‘Gravity’ Review: This’ll Scare Off Any Would-Be Astronauts

By Todd Gilchrist | The Wrap

Although it unquestionably ennobles the pursuit of space exploration, “Gravity” feels like the polar opposite of a recruitment film for NASA.
Alfonso Cuaron’s overdue follow-up to “Children of Men” captures the beauty and terror of weightlessness as accurately as one imagines is possible — or a civilian could probably tolerate, anyway. A hard-science tale that offers a uniquely poetic portrait of hope and survival, “Gravity” is a both a virtuoso technical achievement and a powerfully visceral cinematic experience.

Sandra Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, a civilian engineer who joins the crew of the space shuttle on a mission to test an experimental scanning device. But after a cloud of debris destroys the shuttle, its scattered crew — including cucumber-cool commander Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) — is forced to band together to avoid drifting off into space. As their oxygen supply dwindles and their prospects for survival grow increasingly dim, Stone and Kowalsky make a last-ditch effort to find sanctuary in a nearby space station. But even if the duo manage to make it 100 kilometers with little functional equipment and even less breathable air, they still have to contend with the impending return of the orbiting debris, whose destruction of their one refuge may scuttle any chance they have to return to earth.

In assembling the film from a concentrated series of vignettes — each of which is photographed in long, fluid takes — Cuaron creates an immediate feeling of verisimilitude, which is amplified by sound design and sustained by denying the audience a consistent horizon to remind them which way is up.
Notwithstanding the massive blue marble that occasionally cascades across the astronauts’ viewfinders as they’re tumbling through space, their environment is basically a pitch-black backdrop of nothingness, and Cuaron’s first-person perspective — including shots from inside Stone’s helmet — makes it impossible for the audience not to identify with her paralyzing disorientation.
Moreover, Cuaron’s ceaselessly inventive camerawork manages to be artistic and functional at the same time, creating set pieces of breathtaking dexterity while also showing the literal physics of how Stone navigates space in zero gravity.

Clooney manages to be a little too Clooney, oozing Danny Ocean levels of confidence and charm as the more experienced of the pair. Bullock, on the other hand, carries the weight of the film on her shoulders and maintains a delicate balance between debilitating fear and pragmatic resilience. After aging out of the ingénue roles that relegated her early in her career to playing spunky go-getters or romantic interests, she has become an increasingly — and successfully — adventurous actress, and she seems to apply her professional uncertainty in the unfamiliar territory of science fiction to the gradual empowerment of her character.

At the same time, the film works best when it communicates character through action rather than exposition, and the only time its emotional power wanes is when Stone and Kowalsky are put in the position of providing themselves with an “arc.” Because, quite frankly, their battle for survival in humankind’s most hostile environment is enough by itself to generate drama, and it needs no additional trauma or back story to give it poignancy.

That said, it’s understandable that the film chooses to supply the audience with a form of verbal expression other than panicked breathing, but with such a straightforwardly potent concept to explore, the deeper underpinnings of their behavior provide an embarrassment of riches — superfluous, but effective, dramatically speaking.
It seems a bit early to declare the film a bona fide masterpiece, but no film released in 2013 thus far has the singularity, and the impact, of “Gravity.” While “Children of Men” is far too accomplished to serve as a trial run for almost anything, this film’s sophistication feels like a direct outgrowth of the experimentation — the alchemy of a unique idea and universal feelings – of its predecessor. Because if that film brought to life a childless world and made you understand the significance of its first new birth, this one not only shows you the fear and desperation of character in a seemingly inescapable environment, but makes you feel like you’re trapped there along with her.
In other words, Cuaron’s technical virtuosity makes it possible to experience a catastrophe without actually having to endure it first hand — which is why “Gravity” may eventually enlist more people to become filmmakers than astronauts.

as I have said here before the word is that this is Sandra Bullock's best role ever and the best way to see it is in Imax 3D but in 3D nonetheless

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...ty-Film-Teaser&p=191620&viewfull=1#post191620

'Gravity' review: try not to scream

Director Alfonso Cuarón proves that the scariest world in sci-fi is our own

By Bryan Bishop The Verge

There’s a moment in Gravity when you suddenly realize you’re not safe. Sandra Bullock’s Dr. Ryan Stone is installing a component for the Hubble space telescope, wrapped in her bulky spacesuit. Mission Commander Kowalski (George Clooney) loops around her, showboating while he makes small talk with Mission Control. The camera circles in one of director Alfonso Cuarón’s signature long takes, framing up Bullock with just the blue orb of planet Earth behind her. The 3D pulls you in, and then it hits you. One wrong move could pitch you right out of your theater seat, sending you hurtling through the IMAX screen and toward the planet far, far below.

And that’s just three minutes in.

Gravity isn’t so much a sci-fi movie as it is a survival film: two people against the elements, only as the film’s opening title card reminds us, it’s in the harshest environment possible. Kowalski and Stone are on a spacewalk when a wave of errant space debris comes their way. You’ve seen the trailer. Bad things happen. Vessels are destroyed. And the pair have to find a way to save themselves without any help from the folks back home. From that straightforward premise, Cuarón (Children of Men) crafts a visceral, mesmerizing adventure.

We’ve seen films set in outer space before, sure, but nothing has ever felt this real. Much has been written about the movie’s mix of live-action and computer-generated imagery — the majority of sets, ships, and even costumes were created digitally — and while Gravity contains some of the most breathtaking visual effects work in recent years the focus isn’t on sheer spectacle. It’s on familiarity. From the encumbered, awkward way the astronauts maneuver in their suits, to the cozy interior of the International Space Station, the film is filled with iconic imagery that people have grown up with thanks to NASA and the nightly news. One deviation from our collective memory and the illusion would fall apart, but Cuarón and his team render it all with photorealistic precision. This isn’t world building. It’s reality building.

The film takes us inside Dr. Stone’s point of view — sometimes literally — and we feel her panic as she whips through the void. We experience the absolute silence of space. We feel her terror as she grapples for purchase on the side of a ship. In IMAX theaters, the wraparound screen does more than fill our field of vision; it consumes it. It’s part film, part virtual reality, and every moment is bolstered by a truly stunning use of 3D.

For years audiences have been told that 3D provided the opportunity for movies that felt more alive and more immersive. That it could create living, fictional worlds, but those claims have never really held up — until now. The 3D in Gravity is nuanced; never distracting from the action on screen, but always pulling the viewer in alongside Clooney and Bullock. There are times when the 3D is quite pronounced, but it’s always in moments very clearly designed to accommodate the illusion. The experiential nature of the film helps — I’m still not sold that 3D will ever be worthwhile in a courtroom drama — but the general feeling is that of a gifted artist harnessing the capabilities of a powerful new tool. 3D is such an integral part of the spell the movie casts that its only downside may be that it won’t be duplicated effectively when people watch the movie at home.

None of it would work, however, without Sandra Bullock. George Clooney is as charming as ever, but he’s still just playing George Clooney. It’s Bullock who serves as the vital, human core of the film. It’s her panic we feel, her desperation that gnaws at our guts, and eventually, her hope that drives the film. Ultimately all of Cuarón’s efforts are there in service of Bullock’s performance, and the resonant, human story it tells. Gravity does reach beyond basic survival for some loftier thematic goals, and while some may find it clunky — the movie isn’t shy about wearing its ideas on its sleeve — it’s awkward only because the rest of the film is so flawless.

In 90 minutes Alfonso Cuarón has managed to take one of the most well-mined settings for sci-fi films and change it forever. Gravity turns outer space from the broad canvas that we use for whatever fantastical scenarios we want to paint, and makes it a real place. One with rules, physicality, and consequences. "We wanted to surrender to the reality of the technologies that exist," the director recently told New York Magazine. "We wanted it to almost have the experience of an IMAX documentary gone wrong." He’s succeeded in almost every way possible. Gravity doesn’t just raise the bar; it creates a new category.

Twenty years from now, we’ll see new writers and directors point back to Gravity as the movie that first made them realize the potential of filmmaking. But perhaps Alfonso Cuarón’s masterwork will have an effect in the meantime, as well. It’s been a year of disappointing sci-fi, and while the fantastical worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek aren’t going anywhere, maybe everyone else will learn to put the brakes on their action-movie antics. Now that they see it’s possible, maybe they’ll learn to explore the incredible power and danger of space and science itself. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

'Gravity' Reality Check: Alfonso Cuarón, Sandra Bullock Talk Fact vs. Fiction

by Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com Editor
In the new movie "Gravity," starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, it's possible to forget you are watching a film and not NASA footage.
That is because director Alfonso Cuarón chose to set his story about astronauts stranded on a spacewalk within the setting of real spaceflight, recreating, often in painstaking detail, modern day spacecraft and hardware.
But Cuarón is clear about what "Gravity" is, and what it is not. Warning: Minor spoilers follow.

"This is not a documentary," the director said in a recent interview with collectSPACE.com. "It is a piece of fiction."
Cuarón, however, did not want to invent new spacecraft to fit into his fictional storyline. He specifically chose to use the space shuttle (which was still flying when production began on "Gravity" in 2010), the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station to pay tribute to their achievements.
"I am fascinated by space exploration," he said. "I have a big huge respect for the people who have made it happen. For my money, the most amazing piece of technology that humanity has ever done is the Hubble Telescope."
"Since I was a kid, I followed space exploration because I am from the generation who saw the man stepping on the moon for the first time," Cuarón explained. "So for me that whole idea of doing the setting in space and honor what is in there, not trying to invent, that was the thing."
"Why invent when you have the most amazing technology up there?"

Leaping orbits
Cuarón didn't need to invent the spacecraft, though he and the team behind "Gravity" did need to create new methods of filming, as well as hundreds of detailed props and very intricate digital models to bring the vehicles to life on the screen.
But to tell the story he wanted to tell, the director found he needed to divert from reality, changing the space in which the real space shuttle, space telescope and space station exist.
"In the frame of the fiction, we wanted to be as respectful and accurate as possible," Cuarón shared. "But obviously, we had to take a big, big leap and a big, big freedom to tell the story."

Cuarón strove to get the physics of gravity — or rather the physics of microgravity — correct, emphasizing the film's title and the metaphorical struggle that it represents for the movie's characters. But if he insisted on the same level of realism with other details, such as the many procedures that NASA its trains astronauts to follow in order to avoid problems, it would have weighed down the plot.
"The amazing thing about the space program if you think about it, how many missions they have done ever since it started, how many incidents they had — very minimal," he stated. "Because the space program has a lot of alternate procedures for any circumstance."
Those procedures needed to be simplified in "Gravity," as did the spacecrafts' locations.
"The orbital position, they are in different orbital planes … and we had to put them in a similar orbital plane because otherwise we would not be able to tell the story," explained Cuarón.

In reality, it is not possible to easily transfer between the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station, or the station and China's spacelab Tiangong 1, because they are in different orbits. The space shuttle, when it was flying, and Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, cannot fly between the outposts and orbiting observatory, at least not without being redesigned and carrying considerably more fuel.
Cuarón didn't just adopt the changes to orbital inclinations and procedures without first trying to make them work.
"We did a draft where we tried to respect everything," he revealed, adding that the end result was a towering script. "Everything was just about explaining to the audiences all of that stuff, so we had to try to create a balance."

Portal to space
It wasn't only Cuarón who was working to get things right. Sandra Bullock, who readily admits to knowing "absolutely nothing" about spaceflight before signing on to "Gravity," delved into the part to accurately portray an astronaut.
"It is like going back to college and researching a paper in a world that you're totally unfamiliar with but it is your job to do," Bullock said. "The more you dig deep, the more you can nuance yourself and your character."
"In this case, you have to understand the technology that was foreign to you, a body movement that was foreign to you, verbiage and technology that made no sense but that you had to learn it enough so that it made some kind of sense while you were doing it, so you could be authentic while portraying it," Bullock added.
In the end, the attention that was paid to authenticity not only helped tell the story, but made "Gravity" a movie and an experience. Bullock cited the film's virtual Earth as an example.
"Two hundred and fifty people worked on every single frame of the movie to create the magic of Earth," Bullock said. "It is a live organism but we never look at it in that 3D, moving way. It is always sort of, 'there's Earth, she's round, we know the lakes, we know the grass.'"
"They created such a live character with Earth and space I think it gives you such a visceral experience of watching this movie that you feel like you are actually floating right above us performing in it," Bullock remarked. "So we gave you a portal into space."

still-one said:

I am not sure if you caught Edelstein's review of Sunday Morning. Although the plot may be "cornball" he notes he runs out of adjectives describing how good it is.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_16...avity-both-cornball-and-amazingly-incredible/

Click to expand...

From everything I have read this film is an absolute masterpiece and every critic is saying it must be seen in 3D and ideally iMax 3D

Here's yet another. I have yet to read any negative comment about this film which I gather is only 90 minutes in length......From the Wall Street Journal

By JOE MORGENSTERN

In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like "Gravity." What's new in Alfonso Cuarón's 3-D space adventure is the nature of the motion. It's as if the movie medium had been set free to dance in a bedazzling zero-gravity dream sequence.


Like many dreams of seizing intensity, this one is both deliriously beautiful and charged with primal fear—not just fear of falling, but of hurtling up, spinning out, breaking loose from our planet's embrace. Two astronauts, George Clooney's Matt Kowalski and Sandra Bullock's Ryan Stone, are adrift in space after disaster strikes during a shuttle mission to the Hubble Telescope. Tethered to each other at first, they tumble wildly out of control, then try to regain their equilibrium, conserve their oxygen and, in a cosmic nowhere, find the wherewithal to survive. He's a veteran pilot with a gift of cheery gab that may have helped him ward off unwanted feelings in the past. She's a novice, a medical engineer with not much astronaut training, and she feels everything, from horror through dread and grief to resolve, rebirth and elation.

We feel awe from the start. The film opens with a 12-minute sequence of seamless action in which Matt, Ryan, the giant telescope and the shuttle that brought them there float serenely above a vast, floating Earth until all hell suddenly breaks loose in the form of space debris. Newtonian laws of motion still apply in the maelstrom that ensues; the lawbreaker is the camera. It moves as no movie camera has done before—so fluidly that its loops and glides transgress boundaries and film conventions. At one point it closes in on Ryan, then penetrates her helmet, without pausing at the visor, to study the stark terror on her face.

As befits a superb movie, Ryan is a marvelous heroine. She has suffered an anguishing personal loss that resonates powerfully in her desperate present; until this galvanizing assignment, she'd only been going through the motions of her everyday life on Earth. She must have been an overachiever to reach a position of eminence in her profession, but her undertraining as an astronaut leaves her in a state of utter panic when chaos engulfs not only her shuttle but a whole tier of orbiting space stations and communication satellites in the extraterrestrial neighborhood. ("Half of North America just lost their Facebook," Matt says wryly when all the circuits go dead.)


If Ryan is to survive, she must augment everything she's recently learned with all the courage at her command. Before that, though, this wounded woman must replenish her will to live; that process is visualized through a silent, exquisitely grave moment in which Ryan becomes her own star child. (The filmmakers, you'll be glad to know, hold out the slim prospect of her making it back to Earth through a deliciously unlikely set of circumstances. She isn't quite doomed to exit the solar system, as Voyager 1 did last year.)

Until now, a Sandra Bullock film often turned on spunk or rue. The rue was a result of the loneliness that afflicted many of her characters, and became a vital ingredient of her hugely successful comedies. (My first column for the Journal, in 1995, reviewed her in "While You Were Sleeping," and noted the script's unlikely effort "to convince us that this lovely young woman, this vivid life spirit with a lyrical smile, can't make friends, can't get a date.") The spunk found its finest expression in Jan de Bont's "Speed," an action classic that worked as well as it did largely because Ms. Bullock's Annie was so smart and endearing, as well as terrified at finding herself behind the wheel of a bomb-laden bus.

Two decades after "Speed," Ms. Bullock has found the perfect receptacle for her humor and intelligence: Ryan's courage is matched by her intellect. She still does her trademarked rue, particularly at the outset, when the novice astronaut can barely keep her lunch down during her first spacewalk. And she's still movie-star youthful, maybe more so than ever since her character's energy is so tightly tied to physical action. (One of the movie's myriad achievements is portraying Ryan's strength and athletic beauty without making her a sexual object.) Best of all, though, Ms. Bullock has replaced the spunk of her ardent youth with a complex woman's depth of spirit. It's the best performance of her career.

Mr. Clooney is movie-star charismatic, even in a subordinate role, a feat that he manages almost entirely with his voice, since he's encased in spacewalk wardrobe from start to finish. His character isn't there for complexity. Matt's wisecracks, his corny stories, his swashbuckling expertise and, ultimately, his gallantry are all canny components of the movie's broad appeal.

The script, by the director, Mr. Cuarón, and his son Jonás Cuarón, is as shrewd as it is inventive. Matt gets a few lines, and deeds, of heart-stopping grace. "You should see the sun on the Ganges," he tells Ryan from a receding position in the void, thereby evoking, in eight words, the wonder of life on Earth. Mainly, though, he's very funny, a carefree cowboy on the high frontier, and his humor serves as welcome relief in a tale of barely endurable suspense—one that's told with startling compression in the course of 90 minutes. Objections have been raised in scientific quarters to the depiction of the international space station as being in proximity to the Hubble Space Telescope; they're actually in different orbits. This isn't nitpicking, since that proximity figures importantly in the plot, but it isn't a cardinal sin against science either; no one would mistake this movie for a planetarium lecture.

Watching the tale unfold, you're truly awe-struck, but you can't help wondering from time to time how they did it. (Though the movie is loud, don't bother bringing earplugs. The sound design is hypnotic, most of all when Ryan struggles in tight spaces, and essential to the experience.) "Gravity" is the culmination of a yearslong collaboration between a visionary filmmaker and a team of artists and technicians who had to invent elaborate new tools in the service of that vision. Chief among them are the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (he devised a radically new LED lighting system that came to be called The Sarcophagus); the production designer, Andy Nicholson; the visual effects supervisor, Tim Webber, and the editor, in conjunction with Mr. Cuarón, Mark Sanger. The 3-D photography is effective, sometimes stunningly so, but never calls undue attention to itself.

What you're watching at any given moment is likely to be partly or wholly animated. Long may flesh-and-blood actors thrive, but in the new world of tech-heavy productions they're only one of many elements in the FX mix. "Gravity" floats on the shoulders of the Pixar giants—especially "The Incredibles," which showed that computer animation could do almost anything live action can do, and "WALL-E," with its mysteriously somber opening sequence (and with its comic use of a fire extinguisher, which is put to very different use in "Gravity"). The greatest artistic debt, of course, is owed to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," which dared to use silence, serenity and space—screen space as well as space space—as never before.

Long before "Gravity" went into production, it was choreographed to the nth degree. Yet there's a sense of everything happening spontaneously, of surreal freedom plus a fearful randomness that unleashes those debris storms. The newness is more than a function of the motion. We've never seen such striking images of the structures our species has built in space. When we're inside them, objects float, willy-nilly, with tiny lives of their own. (How odd that one of Sandra Bullock's films was called "Hope Floats.") A movie has never brought us this close to tasting oxygen. (Or feeling mud.) And the randomness can be poetic. In the midst of that long and frightening radio silence, Ryan hears a staticky voice in an Earth language not her own, accompanied by laughter and a baby's cries. Hope floats indeed.

In the immediate future, "Gravity" is certain to find appreciative audiences all over the world; it speaks the language of big-screen action with surpassing eloquence, and comes to a climax as thrilling as any movie lover could wish for. No one can predict what impact it will have on the movies' future, but consider what the film already represents—the conjunction, within the studio system, of a singular cinema artist and a full array of Hollywood's most advanced filmmaking tools.

It's remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that Mr. Cuarón ever got the gig. He's no stranger to technology, having directed "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Children of Men," but he's not James Cameron, with a long history of technical virtuosity and hugely profitable action adventures. More remarkable still, he has been able to translate his vision into a film that shows the world, and the filmmaking world, what wondrous new things big studio films can do. All too often in the recent past, Hollywood's most magical tools have fallen into the hands of sorcerers' apprentices who perpetrate the same old succession of explosions, car crashes and fireballs. "Gravity" was made by a sorcerer.

the critics are also saying, like you, that it is her best role ever.

I like to use mrqe.com for movie reviews as their ratings are an average of all reviews of the same movie tajen across the country. Usually a good rating is mid 70's to low 80's

Gravity scored an all time high of 91. It must be good. I'm typing this waiting for Rush to start as IMAX Gravity was sold out here.