Even though The Blind Side was a bit treacly for my tastes, I have to point out that she acted the hell out of it. And of course she was really good here as well, although I wish they had stripped away some of the manufactured drama of her daughter.
That scene stuck out for me as well. The idea that her tears would form little floating globs was cute and all, but come on, both cohesion and adhesion work in space! Her non-moving hair also kind of spoiled the weightless effect at times.
Those nits aside, I thought it was a very entertaining 90 minutes and worth every penny of the ticket price. This has to be the best use of 3D I have seen since Avatar or Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
I think a few minutes before that scene, she floated past some equipment on fire in one of the space stations. There were a few globs of flame floating away from the main fire. I thought that was interesting, but I don’t know if it was realistic.
I don’t know. I thought a couple of things could have made this movie better:
-A rousing speech by the President of the United States, addressing the entire world.
-Sex scene between Kowalski and Dr Stone (I assumed they banged anyway).
-A crazed psychopath on board the Chinese space station.
-They are on a mission to Mars to save humanity…from an asteroid…that’s about to knock out the sun
-Dr Stone has to kick a stowaway out of the Shenzhou capsule to drop enough weight to land safely with the cure to cancer.
-They have an adorable robot mascot…who goes crazy and murders everyone.
-Interspersed scenes of Dr Stone’s older daughter on Earth and her drug problems.
Best space movie ever.
Seriously though. I thought the film Sunshine was similar to Gravity when it focused on the “space as a lonely and unforgivingly dangerous place to travel” theme. That film sort of went off the rails when it tried to do more and turned into a “monster on a space ship” film.
Saw it in 3D last night. My first reaction was disappointment, but I think that’s unfair. More on that later.
In regards to the film having “plot,” I think it’s got plenty. There’s a lot of activity to get from point A to point Z; it’s not like 2001 where nothing happens for 2 hours. It does lack any deep drama or character development. In this interview in Wired, director Alfonso Cuaron says of Sandra Bullock’s character,
[QUOTE=Alfonso Cuaron]
Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity. She’s a character who lives in her own bubble, and in the film she’s trapped in her space suit. She’s a character who has trouble communicating, and here she literally starts having communication problems. She’s a character who needs to shed her skin to move on, and in the film she needs to get out of her astronaut suit because it’s suffocating her. In the end, the story is about rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity.
[/QUOTE]
Clearly that’s what he was going for with all those bits jammed in about her kid dying, her floating in the womb of the space station, her rebirth from the ocean, but it was all so very shallow. I found myself wanting for her to drift off into space like George Clooney at a lot of points, because I didn’t care about her as a character and I thought it would be a more interesting movie if they examined that angle of death.
My other chief complaint is that the action is so very preposterous, and not from a science/realism perspective. It’s like how every bomb countdown timer has to get to 1 because it creates “tension.” But eventually audiences get tension fatigue, and I started rolling my eyes about how every step of the plot had to happen just in the nick of time, whether it was oxygen running out, CO2 building up, grabbing the last rope or handle every time they floated off, using the last bit of propellant, or disembarking just as the parent vehicle was blowing up. Every. Single. Scene. Apollo 13 managed to create a lot more tension without resorting to such gimmicky cliches every 10 minutes, and that was a story with a publicly known ending.
All that said, after sleeping on it I don’t think it’s important to focus on those negatives. The attention to detail was absolutely phenomenal. The sounds, the movement, the scenery, it was all 100% top notch. The fact that I was able to nitpick it as a movie means, I think, that I wholeheartedly accepted the environment, and that’s a good thing. Overall, I’d give the movie a solid A.
That’s a valid point.
The fact that George Clooney had to be on his “last mission” (we call that “retirony”).
That Dr Stone just HAD to have one more narrow escape with the water landing.
Shit, I thought she would get tangled up in the seaweed just for good measure.
I asked my wife if Bullock’s character was going to get attacked by sharks next.
it’s like doing Parkour in a metal scrap yard.
Ha, that’s basically what Warner Brothers wanted:
http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=29651
I assumed that was Cuaron’s clumsy notification of the ‘rebirth’ theme for those who’d missed the floating fetus shot earlier. But it also annoyed me as well, though I was mildly rooting for her to drown because it would have just been so unexpected.
Relative to what she’s gone through, she’s not really in much danger in the water. Getting out of the suit is ‘necessary’ so she can emerge as close to naked as American mass audiences can handle. It’s not so much a notification of the theme as the realization of it.
A lot of people seem to be taking this all too literally. It works better if you just accept that it’s paintings and shamanism.
Nice. When the camera pans up her body, it is attractive, but as a heroic statue of a goddess - carved in perfect marble. That and the Fetus in the Airlock sell this rebirth/transformation clearly. And, wow: female empowerment has never been so mythologized. She IS Woman. (I mean this in a very complimentary way - she presents her heroic nature in a great way).
Saw it. Agreed with those who call it a game-changer. No one is discussing the 3D - i.e., dissecting it’s “integration” with the rest of the movie. That was seamless with this movie. It was a game-changer in the immersiveness of the experience. Stranger On A Train, thank you for your conrtext, and your balance between tech detail and an understanding of the movie experience.
This will hold up to multiple viewings - I wonder which population groups will flock to it repeatedly? Women/girls for its pro-woman subtext?
No, getting out of the spacesuit was necessary because she would drown if she stayed in it, as Gus Grissom almost did. Without the helmet they fill with water and then you drown.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I read a review which claimed that Bullock’s climb out of the water was like the first fish that learned to walk on land - a symbolic triumph over the struggle against a harsh environment or something.
Personally, I thought the director was just being true to the fact that after spending a long time in orbit it takes some time to get your ‘Earth Legs’ back. Yes, it was another struggle she had to go through, but it was a realistic one.
You can always find symbolism if you look for it. If she had gotten up quickly and strutted powerfully out of the water, I’m sure some reviewers would have said that was an intentional display of her ‘triumph’, or perhaps symbolic of how man was meant to be on Earth and not in space, or some other nonsense.
As for her fetal position in the ISS, I don’t think that was meant to be symbolic in any way other than to show that she was utterly spent physically and emotionally and at that point just wanted to curl up and rest.
You say Potato, I say Reborn Survivor-Goddess Fetus.
I liked the “overlap” between getting her Earth Legs back, and the evolutionary symbolism. Layers, I tell you!
Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m usually the first to scoff when people start reading into things way too much, but that scene was pretty blatant. If that scene wasn’t meant to evoke a fetus, then nothing in the movie meant anything other than it’s most literal, surface level interpretation. And for a movie that relies so heavily on myths and archetypes, that seems entirely implausible.
And please: with the various floating tubes - could they be more umbilical?! You don’t haveta be Fellini to see this (paraphrased from George Carlin…)
You’re confusing device with content. This isn’t based on a true story. Everything in it happens because it serves the vision of the filmmakers. There’s no ‘reason’ for the capsule to land in water at all, nor the hatch to be opened before the rescue chopper arrives, except to create the necessity of shedding the suit and the scene of emerging onto the shore.
It can, in fact, be all of these things at the same time. In fact, I’d argue that Cuaron’s ability to meld technical accuracy with thematic symbols is the strongest argument for his strength as a filmmaker. It’s what elevates “Gravity” from visceral thrill-ride to art.
Agreed. Layers!
There’s a fine line between a simple story and a legend.
He really swung for the fences with this one.