Too bad Gravity’s fanboy audience is conveniently ignorant of richer space dramas like Walter Hill’s sexy-scary  Supernova and Brian DePalma’s Mission to Mars (remember that astoundingly witty Ennio Morricone score?) which entertainingly combined psychological and visionary pondering with sci-fi agape. Hill advanced the genre with tense, erotic, metaphysical characterizations. Nothing in Gravity compares to Mission to Mars’ extraordinary orchestration of passion and dread among a team of astronauts attempting to forge a lifeline in outer space. DePalma created an unforgettable, breathtaking sequence of love and loss. His great tragic humanism was more powerful than Cuaron’s tepid “hope.”

Cuaron plays with philosophy in a shallow, juvenile way, the same as he misuses technology—he even throws in a 3D teardrop. His teasing, tormenting style is just green-screen busyness; though set in space, Cuaron’s Earth-bound “Esperanza” in Gravity could be anywhere, nowhere.

SPOILER Show

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EDIT: Ewing you sonuvabitch. You didn't count on my pathological inability to avoid spoilers, did you?

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2013-10-04 18:27:55)

He's fully embraced his status as a movie critic supervillain and it's kind of amazing.

I now want a WAYDM of Supernova because the behind the scenes of that movie alone make me amazed it was ever made. I watched it twice as a teenager, purely for the T&A (ashamed to admit it but I'll be honest), and left it wondering why that film told me that story.

Also, not sure what White is going for either...

I really think that most of the complaints about dialogue in this movie can be explained away with, "They're talking to distract themselves from the endless terror of their situation." And maybe Kowalski DID ask her that and he was just asking her again. It's set up that he likes to do that.

I'm of two minds about this movie. It REALLY needed another half-hour or so. It felt like it had barely begun before the credits started to roll (although that final sequence was beautiful and awe-inspiring.) I can't tell if the movie was bold and awesome for telling the story that it does, or whether it was a major misstep that ruined the whole thing. I can't decide if I really like the fact that they just throw you right into the story and don't spend time on character backstories OR if I think that it leaves the movie without a point. As to Teague's point that they "bothered to have a theme," I'd really like to know what you think the theme is, because I can't tell. There was a cursory nod to Stone "needing to let go," but that had no impact on the story or her actions, and her final monologue felt really, really un-earned.

Then again, it's a fantastic movie to look at. I really wish I could see this movie with the dialogue muted, and just the music and visuals. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before, and unlike anything that's likely to be made again. I just wish that the Gravity we got had some more depth. It's not a movie, it's an experience. And there's nothing wrong with that, per se, because it's a GREAT experience. But it's wide as a lake and deep as a puddle. I like movies that stick with you, intellectually, after you leave the theater. Gravity doesn't do that for me. But hey, if it does that for you, more power to you. I'd love to see the breakdown on all the metaphor and symbolism that escaped me.

Oh my yes — the visual effects Oscar is in the bag. You don't have to be Nate Silver to handicap that category.

It may be a contender for Best Cinematography, too. Last time around that Oscar went to Life of Pi, which was, like Gravity, a super effects-y film that just happened to be made by a well respected director. And Cuaron's DP is Emmanuel Lubezki, who is like a mini Roger Deakins in that he's been nominated something like 3 or 4 times (The Tree of Life, Children of Men, etc.) but never won.

Phil Plait has commented. He commends the movie for several things, but he does criticize the same problem Teague pointed out about the tether:

Idk, fridge logic physics seems like the kind of thing that would kinda piss me off to no end.

(And no, I haven't seen it, and yes I'm in the spoilers thread. No, I have never particularly cared about this movie.)

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-10-07 04:31:01)

If you're nitpicking physics about this movie, which is more accurate in its physics than any space movie in the history of cinema, I don't know what to tell you.

I think people complaining just had a different movie in their minds and are upset it wasn't the one Cuaron set out to make. It sounds like you may have wanted a more art-house, existential, bleak, slowly dying in space movie. I'd like that too, but that's not this movie, and it doesn't have to be. This is a roller-coaster action film about not giving up, and fighting tooth and nail to survive, it's an up-beat, intense-as hell, survival story. And I'm SUPER happy about that.

I am absolutely floored, jaw-dropped floored. It was everything I could have hoped for and more. I didn't necessarily expect it going in, but this is one the best action films of all time. It reminds me of the back-half of Aliens in its relentlessness.

Just, wall-to-wall holy shit. I haven't been this viscerally and emotionally drained by a movie in years.

http://thedissolve.com/features/the-con … e-on-eart/

This article from Noel Murray and Tasha Robinson has pretty much singlehandedly turned me around on the film. There's a LOT to be read into here. I love the idea that the movie is a metaphor for depression. When the movie says that "life in space is impossible," that's what it's getting at. It's no accident that the movie takes place in an empty, lifeless void. That's pretty much what depression feels like.

I also love how this plays into the movie's ideas about rebirth. Note that Stone spends most of Act 1 attached to Kowalski by an umbilical cord

Holy crap, what was I thinking? This movie is brilliant.

But it's because it's so accurate that people are nitpicking. You laugh at the mistakes in The Core, but this is so close you just groan over every mistake that could have been fixed with a bit more thought.

I wanted space surfing