Gravity (2013)

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, (voice) Ed Harris. [PG-13]

Cuarón’s ambitious, laser-focused astronauts-in-distress opus features no shortage of eye-popping camerawork and special effects, but it’s all in service to an insubstantial crisis story with a protagonist that earns her rooting interest by default. Disaster strikes a shuttle mission in Earth’s orbit, leaving survivors Bullock and Clooney untethered and adrift, forced to make a last-ditch endeavor to reach a different spacecraft and get back to solid ground. Suspense is muted by the thinness of character and narrative, to say nothing for that infuriatingly pointless and unsound “fantasy sequence,” but a few white-knuckle sequences do successfully recreate sensations of vertigo, weightlessness, even hopelessness. The decision to make outer space a vast, silent and hostile environment is a laudatory one, as is the filmmakers’ commitment to authenticity with all the hardware and procedures, but such slavish attention to realism nearly undoes the picture at multiple junctures when “movie physics” and incredible luck take over (one incident involving Bullock and a fire extinguisher is so laughable that it makes the oh-come-on climax of The Martian look like it belongs in a NASA training film). It would undoubtedly be a more awesome physical and visual experience on the big-screen (with 3-D effects and surround sound and the whole shebang), but even full immersion on the largest IMAX screen on the planet wouldn’t be able to camouflage its flaws and emotional shortcomings. Yet even with very little to work with on the page, Bullock gives a skillfully wrung-out performance that may actually be her most accomplished work in film to date. Oscar-winning direction, photography, visual effects, sound mixing, sound editing, music, and editing (the latter is especially puzzling since it’s a film of long, seemingly unbroken shots where the praise should be leveled instead at the planning and shot selections that allowed for so many “invisible stitch marks”).

56/100