Lost in space

To be quite frank, I had my doubts about Gravity. I had seen the trailer and, as intriguing as it was, I wondered how a film about people floating in space could sustain the interest of an audience for an hour and a half.

That it featured actors who, in my estimation, were too well-known to play characters other than their real-life selves only added to the skepticism. How can that lady from Miss Congeniality be rocket-scientist smart? And what’s that old dude from the Ocean’s movies doing here? But I went out and saw it. If you had a fun little cinematic panic attack while watching Gravity, I’d like to let you know that you were not alone.

Leave it to the Cuaróns – Jonás co-wrote the script with father Alfonso, who served as director – to turn the story of an astronaut stranded in unending darkness into a tale of personal rebirth complete with umbilical and watery symbolism. Marion Cotillard, Scarlett Johansson and Blake Lively were linked to the project during its early stages, and the two offered the part to Natalie Portman, who turned it down. Though Sandra Bullock was a leftfield choice, her accessible, everyday-woman persona grounds Ryan Stone, a biomedical engineer making her debut trip into space.

Massive yet claustrophobic

While she and chatty veteran Matt Kowalski, played by George Clooney, are fixing a panel, debris from a Russian satellite crash into their shuttle and send them spinning into infinity. Stone struggles to reconnect with her companion, floating toward various space stations and breathing her way from one disaster to the next. The anxiety, punctuated by Steven Price’s excellent score, made me wish for a fast- forward button.

Offering no mental break, Gravity’s tense atmosphere evoked another film set in the grand expanse of space, a world unimaginably massive yet terribly suffocating. In Moon, which opened to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, the sole human caretaker on a lunar mining plant shipping mineral-rich moon dust back to Earth. With only a computer for company, he begins to see visions of himself after a buggy accident.

Loneliness and isolation, especially in a place as far away as humans have ever been, force thoughts and emotions inward. “I knew I had to give him [Rockwell] a challenge he couldn’t turn down, so I started thinking about having him play multiple parts. On a purely philosophical level that prompted the notion of what it would be like to meet yourself and work out what you’re like as a person,” said Duncan Jones, the film’s award-winning director, in Timeout.

Serious drama potential

I also couldn’t help but remember Sunshine. Danny Boyle’s 2007 thriller, about a group of scientists trying to save the Earth by reigniting a failing sun, showed that futuristic science fiction has the potential to become serious drama. While it, too, was visually stunning and packed the same levels of stress, it wasn’t as tight and focused as Gravity, lasting 20 minutes longer. To this day, I still believe that Sunshine could’ve ended less bizarrely than it did.     

It’s odd to unwind by watching someone get stressed out while adrift in space, but there is something truly immersive about the experience. As I walked out of the theater, claustrophobic, agoraphobic and exhilarated all at the same time, I thought about the possibility of a sequel. But after almost five years working on Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón would like to work on something more earthbound. Asked about his next feature, the Academy Award nominee told Wired: “Any movie in which the characters walk on the floor.”

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