At a young age, children are asked what they want to do when they grow up. Some of the jobs that stand out from the rest are jobs like an actor, firefighter, police officer, doctor and of course…astronaut. But I believe that if any child watches the film Gravity, that dream job of theirs will quickly diminish.
Alfonso Cuaron, director of films such as Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed this one-of-kind masterpiece about astronauts working on a space station who are quickly interrupted by debris which not only crashes into their space station but also sends them floating into space. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as astronauts who tend to a space station while taking orders from mission control. Clooney’s character, Kowalski, floats around the station on a thruster pack as Bullock’s character, Stone, remains attached to the space station working on the necessary adjustments. Soon, they are interrupted by mission control with whom they immediately lose contact before getting the message that debris from a Russian missile strike on a satellite has caused a disturbance and might be in collision course with them. Within minutes, the station is hit and the two astronauts are catapulted in opposite directions into space. Eventually, Kowalski flies over to Stone and the two gently begin their route back to what is left of their damaged space shuttle But when something unexpectedly happens, thoughts and decisions regarding one of the characters will hurl you into a deep emotional journey that will hopefully end in solitude. I’m not going to spoil anything,
Although it may seem just like any other space movie, the different perspectives and first-person shots from inside the characters suits give the audience the feeling of what it’s like to be floating in space and also show us how one person can turn a bad situation into a guide of survival. We’ve seen bodies floating in space without a space suit before from long distances in films like Star Trek and Armageddon, but not up-close like Cuaron shows us in this film.
There are not a lot of things that can happen when you’re just sitting, watching a person float in outer space, yet the storyline moved along very well and kept me asking for more. I didn’t know what was going to happen next and that’s what I liked about the movie.
I thought it was brilliant how they filmed the objects in or around the spacecraft floating. Things like a chess piece, a pen, a Marvin the Martian doll, or the lonesome tears of Bullock’s character when she cried added to this brilliance. It’s without a doubt, one of the most visually stunning films of the year. If there’s something about the film that isn’t done correctly, please point it out to me, because I was too busy enjoying the picture too much.
After all is said and done, we have to ask ourselves if anything of that nature is truly possible in real life. I say, “Feel free to man a shuttle and try for yourselves, there’s nothing to be scared of.”
