Gravity

There are a lot of films from 2013 that I told myself I was going to see and then never really got around to seeing them. Gravity is one of those movies. The only reason I really watched it was by accident. My friend came by, said he was going to watch the movie, my other friend and I were playing Xbox on a bigger TV and offered it to him. And so the experience of watching Gravity happened.

Gravity really only has two cast members in it. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Bullock is Ryan Stone, a medical doctor on her first trip to space. Why she's in space, I'm not totally sure. She's doing some kind of biochemical engineering and for some reason that requires her to go into space, but all you really need to know is that she has never been in space before.

On the other hand you have George Clooney as Matt Kowalski, a veteran astronaut who is on his last day in space. He's been in space for so long that he was going for a record that he barely missed by a few hours. They're up in space doing whatever astronauts do in space when suddenly everything goes to shit. To be honest, its a little confusing how everything goes to hell but it does. The short answer is that the Russians are trying to dispose of a satellite so they blow it up with a missile. This causes a huge storm of debris to hit Stone and Kowalski's shuttle, tearing it to bits, killing the rest of their team, and stranding them in space.

The movie is their mission to survive and find a way to get back to earth, all while fighting the forces of no gravity in space.

Visually, the movie is absolutely stunning. If you've watched my reviews you know that I don't tend to focus on visuals and if I do its mainly a quick sentence saying how the movie looked pretty. But this movie was nominated and won a lot of awards based on the visuals and sounds mainly because that's all this movie is. Its a movie that just looks and sounds amazing. The purpose of the movie is to make you feel as though you are in space. Its to show you the vast vacuum of space and the true deafening silence that goes along with it. Its paired beautifully with the visuals as these space stations explode around our characters in what would usually be a Michael Bay wet dream and instead of loud explosions, all we hear is nothing. We see Sandra Bullock get tossed around like a rag doll and yet we hear absolutely nothing.

On top of that there's this experience that I'm sure was just amazing in the theaters of the movie trying to put you in the perspective of astronauts as they're floating uncontrollably in space. If there was ever a movie that gave a beautiful representation of zero gravity, Gravity is the closest thing to that.

Story wise is it a great movie though? Well... not really.

Let me be clear, Bullock and Clooney are by no means bad in the film. Their performances are very good, they portray different reactions to this unthinkable situation and those reactions fit perfectly with their personalities and their experience. Obviously Bullock, having this as her first time is going to be exasperated. Of course we're going to get frustrated with her because of her crippling fear of being out in space alone because, we're not in that situation.

And of course Clooney is going to have this calm and collect reaction because he's had the most experience. And the two really do play off each other well.

I am by no means saying that these two gave a bad performance. For being the only important people in the movie, they really carry it.

But for a 90 minute movie that is obviously more about the visuals and less about these characters, I'm not going to rave about their performances. In comparison with the other great performances that year, 12 Years a Slave, Wolf of Wallstreet, American Hustle, this movie, it doesn't surprise me that the awards it won were all about the visuals and not the performances.

And that's not a horrible thing. If the movie was clear about what the purpose was, which Gravity was, I shouldn't discredit it for what it really was. A well acted and incredibly gorgeous looking movie.

The thing that I was happy to come out of this movie saying was that I still thought this movie was gorgeous and visually stunning without seeing it in theaters. I thought I was going to be incredibly disappointed with this film because I didn't see it in theaters. I'm sure it was absolutely mind numbing in theaters but it still looked good on my friend's medium sized TV.

 I'm probably not going to watch Gravity again for a long while. There's not anything about the movie that says, I want to watch this movie again, and again, and again. But it was an experience. Maybe down the road when I get a really good TV with a pair of really good surround sound speakers, I might put in Gravity again and go for a fun ride, but for now, I'm going to enjoy Gravity for what it was, tell you that if you haven't seen it, its worth at least one watch, and move on with my life. And I think that's okay. I'm not overselling this movie, I'm not saying it was bad, I'm just saying its an experience. Probably a one time experience, but an experience nonetheless.

On a slightly unrelated note, did it not feel to anybody else like the world was ending in this movie? Maybe its just the perspective and the absence of any scenes on Earth but its like every satellite orbiting Earth was going down, I get that there needed to be tension but damn Russia, you deciding to blow up your satellite with a missile kind of fucked everything up. Or at least that's what this movie made it seem like.

So those are my thoughts on Gravity. What did you think? Do you feel like you could watch this movie multiple times? I mean another good thing was the running time. I don't feel like it needed to be any longer than 90 minutes. Comment and Discuss below! Or shoot me a tweet @cmhaugen24 and follow me on Twitter to get movie news and reviews in the future.

I'll leave you with this. Taking the easy way out, here's the honest trailer. Enjoy!