Gravity (US 2013): What it could have been without the Birth Leitmotiv

Gravity is one of those movies that seems to have been born out of a constraint rather than an interest in a human story: most of it had to happen in orbit, where, as the prologue reminds that part of the audience who forgot science, gravity and sound are less of a thing, and oh, by the way, “human life is unsustainable”. Gravity’s formal constraint is met with aesthetic professionalism – the satellites colliding with debris, the stars, the not-so-distant earth all look amazing; the motion feels sickening, and though I have too little empirical evidence to support this, the experience feels real enough. But the quality and potential of the movie’s set up is never met with equal narrative excellence. The challenge in character development is resolved without conviction, the stakes remain low and primarily physical in nature. Frustratingly enough, Gravity ends up being little more than an extremely stressful film.

The characters remind us why we should enjoy the external experience of the movie: the view, the silence, the sunset. Something about lack of gravity, light and sound is very pleasing at an aesthetic level. People bounce on tethers, are mostly communicating over a radio, and most of the time see each other through the two glass screens of their space helmets and a little bit of nothingness. Being lost in space is a little bit like getting lost at sea, of course, and that part is new only in that there’s one more dimension to be lost and never found in. When lost at sea, you may imagine that whichever direction you swim in, however unlikely you are of finding it, there will be land somewhere. No such hope exists in space – you fall or float away, and you inevitably die. The extra dimension creates a new experience of loneliness that Gravity expresses well.

Not so long after the movie starts, we are left with only two surviving characters (of course the Indian-nerd-Harvard-graduate had to die first). In fact, most of the movie features only the adventures of Dr. Ryan Stone. This lack of interaction creates an interesting challenge for character development. How does Ryan Stone change and evolve if there is no one and nothing to influence her? The cascade of events and circumstances around Stone are all the same in nature: hopelessness, stark violence and sheer uncontrollable energy of the outer space experience, a lot of luck, and finally the next challenge – the next station to get to, the next debris cloud to avoid. If Stone also remains the same throughout, that sounds like a repetitive plot. (It is).

Gravity solves the problem of narration in a frustrating and unconvincingly conventional way: Stone’s back story paints a flat and sentimentalist portrait of her character. She becomes a binary switch – to be the pride of all surviving humans, for the memory of her captain Kowalski and her deceased child, or not to be and instead drive in apathy to her lab everyday and lose hope to survive. Not particularly polychromatic, this back story is then exploited in the only form that makes psychological and logistical sense when the main character has lost all radio transmission: Shakespearean soliloquies that lack the spirit of the bard (I’d be more interested to see The Tempest set in outer space). Bullock’s delivery is unconvincing – in her defense, it’s a hard text to bounce on its own, in outer space, without cracking up.

Because the human architecture of Gravity is weak, we lose interest in its outcome. I found myself caring little whether or not Stone made it. This often reduces the stakes of a particular scene to: is the thing going to hit the other thing? or Will she manage to grab the last rung of a particular station? What happens when she hits one of a hundred buttons marked with an incomprehensible alphabet on a command board? All in all, that’s not enough. And finally, the theme of rebirth, introduced for no particular reason. A shot of Stone in fetal position against a circular frame of light, her rough alighting into the symbolically placental sea, conveniently placed right next to an easily accessible deserted beach so that newborn Stone may take her first steps as a human being whose hopes are renewed by her recent near-death experience. It’s all too simple, and we don’t go to the movies to not care about characters who go from one flat state to another.

And so Gravity, a would-be excellent film, is turned into a bad romantic drama. Gravity is the experience of a film that sets up an interesting challenge and ends up shying away from its possibilities. Aesthetically genius, intellectually lazy, unconvincing in performance, Gravity makes your heart tension rise but shuts your your mind up from the first debris cloud on.