This is a rating and review of Gravity (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 November
78 = S : 9 / A : 12 / C : 16 / M : 14 / P : 13 / F : 14
This is a rating and review of Gravity (2013)
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)
With Gravity (2013), 'irrelevant' questions easily abound :
* How does fire propagate in a space station ?
* If fire were whooshing down a tunnel, would it delay momentarily to allow someone to get through a hatch ?
* Are not the International Space Station (ISS) and its hatches actually square in profile (as this footage, hosted by astronaut Suni Williams, shows), with rounded edges, not circular hatches (except for in the oldest part, the Russian module) ?
* Would debris said to be from a missile-strike on a satellite whose explosion had set off the destruction of other satellites behave predictably in orbiting the earth, all in one direction and at the same velocity?
* If communications’ satellites had been damaged, would communications between individuals, or between space stations, operate ?
* Could the ISS initially escape without damage and with an uncompromised air-lock, despite such debris ?
* When hit by debris, would it explode, as vessels commonly do in the cinema, as if it were kindling, or made of tinder ?
* How would an atmosphere and a survivable temperature be maintained in a capsule from which someone went out on a pressurized line, protruding from its hatch left ajar ?
* If it were not maintained, how quickly would systems be able to create a breathable atmosphere and acceptable temperature?
* Would bodies in space and colliding at relatively low speeds cause a thump of a collision ? The footage,
taken within the ISS, suggests not. Here, also, is NASA footage, showing the use of a jetpack in a space walk.
* Do space suits, as NASA footage seems to suggest, really need two crew members to help lock together and seal upper and lower parts, i.e. not something that one could simply do on one’s own ?
* Does breath condense on the visor of such a space suit, given that they have to withstand and compensate for the temperatures of outer space (in the footage linked to above, our guide calls the suit a spacecraft, since it contains 300kg of equipment for regulating its heating and the breathable air)?
* Do not helmets (as this footage demonstrates) have a silvered visor to act as sun-glasses, which the film - keen to keep showing us the actors' faces (since, most of the time, nothing else was visible)* - does not show being used ?
Finally, here are some comments from astronauts, interviewed by First Post, about what mattered to them in what the film showed...
None of these really matter, but they are niggly : they draw attention to the fact that a reality is being shown, as always in film, but that it may not be drawing on facts about space and survival in space, but be invention.
They also serve to detract from the fact that, apart from voices and a colleague whom she never see properly (until it is too late, and then by the proxy of a family photo), there are actually only two actors in this film – we are not even shown the famous control-room at Houston. Sandra Bullock (Ryan Stone), with some on-screen support from George Clooney (Matt Kowalski), has to carry it all, and, although I do not generally find her engaging as a performer, she must have done it, because I only realized this fact after the event.
Call it spirituality, call it faith, but there is a trail of images and ideas. In the Russian craft, above the controls, there is an icon (St Christopher, a fellow viewer thought), and, perhaps less realistically, a Buddha in the Chinese one (they are actually Korean, but lucky cats have been adopted fairly widely in Chinese culture). Thinking that she will not survive at one moment, Stone realizes that there will be no one to say prayers over her body and that she has never been taught how to pray, and, later, addresses requests to Matt for her daughter, amongst other things, that are effectively prayers.
Typically, for such a film, there are sacrifices in the interests of the wider good, there is ingenuity and lateral thinking, and we have evidence for the strength of the human spirit. Whether such traditional elements sustain here, any more than in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or Captain Phillips (2013), depends on one’s point of view.
Bullock is good enough, compared with her usual showing, but others could have been much better, and Kowalski’s oscillation between making wisecracks or giving monologues and being directive in a grimly jokey does not leave a lot of room in between for the character development that Stone has, not least, as I observed, largely alone.
All that aside, for me, the setting in space has been compromised by, primarily, not getting detail right or cheating the laws of physics to spice things up. I wonder what Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield really thought...
End-notes
* I am merely saying that, if there are any pretensions to show things as they are, a film that can only show people through their visors is not an obvious place to start.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
