The Inertia of Spectacle . . . Or, Gravity Movie Review

This review is going to be relatively short.

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is . . . wow.  It's just wow.  I've never seen a movie as intensely, gloriously spectacular before now.  I found myself agog for one hour and twenty minutes.

When the credits began rolling, I realized that I'd never seen a movie like this before.  The obvious comparisons between Gravity and Apollo 13 are just that, obvious.  To make them demeans both movies.  While each deals with tragedy in space, the two are worlds apart, though equally deserving of every single accolade that each earned -- and probably three more besides. 

Before we get too far into it, though, let's talk about some of the specific criticisms that real scientists have had about the science in this movie.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the most obvious, and his twitter posts have a tongue-in-cheek feel to his criticisms.  But Alfonso Cuarón addressed those comments early on in an interview with Wired.

"Well, the story itself is … not unrealistic, but it’s just not very probable that it would happen, you know? And we had to embrace that from the get-go. But I want audiences to embrace the universe. It’s not about trying to figure out what is accurate and what is not. I mean, there’s no sound in space, for instance, but we use music to convey the story."

I like to think that you can make a good science fiction that is completely scientific accurate, but I respect that sometimes the story demands certain concessions, and to my mind none of those concession were so egregious that they distracted me from the story itself. 

Basically, Sandra Bullock plays a scientist working to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and George Clooney is the NASA astronaut tagging along.  Things go terrible, horribly wrong very quickly and they're left to try to rescue themselves.  Parts of the movie reminded me of that terribly campy 80s NASA-glorification Space Camp.

Other than those parts (and one really, explicitly unlikely scene reminiscent of a certain Pixar film about a futuristic robot) the movie was simply spectacular.  When I use that term, I want you to hear it for what it means -- a movie filled with the best kind of spectacle.

Aristotle put spectacle as the lowest form of poetry -- something that appeals to the senses (especially visually: spectacle/spectacles . . . get it?).  He insisted that this was the lowest form of art, but it makes sense in our era of spectacle and popcorn-spectacle to make a further distinction.  Because in movies we're allowed to grasp the awe and wonder of the universe, and our remarkably tiny part of it, in a way that no other form of media can convey.   

Gravity makes a bold assertion that film can make us more aware of our mortality and convey an existential synchronicity with the members of the audience.  That is, in that moment, we all have a shared experience which binds us closer as members of humanity.

It's heady and wonderful and glorious spectacle that should not be missed.



(As an aside, I'd like to launch on a short screed about how irritated I was watching how awesome NASA is, how glorious it is that human beings were in space, and then remembering that the United States of America doesn't do that anymore.  The movie begins on the shuttle Explorer, a shuttle which was never in our fleet -- when we had one!  How small and petty are we that we don't even think of the grandeur to which our forebears strove and then reached.  We belittle ourselves by forsaking our potential.)