Only now does it occur to me... that the glory of 3-D has brought us
a giant ape flinging boulders right at me and
Jason Voorhees squeezing a man's head until the eyeball shoots out. It's shown us
Freddy Krueger,
Michael Ironside, and even
Charles Bronson in three-dimensions. I've even seen
blue cat people have strongly-implied weirdo hair sex. But never did I ever expect to be...
SPLOOSHED IN THE FACE WITH SANDRA BULLOCK'S CGI SPACE-TEARS!!!
Let me make this brief and relatively spoiler-free: while GRAVITY indeed boasts some incredible visuals, its manipulative attempts at emotional depth are in general clumsy, unearned, and give off the overwhelming impression that they've been scraped together from the afterglow of superior movies (DON'T LOOK NOW? APOLLO 13?). Sadly, this cannot be remedied by an Ed Harris vocal cameo (he gets about 10 minutes of screentime, tops) or any number of George HaClooncinations, even when he does his best
Doug Ross impersonation.
[
It's also worth mentioning that Sandra Bullock's numerous wardrobe changes– from spacesuit into hot pants/tank top and back again– flavor the film with a "peekaboo– gym bod!" salaciousness that distracts from the narrative drive and nearly suggests a sexploitation
movie, which gave rise to the idea that I'd much rather have seen a GRAVITY that was made in the 1970s, starring Pam Grier and Sid Haig!]
Perhaps I made a mistake in watching it nearly back-to-back with one of my all-time favorite 'survival journey' movies,
THE WAGES OF FEAR, a film that that firmly balances character development and white knuckle thrills with virtuosic integrity; conversely, GRAVITY's mushier than a melty banana split (and I don't mean one made with
astronaut ice cream!).
Hell, I don't mean to shit on this thing; it seems that many have derived genuine emotional responses from it, including some teary-eyed patrons at my local theater. Perhaps ours is a fragmented era of ramshackle profundities, where the existential hum can be quieted with a pat on the shoulder and a few empty platitudes. Perhaps the legacy of cosmic wonder and moral wisdom forged by writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke has merely become... CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE ASTRONAUT SOUL. Now
that makes me sad. I s'pose you succeeded after all, GRAVITY!
In closing, for its unsubtle attempts at emotional button-pushing and a visual vocabulary that consists of objects hovering slowly across the frame, I think perhaps a better title may have been:
