Gravity

For all of the innovative, jaw-dropping, never before seen CGI wonder in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” the impossibly balletic movement of Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera and the impeccably seamless 3-D effects, one of the film’s most impressive and memorable things is something Cuaron has withheld.

In space, there is nothing to carry sound. Satellites collide and rupture into millions of pieces, jetpacks soar and glide through the stars and astronauts dangle from floating space stations, clinging with their last ounce of strength to avoid floating into the distance, and nothing is to be heard.

Although the swell of an orchestra will remind you this is a Hollywood film, “Gravity” shatters the mold of what it is to be epic. Today’s tentpole movies are all noise and bombast; the multi-million dollar visual effects are par for the course. Unlike “Avatar,” “Life of Pi” and “Hugo” before it, 3-D and CGI are not here to enhance. Working through technology that needed to be invented, Cuaron has invented something breathtakingly original.

His focus on sights, not sound, story nor style, has nearly taken cinema back to its silent day roots and helped to imagine a future vision for what cinema can be.

The film’s opening seconds accomplish so much with so little. Earth is seen in all its luminous blue glory below the camera that seems to float above it. A few blips and voices come in over a radio frequency, and in the distance we see a tiny speck emerge. Like a sight out of the vast desert in “Lawrence of Arabia,” it’s an astronaut, and as he floats closer into view, the shot turns into a close-up; it’s George Clooney looking back at us.

Clooney plays Matt Kowalski, a veteran space walker leading a team of scientists repairing the American space station. In this opening shot that lasts upwards of 15 minutes, the camera swivels, soars and arabesques around Kowalski and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), another astronaut with significantly less comfort in this great black void.

Their dialogue is procedural. When news comes in that a missile has struck a Russian satellite and created debris, it’s met without foreboding or urgency. Kowalski discusses a Mardi Gras vacation, admires the planet for a moment, and then it will only be a few minutes before the beautiful sight of the Earth will look like a death sentence. Debris and destruction enters the frame without fanfare, and Stone begins to tumble into the black abyss with only her breathing to remind us of her terror.

For all the realism on display in “Gravity,” Cuaron has a precise eye for cinematic trickery and suspense building. At the right angle and with an astronaut’s body blocking the sun’s light source in the right way, Cuaron tantalizes our senses with a momentary eclipse, the bright white of the astronaut suits turning to an empty black and the glow of the Earth suddenly burning red from the sunrise.

And although Lubeski’s camera seems to be floating along with Stone and Kowalski, it’s again careful camera placement that enables this morbid ballet. One of the film’s most terrifying scenes is after Kowalski has rescued Stone on the return to their station. A Marvin the Martian toy floats out of the cockpit, and as our eye is slowly drawn to it, the ruptured face of another crew member bursts into view.

Some have criticized the story in “Gravity,” citing it as too simple and even pushing too many profundities. But despite all the spectacle, “Gravity” is actually a modest film. It is quite simply about a woman adrift, struggling and fighting for a reason to live.

We learn that Stone lost her daughter some years earlier, and back on Earth she simply floats from work to home without much more purpose or direction than she has in space. That’s the elegant beauty of this film. It doesn’t invoke a higher power or surreal imagination in the way “2001: A Space Odyssey” does, (really the only film that can earn and surpass comparison) but the fateful entry of a new problem, barrier or threat into each moment of Stone’s quest will remind you something is there.

After all, some of the film’s most beautiful images are the smallest. The 3-D allows Stone’s tears to float toward the camera, and when she sheds her spacesuit in a moment of safety, it’s as though she’s detaching from her body in a figurative sense. She curls up into a ball, and it invokes Ripley at the end of “Alien” and the newborn fetus at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at once.

And it should not be forgotten that Bullock, tied to behind-the-scenes puppetry, floating through cyber space and photographed from super close-up, manages to give the finest performance of her career.

Most films that rewrite the rules of filmmaking will not be received as whole-heartedly as “Gravity.” “2001” is an art film, one that polarized half of those who watched it. “Gravity’s” most brilliant trick is its accessibility and innovation. It’s a sci-fi filled with wonder, pathos and excitement, and it is by far the finest movie of the year.

4 stars