[Spoiler Alert!] Saw "Gravity" a few weeks
back... I'll preface by mentioning that I generally like George Clooney in
pretty much everything he's been in—except "The Fantastic Mr. Fox"...what
was he thinking??? …but I digress. Clooney was great in this movie, too, but he
doesn’t get enough screen time to matter.
More on this later. Now Sandra
Bullock is no scrub, yet the director has her playing a medical doctor, and
changing circuit boards in Earth's orbit.
Really? To be fair, Sci-Fi films often ask us to take leaps of faith,
and I'm generally cool with that unless a film takes itself too seriously. Still, “Gravity” rather promotes itself as plausible fiction. In this case, following a "storm"
of shrapnel from another (unseen) space station, the unknown, minority actor
gets his head imploded after which he and the rest of the team—except for
Sandra and Clooney—become human popsicles.
Sandra finds herself floating, untethered, in deep
space. She’s helpless. She’s spinning uncontrollably and has no visual
of the station. Who saves the day? Why Clooney, of course!—Leap of faith number
one. He must have had a Tesla-sized
battery pack and a space suit full of jet fuel to reach her, make it back to
the first, battered space station and then to a second one—Leap of faith number
two. Are space stations really that
close in the real world? The viewer is
left to postulate as the next “tense” problem presents itself.
Clooney gets caught up in the next wave of space shrapnel
and the movie ditches its "lost in space" theme and turns into
"Cast Away (Space Edition)" with Sandra Bullock. As she talks to herself throughout the
balance of the film, she manages to hopscotch to yet another space station—this
one left by the Chinese—that is intact enough to get her back to Earth. But not before she has a hallucination that
involves…wait for it…George Clooney!
Clooney and James Spader (see The Black List, Boston Legal,
and The Practice) are the co-Kings of the monologue. Clooney’s scenes are worth their weight in gold
here, but it’s still not enough to make up for the boredom that ensues when
he’s not on screen. Don’t get me wrong,
Sandra Bullock’s acting chops are good, but the story is so predictable it
becomes anticlimactic. Sandra manages to
get to Chinese space station. Sandra
finds said space station is still operational, full of oxygen, and she can
interpret Chinese hanzi characters well enough to get it all going and land
safely on Earth—Leap of faith number three.
I really wanted to like this movie. It has all the requisite elements—A-list
actors, Space, tense situations, great special effects—but in the end space was
just the backdrop for the drama of a woman wanting to get home. Even the name of the film, Gravity, is
powerful and to the point. The sum of
the parts leaves at least this one wanting something more. Or perhaps less? Was there even a question as to whether
Sandra was going to escape the capsule as it filled with water at the end? It would have been more dramatic if, after
all she’d been through, that she wound up drowning or running out of air after
reaching Earth. I know, that’s probably
not the happy ending everyone would have preferred, but it certainly would have made for
an intense fade to black. Grade: B-
'Nough Said,
+Thinker
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