GRAVITY (2013)

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is a spectacular enterprise that AWES us from the very first frame with its sheer brilliance and could well be counted among the defining movie experiences of our lives. If movies are an endeavour in collective dreaming, this is one hell of a dream which would remain with us, the viewers, for a very long time. For the cost of a mere movie ticket, the director transforms the audience into astronauts and transports them to space such that the entire movie hall seems suspended in space for about two hours.

The movie's plot, as such, deals with a catastrophe set in space and its aftermath. First time astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and her experienced mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are on a space walk mission with their team to repair the Hubble telescope. Disaster strikes when a debris cloud from an exploded Russian satellite  comes hurtling at them. The debris destroys their shuttle, the telescope and also kills the rest of their crew and space-walk team, leaving them adrift and spinning in a very vast and lonely space without any means of communication to their command center on earth at Houston. The rest of the movie is a race against time thriller wherein they need to find each other and escape to the safety of terra firma. Yet, at the very heart of the movie is an engaging and inspiring tale of hope, resilience, courage and grit that defies overwhelming odds (of astronomical magnitude, one may add). 

The brilliance of Cuarón  as a director, is in his intelligent and seamless enmeshing of the scientific spectacle, visual wizardry and a very human tale of hope. He creates a very vivid image of the loneliness and utter helplessness that confronts a human being in what could be one of the most hostile environments to endure and survive. Cuarón creates an immersive experience for the viewer by effortlessly switching the viewer from a third person watching the action from a safe distance to a first person when we look at the happenings through the visor of Bullock. As a result, the helpless free-floating spin of Bullock and her breathlessness when her oxygen levels plunge are very real and palpable experiences for the viewers themselves. Cuarón masterfully combines the skills of his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and the visual effects team to present striking visuals with a silken flow as they effortlessly pan out to showcase the breathtaking beauty as well as the unending vastness of the space and zoom in to capture the tense expressions of the leads. There is also a remarkable eye for the detail, be it the careful and measured movements of the astronauts at work or their frenetic efforts to grapple at a hold to stem their free-fall or the floating specks of flame or even the globular drops of tears or other pieces of flotsam, which presents a well detailed and realistic setting. 

For a movie that spans about two hours, Gravity depends almost entirely on, its aptly cast, two Academy Award winner leads - viz. an excellent Sandra Bullock and the suave, smooth talking George Clooney. Sandra Bullock puts in a riveting performance as Dr. Ryan Stone, bringing in just the right amount of vulnerability, melancholy and grit to the part. The significance of her performance is accentuated by the fact that, for the better part of this movie, she is the only human element who anchors the emotional content of this movie and in the process, lifts it from being merely a spectacular sci-fi eye-candy. The silent vastness of space filled with enormous, yet, empty distances between far flung celestial bodies and presenting beauty that is both captivating and foreboding alternatively, is the other major dimension of the movie 

Gravity belongs to a small and rare category of movies that succeed in questioning and extending the hitherto known and accepted horizons of film-making. It is also one of the few movies which capitalises on the scope and depth offered by the IMAX experience to the hilt and is sure to be the front-runner for a clutch of technical categories including cinematography and visual effects at all major award events for the year. 

This is a movie experience that inspires the viewers at several levels and is sure to spark many a young hearts to nurture the dream of donning a space suit. One also hopes that it would also inspire many more film-makers to conceive and conjure many such pioneering movie projects which could navigate the collective dream experiences of the audience to hitherto unexplored newer directions.

A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE ! A MUST WATCH (preferably in IMAX 3D) !!