BEFORE: OK, I admit it - I screwed up my own actor linking. Sure, anyone could have gone from "Elysium" to "Gravity" via the Matt Damon/George Clooney connection - the "Ocean's Eleven" series, of course. But I had NINE sci-fi films to work together. So I had to look at the big picture - and when I did, the only way to make all of the necessary connections was to go from Clifton Collins Jr. in "Pacific Rim" to Clooney via the "Perfect Storm"...
Only it wasn't Clifton Collins in that film, it was John Hawkes. Sure, they look a bit alike - call up some pics on Google if you don't believe me - but it's still a mistake that I should not have made. Character actors be damned, I should be able to tell them apart by now. So my linking's down the drain... Wait a minute, not so fast, Idris Elba links to Ed Harris (last seen in "Pollock") via a film called "Buffalo Soldiers" - and Ron Perlman also links to Ed Harris via a film called "Enemy at the Gates". So the chain survives, I live to fight another day. (Ed Harris is not seen in "Gravity", merely heard as the voice of Mission Control, but c'mon, work with me here.)
AFTER: This was one of the biggest films of 2013, nominated for a ton of awards (did it win any? I'll have to check my notes) and from everything I've read, it represented a giant leap forward in special effects, and storytelling in general. Plus, it's got astronauts, and space shuttles and satellites! As a geek, I should be all over this one, right?
Not so fast. Turns out there are all different kinds of geeks - there are the type that go to Comic-Con, and then there are the type who hang out at Cape Canaveral to see a shuttle launch, or can't wait to hear the news about the new experimental space-plane or whatever the hell that thing was. Turns out, I think I'm firmly in the first camp, not so much in the second camp. I liked "Apollo 13", but because it's gripping story made for great tension - I wasn't watching it to see if they nailed the way weightlessness worked on screen, or to get a look at what the dials looked like on the Apollo module. Yes, there are space nerds, as opposed to sci-fi nerds, and I don't think I'm one of them. They really need their own name, to distinguish themselves from the fans of "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" - how about Astro-nuts? OK, that's a bit derogative, but we'll workshop something.
Yes, it seems like this film was striving for REALITY, or as close as one can come to reality by using CGI and filming in a studio with people on wires and gimbals in front of green-screen can get. Science FACT-ion instead of science fiction? Of course, it can't be really real because we can't send our actors up into orbit or endanger them in any way, so a lot of people went to a lot of trouble here to duplicate reality (or a fictional reality that looks and feels like a real reality) and while this is science-based and fictional, I can't bring myself to consider it as science fiction - where are the aliens? The robots? Phasers and/or lightsabers?
I put this on a DVD with the film "The Impossible", and I think my instincts there were spot on - it's about survival, doing whatever it takes to survive, get back to civilization and tell your story, and the stories of those who maybe didn't make it back. Beating the odds, no matter what the cost. Sacrifice as well as survival -
Now that we've established that, I can judge the film based on its own merits, right? Not so fast. Here's the part where the film and I parted company - the sequence that just HAD to be a dream, because it defied the rules of both physics and proper storytelling. Yes, it was most likely a dream, but it LOOKED like part of the reality, and it was placed before the audience as if it WERE part of the reality, right up until the part where it was revealed not to be. From a storytelling angle, this is dirty pool. Bait and switch. I'm only angry because a vital bit of information is revealed in this dream/hallucination, one that otherwise might not have come to light, and that's just not how dreams work. You can't know something in a dream that you didn't know in your waking life. Perhaps she knew this and forgot it and the dream reminded her of it, but it's still a dirty storytelling trick.
Beyond that, there were several times that I didn't really know what was going on. Clearly there was some kind of specific problem taking place, but since at this point there was only one character on screen, and you wouldn't expect someone to talk to themselves the same way they would talk to another person, this sort of left me, as an audience member, out in the cold. If I have to read the plot summary on Wikipedia the next day to find out what happened in the film I watched the night before, then someone involved in the storytelling process dropped the ball. Or pitched it too far over my head.
I can see how some people appreciated the sentimentality involved in the storyline - the drama and the emotions involved was there to elevate this over a simple story about astronauts and how they do what they do. But I think it was a bit too much - I think "Gravity" represents not only the force that causes items to fall toward Earth, it also represents the heavy-handedness applied here by the director to try and elicit an emotional response from the audience.
Of course, this all could be a result of a glitch in my progress - I simply read and heard too much about this film before watching it. You reviewers and comedians who can't resist spoiling endings, I'm holding you to blame. Plus I had to dub it to DVD, and I had to check that DVD - so I probably saw too much about the ending before watching it in sequence. They really should have had a disclaimer on this film - something like "You're going to want to see this in the theater, because if you watch it at home or read too much about the ending beforehand, it's going to seem like a pointless exercise." That's much too long for the poster, but again, we'll workshop something.
Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "The Heat"), George Clooney (last seen in "The Thin Red Line").
RATING: 6 out of 10 airlocks
I saw it in IMAX 3D. I can't imagine what the experience was like in standard-definition, on a DVD-R. I liked it even though I acknowledge that it was thin on plot and that some of the plot points seemed...convenient? Hard to believe that they trained the electronic engineer (who worked in the medical industry) how to be an astronaut, as opposed to training an astronaut how to install a new card into a satellite.
ReplyDeleteAnd only six months of astronaut training?
And this training was so thorough that she could work out how to operate a Chinese spacecraft from power-up through undocking and onward to a successful landing?
None of this ruined my good time, however. It was such a damn beautiful-looking movie.
And nope, I definitely can't imagine what it would be like to watch this in standard definition off of a DVD-R. :)