The box office for this film was amazing, the audience grade was a strong A- and the rotten tomatoes score was an unreal 97 percent. So there’s not a lot of praise I can sing for this movie that hasn’t already been sung but I’ll try anyway. The short review: See this movie, and do so in theaters.
What Works: It’s a space movie that’s not “Syfy” at all since absolutely nothing that happens in Gravity couldn’t be done today or even yesterday. In this age of aliens and robots and alien-robots and monster alien robots, the realistic nature of Gravity is subversively simple. In fact, when the movie was first advertised, a lot of audiences were downright confused that there wouldn’t be more obvious, CGI-fakery to go along with the effects. “Really, she’s just floating around space for 90 minutes? Won’t that get repetitive and even boring?”
Imagine that, we now live in an age when a space movie can be considered boring if there aren’t laser beam fights and alien autopsies. Well, Gravity ain’t boring folks. Since I’m tired of essentially watching “Alien” over and over again (there’s a ship, and something on that ship that is picking off the crew one by one…in 100 different movies), Gravity felt downright refreshing.
To say a lot about what happens would be spoiling the organic nature of the action that unfolds (things happen because they really would, not because it’s what we want to happen), but I can say that this is the best performance I have ever seen out of Sandra Bullock. I felt like her Oscar-winning turn in The Blind Side was cartoonish, but here she’s either heartbreaking, exhausted, or terrified for much of her screen time. [Don’t worry, it’s more exciting than it sounds.] She finally strips down that movie star armor to let us see her in her most vulnerable state, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that one of the movie’s big emotional climaxes is her wiggling out of her protective spacesuit.
What Doesn’t Work: [crickets] I’m honestly struggling to come up with something. I know that for everyone who truly loves this film, there might be someone who finds stretches of it tedious, but sometimes you just have to let a movie work its magic on you. And this film (which establishes a singular atmosphere in the opening scene) certainly will if you let it.
What I Would Have Done Differently: [crickets]
Get review! Can’t wait to see the movie.