"Gravity" was okay, but it could have been better...

[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