photographer Emmanuel Lubezki's work borders on showing off. And his show-off poses quite a challenge to Sandra Bullock, who must demonstrate an extraordinary command of her body to present movement under zero gravity. I wouldn't be surprised if Sandra is nominated for the next Academy Award.
Perhaps the only disadvantage about Gravity is that almost everything about it is good enough to compare with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, except for the philosophical connotation. But in the absence of a philosophical discourse, Gravity invokes a good deal of sensations, and those sensations are as real as they can get for those of us who might never actually venture out of Planet Earth.
On a scale from one to ten, Gravity gets an eight.