In Space, there is only more Space

GRAVITY (2013)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Make no mistake about it - "Gravity" is often edge-of-your-seat suspenseful and has amazing visuals of space that really envelop you. It is a film about a terrible accident at a space shuttle, and it is often astounding and marvelous to see the panorama of the Earth as we and the characters orbit around it and try to keep breathing amid chaos. But, at the end of the day, the movie ends too soon, leaving us with fewer impressions than we had. It is an entertaining footnotes kind of movie, lacking anything tangible to latch onto.

Sandra Bullock is Dr. Ryan Stone, a Biomedical engineer aboard her first space shuttle mission, the Explorer. George Clooney is Lt. Matt Kowalski, the leader of the Explorer team. They are fixing the Hubble Space Telescope as Kowalski does his spacewalk in circles. It is an astounding sequence, filmed in what seems like an unbroken shot that runs forever. It is transfixing and there is a terrifying beauty about it - the idea of hovering above the planet Earth while engaging in matters that are beyond normal human means. In a sense, director Alfonso Cuaron ("Y Tu Mama Tambien") is also implying how Earth is not within anyone's grasp when you are running on oxygen for a short amount of time, hovering over the home planet where no one else can see you. Was mankind meant to be hovering in space? Then Mission Control in Houston warns the crew that flying debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is making its way in the astronauts' direction. It is time to abort the mission but complications ensue - Dr. Stone and Lt. Kowalski feel the impact of the debris as it strikes the Telescope, the shuttle and the space station. The shuttle is beyond any repair and the entire crew is also dead. The Space Station has only one malfunctioning module. Their situation now is really dire.

I rather not give away much more of this 91-minute science-fiction thriller but I can say it involves more explosions and space stations. Bullock's Stone also has one rather absurd hallucination, thoughts of her long-lost daughter and her need to get back to Earth. She expresses little emotion about the other dead astronauts, and that is rather odd considering it is her first space shuttle mission, nor does she shed tears for Kowalski who performs an action in the film that has been criticized by scientists for reasons I cannot spoil. As I had mentioned earlier, "Gravity" is quite a cinematic experience and in an IMAX theater in 3-D, it might be even more thrilling.

The issue is the movie is only 91 minutes long, or maybe it is too long to tell a tale that could've been shortened to a half-hour. Or maybe too short to tell a tale that could have used more character exploration. "Gravity" feels like the last thirty minutes of "2001: A Space Odyssey" expanded to feature length. It does the job of entertaining the audience but I expect more from a Clooney-Bullock-Cuaron team up.