My mate:
'Dude you gots to see Gravity in 3D maaan. Seeeeeriously, bruv. It's da ting. Even famed 3D sceptic Mark Kermode says it makes 3D SENSE.'
I was all, yeh but its well more expensive nevertheless I did plan a splash; I had financial room for a treat. So there I was, paying for a pair of format-specific glasses, hopping up some stairs in a real cinema, walking down the aisles past some rudimentary Chinese people and a Spanish speaking posse babbling in the premium seats. I sat near the front (even though I wasn't supposed to) to ingest as much 3D as possible - because that's how it works I think - and hear as much bass as possible. 30 languishing minutes of migraine-inducing advertisements later and the trailer's began to roll and then we were in. 3D vision always takes five minutes of getting used to but Gravity, it can be unequivocally confirmed, is the real three-dee mother-shit.
Even from the opening ten minute opening salvo, almost entirely one beautiful swirling shot, every filmmaking aspect is strangely realist and genuine and fibrous yet blessed with the photographic cerebral grace that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki somehow bestows upon Alfonso Cuaron's film. How the sets and photographic angles were constructed completely confounds my admittedly limited knowledge of CGI and camerawork, but I just can't imagine how they were conducted... just staggering. I'm loathe to say 'gamechanger' because that's a horrible portmanteau word and lacks all the relativistic technological contexts of each individual film, but there's no doubt that every astronaut film, past and future, will be compared negatively to this one - with the arguable exception of 2001: Space Odyssey.
The Cuaron-Lubezki dynamic has got to be the edgiest partnership in cinema right now, trumping even the Christopher Nolan-Wally Pfister and Steve McQueen-Sean Bobbitt director-cinematographer thing. Lubezki is axiomatic of photographic legerdemain, one who pushes technical boundaries to forge new visual majesties that none thought possible. Here they even improve on the long action-packed tracking shots of Cuaron-Lubezki's previous movie, 2006's Children Of Men. The swinging cameras are just so damn good, me mouth was agape for every successive shot.
Of course their genius lies not only in technical accomplishment but in the more nuanced sections, knowing when to zoom into Sandra Bullock's eye when to pull out when to turn around. Each move feels fastidiously manipulated and studied to yield as much dramatic and emotional gain as possible. Every picture is tastefully loaded with aeons of thematic or existential indicators, like the dulled and blurred renderings of the earth or of faces or chaos on the visor reflections.
But flairy photography alone does not a seminal film make. The sounds and music have to be as geared towards the end result as everything else. Steven Price (whose only other feature-length film composer credits are, strangely, The World's End and Attack The Block, though according to his imdb page he has always been a part of the music department for big scores like Howard Shore's Lord Of The Rings) has composed a soundtrack that discards conventional melody in favour of the suspense and melodrama that Gravity required. His work splices in and out, often unnoticed, melding with other sounds like breathing or the clanking of technology, intensifying apprehension or facilitating a lighter emotional rebate where needed. Yet the most potent sound that Cuaron and Price utilise is... nothing. The unknown, frightening depths of silence. It's a rare feature in a major Hollywood picture and conveys the profundity of nothingness that no could device could possibly manage - the likes of Roland Emmerich and Zack Snyder should take note.
The story too, penned by Cuaron and Cuaron junior, is no let-down. It's as unique and ethereal as one can imagine a disaster/survival film to be, nor is it weighed by tediously orthodox emotional tropes like the search for parents or of love - this is about the singular survival of a person, about the desperation to return home to earth. This is Sandra Bullock. Like many I have generally found Bullock irritating, both in her slippery rom-coms and the non-rom-coms where she acts like a fish out of water. But her excellence here is proof that one fine script can alter the path of an entire career; that top level actors aren't just pretty faces, but present on merit. Her on-screen colleague George Clooney is just as charming and delicately egotistical as he always he is, and ideal for the role that was originally written for Robert Downey Jnr.
