Gravity
Saturday, November 23, 2013 9:18:31 AM | (Age Not Specified)
Director and co-writer Cuarón brilliantly manages to create both awe at his glorious space vistas, and knuckle-gobbling tension at what's happening in the foreground. It's like a bank heist in Reims cathedral – in space. You could find yourself asthmatically gasping with rapture and excitement at the same time. After it was over, I was 10 minutes into my tube ride home before I remembered to exhale. Since its release, various specialist observers have unsportingly emerged to say that the science involved in Gravity is fanciful and wrong. No matter. What makes Gravity so gripping, and so novel, is that it behaves as if what everyone is doing is happening in a world of commonplace fact: like a movie about two drivers on a runaway train or hot-air balloon. A movie set in space tends to trigger an assumption: that it is set in the future (although not the case with Star Wars). If it is not like Apollo 13, about the bygone era of space exploration carried out by guys in quaint crewcuts, then it is going to be set in some madeup futurist world about space exploration in aluminium-foil costumes and spacecraft doors opening and closing with zhhh-zhhh sounds – a world that may or may not involve extraterrestrial creatures, but which importantly and patently doesn't exist; a movie whose effects depend, at least partly, on the assumption that what is being shown is not true.