Suvudu Universe

Alfonso Cuaron’s latest film Gravity is wonderful piece of cinema, telling a small story on a tremendously large canvas.

It is a film featuring only two actors, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. We see another astronaut in the background and a few corpses, but this is a film focusing on one character Bullock’s Ryan Stone with Clooney (Matt Kowalski) as a supporting actor for her to interact with. All other interaction in the film is through radio transmissions.

The film is very well executed and performs beautifully in 3D. The film begins and ends loudly, but quickly quiets down establishing the vacuum and isolation in space. Gravity does a tremendous job communicating the epic scale of space and the fragility of us and our constructs in space. It also communicates the beauty and deadliness of nature, gravity is a force that we can fight against or use to our advantage, but it is not something that we can control.

There are intermittent actions scenes throughout the film as the antagonist is a cloud of rapidly orbiting space debris interacts with our main character and her environment. The CGI on these scenes are very well done and realistic looking.

Cuaron does some interesting things visually in the film, turning the airlock of a space station into a womb was one such decision that I think conveyed well what the station represented in terms of safety as well as the fear and anxiety that Bullock’s character was going through at that point of the film.

Much will be said about Bullock’s performance and rightly so, but Clooney’s zest and humor early in the film help frame and establish Bullock’s performance.

The struggle of Bullock to survive presents both an internal and external struggle for the character. We see the evidence of the internal pain of Bullock’s character in the film and learn the why behind this. We also see the external struggle as Bullock hops from sinking ship to sinking ship in search of safety. Both the internal and external struggles resolve themselves in a moment of clarity and revelation. This provides a satisfying resolution for this character that we spend an hour and a half with.

Bullock’s performance is very impressive, she changes energy and tone through the film, she conveys these changes both vocally and with her expressions. Whether she wins an Oscar is to hard to tell at this point, but I can say without a doubt that this performance will result in a nomination for the veteran actress. The closing scene is perfectly done and communicates the journey that Ryan Stone took both externally and internally.

Gravity is a film that you want to see in the theater on the largest screen possible and in 3D. Without 3D you will not get the same perspective on the movement of objects in space.