Gravity Review
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Gravity
Warner Brothers
PG 13 90 min
Okay gang, spoiler alert ahead. Read on at your own peril. Actually what I should have said is go spend 9 bucks and sit through GRAVITY at your own peril but I digress...
What we know coming in is that gravity has been a very highly advertised and highly touted science fiction extravaganza starring: to very marketable stars, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. What we did not know from the trailers is that this film is similar, at least in concept, to a couple other films that I liked. If you remember Stephen King's CUJO and James Franco and 127 HOURS you remember, at least I do, wondering how they can make it entertaining film with basically only one setting. With CUJO it was the car being terrorized by the monsters rabid dog and 127 HOURS it was a crack in the mountainside where Franco was trapped. I liked both those movies and was surprised at the ingenuity involved to keep that one scene fresh.
(Also while CUJO and 127 HOURS relied on flash back and side stories to leave the boredom here there is none of that, preferring to lumber from calamity to calamity.)
Unfortunately that's not the case with GRAVITY. Here Bullock and Clooney are trapped in an ill-fated Space Station adventure. Bullock will wind up on her own in a desperate attempt to survive until she can make her way back to Earth.
I have often pointed out that with even an average budget just about any film made has the capability of exhibiting some very impressive special effects. That means, unlike 2001 A SPACE ODDYSSEY I'm very really in all of fantastic CGI. Gravity starts out very impressively as the characters and props float about the cabin. This effect loses its lustre in about 5 minutes the surprise is over and it quickly becomes mundane. From then on it is simply a matter of Bullock going from chore to chore untangling the parachute, putting out fires, fixing different components etc. Unfortunately if you know the runtime of the film you quickly realize that these potentially deadly problems will be resolved. All this takes place as everything in the cabin is floating around quite annoyingly. Now while Bullock is certainly no Meryl Streep I don't blame her for this movies doldrums. She's just not given any material to work with. Clooney, on the other hand, is certainly capable but his part is pretty small; small enough, it seems, to have phoned it in which he seems to have done.
So if you’re up for an hour and a half of pointless floating great.
If not you’ll probably be bored to death. I was.
Ps I just looked at some other reviews and I see I’m in the minority. They’re wrong. <G>
D+
WSS
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Steve, as you know, I pretty much agree with you on this one. While the CGI is fantastic, the dialogue is purely pedestrian, that dialogue being mostly Sandra Bullock talking to herself. (which is actually better than the dialog when she is talking to Clooney).
They also have her bipolar....half the time she plays as this tough resourceful well trained astronaut, and another half the time she is completely "damsel in distress" or as I call it "Ingenue in Space".
Then the worst part is the old chestnut that every below average movie comes up with: the tired old "communications are cut off" ploy to try to make the situation more claustrophobic and isolated. Bogus.
The real life counterpart to this film, Apollo 13 didn't cut off communications in order to be riveting.
Oddly, I believe both movies had the same person being the "voice of Houston": Ed Harris.
Cutting Ed out of the equation was a mistake in my mind.
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