This has been on my 'must watch' list for awhile- Alfonso Cuaron is one of my favorite directors (see: Harry Potter 3 and Children of Men if you haven't already) and the setting, realism and effects looked amazing and frankly bone-chilling, given what I saw in the preview. I'm happy to report that this film more than lives up to the hype.
The story of Astronaut Ryen Stone (Sandra Bullock) and her no good, horrible, very bad day, we begin with a team of astronauts who are wrapping up repairs on the Hubble Telescope in their shuttle, The Explorer. Dapper and talkative fellow astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) is on his last shuttle mission and have a fine old time telling stories and jetting around on his cool new jet pack- he's coming close to breaking the record for the longest spacewalk but he won't quite make it. Everything seems to be going fine until Houston radios that the Russians have shot down a satellite and it's started a chain reaction, taking out other satellites and the debris is heading their way.
Just like that, the movie jumps from 25 mph to 125 mph as the astronauts frantically scramble to get back to the shuttle and get out of the way, but it's too late: the debris catches them, destroys the shuttle and the Hubble and sends Stone flying out into oblivion- at Kowalski's urging, she detaches from the Hubble- but is still flying out into nothing.
After some heart pounding panic (including a very cool, slow scene where Cuaron takes us inside Stone's helmet, so you can hear her breathing and the sound of her heart beating) Kowalski jets over to her, tethers back up to her and they had back to the shuttle- there are no survivors. Next stop is the International Space Station, which was evacuated prior to the debris striking. Along the way, we find out why Ryen is up in space: her daughter died and she's sort of been running on auto-pilot ever since.
Using the last of the gas in the jet pack, they fling themselves at the ISS and Ryen manages to grab hold, but Kowalski can't- and although Ryen gets tangled up in the parachute that accidentally deployed on the second life boat, Kowalski is too heavy- he's dragging her away from the station- so he detaches himself and floats away and with her oxygen getting lower and lower, Ryen makes her to the ISS, gets inside, shimmies out of her suit and takes long, long breaths of air.
But, just when you think that she might be catching a break of some kind- we're off and running again, this time due to a fire in the ISS. She hops in the Soyuz and is already to jet free of the ISS when she realizes that she's stuck in the damn parachute and has to go back outside to cut herself loose- when guess what? The debris has come back around and is smacking into the ISS yet again. Ryen manages to get back in the capsule, but the fuel is gone. She about gives up, but a nicely timed hallucination of Kowalski stops by and kicks Ryen into gear. She starts to Soyuz up and heads for the Chinese Station Tiangong, where she finds an escape capsule slips inside and points herself toward Earth and hopes for the best, even as the station begins to re-enter the atmosphere and break apart around her.
SPOILER ALERT, she makes it down okay, but, because every possibly danger has to happen to this poor woman, she almost drowns in her capsule and then her space suit- but she makes it out, heaves herself onto dry land and, slowly, uncertainly stands up and checks out the green landscape around before wandering off- I'm hoping to find a payphone or something to let NASA know she's alive.
Overall: a beautiful, taut and tense movie, Gravity leaves the viewer with a palpable sense of the real dangers that exist all the time in space every single day- and while they did a fantastic job on that- it was pulse-pounding enough on my regular sized television screen, it must have been damn near terrifying on the big or even an IMAX screen- it's also the beautiful story of one woman's journey back to life. The metaphorical aspect of the movie might seem a little heavy handed at times (space capsule as womb, slowly dragging herself to shore, like the primordial creatures coming on land for the first time) but overall, it worked really well. **** out of ****
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