Gravity

The consensus amongst our little group was, I think, that while Gravity was worth a watch, it had been overhyped and was both sillier and more predictable than it was made out to be.

The story is pretty obvious from the trailer – when a space shuttle is hit by high-speed shrapnel (the Russians’ fault, of course), a scientific operation goes disastrously wrong and two astronauts are left out in the void of space with only one thruster pack between them, trying desperately to get to the ISS. 

It may have the novelty of a realistic treatment of space, but it’s the same basic scenario as any escape-from-a-hostile-environment film, be it a crew trapped in a submarine or a sci-fi flick about space shields slowly fading. It is also fanciful, relying on incredibly coincidental timing to put its characters in danger at just the right moments, one rather ham-fisted hallucination scene, a rather handy landing point just off a shore rather than in the middle of a vast ocean, and a fire-extinguisher-as-thruster scene that while reasonable overall, was done rather too soon after Wall-E.

The performances are strong, to be sure, and apart from some well-controlled hair the effects very convincing – done largely with CG and some huge rigs, apparently – but the effect is of course very familiar these days and only when you look into the lengths filmmakers go to get weightless shots (the most impressive being the ordeal for Apollo 13) do you realise how far it can be necessary to go for that effect. But the whole point of this film is to portray the environment realistically, with the dangers that can hit when technology fails, and thus the technical marvel only gets in the way.

In the end, beyond its first ten minutes, I don’t think Gravity manages to deliver on its promises. It’s a film that is ultimately not very thrilling, tense or believable, leaving only something that is quite formulaic and cliché. If the beauty of the view of Earth from orbit is enough of a draw, perhaps none of the other shortcomings matter. It’s not a film I would care to see again, though.