In a grave situation

This is a rating and review of Gravity (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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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...

An astronaut's view on Gravity http://t.co/QDbyd4Htnf pic.twitter.com/adRd2w008H
— Guardian Film (@guardianfilm) December 2, 2013

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.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

All by the board ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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9 November (updated 10 November)


* Contains mild spoilers *


79 = S : 15 / A : 14 / C : 12 / M : 11 / P : 13 / F : 14

A rating and review of Captain Phillips (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)


I know that I am not alone in saying that the closing minutes of Captain Phillips (2013) made all that went before worth watching.

Much of those two hours was, not very subtly, made to seem more thrilling by quick cutting and by the effects of heartbeat-like pulsations, other percussive sounds, and sustained high-frequency notes, which one may not register in Henry Jackman's score, but whose sudden absence lifts the preceding tension. The script also makes use of power-games, and games of people tryin g to work out which game is being played, such as wearing your opponent down through talk, addressing comments to someone who is not there to make it seem as those one has a powerful ally, and, equally, speaking when one knows that, unknown to others, someone else is listening.

The film has some basis in actual events. We have a captain, in Tom Hanks, who notionally establishes his American Irish credentials by saying one line in a lilting brogue (brogues always lilt), but not at any other point. Prior to finishing getting ready, he gratuitously brought up the itinerary on his PC, telling it to us, but as if he was just checking to be sure, which might fit his desire to have things shipshape.

On the journey to the airport to meet his vessel, Rich (Phillips) is admirably concerned about his children's future, when in conversation with his wife Andrea, but he sounds as though he is paraphrasing the lyric of 'Times they are a-changing' in a Forrest Gump (1994) sort of way. His arrival in port in Oman has him check the security on the way up to the bridge, which he announces that he wants rigorously put in place, but, when the time of testing comes, it puts up no resistance whatever.

This is where one wonders what has gone before - Phillips must know more than the e-mail warnings of Somali pirates that we see on his screen on board, and the hoses that are deployed must have been installed as part of a stratagem on the part of Maersk, but, if so, it all seems a little rusty, and rather too ineffectual.

We have Phillips' preparations for sea, and we have that of Muse's (Barkhad Abdi's) crew, under his warlord boss - we compare the Western approach of civility in giving orders with that of the Somalis, shouting at each other and jostling for position, but it is there in the relations on the Maersk Alabama, when Phillips takes on an objecting union member, and urges people to finish their break on time. Another point of contact is engines, on both vessels, being taken beyond their limits, all of which tends to suggest how similar things are in this parallel way.

Still, we do not quite know how much, on Muse's and Phillips' side, is instinctual thinking on their feet, and how much training. Maybe a vain boast from Muse that a $6m Greek vessel had been caught, maybe it was, but all benefit went to his boss - the huge surprise is the successful boarding. From there, everything is bound to go in cat-and-mouse fashion to sustain the film's need for twists and turns, even if Phillips seems the person least likely to convince in lying (both as he does it, and with the lies to hand), and when Muse allows a powerful position to slide for reasons that are fairly tenuous : either he knows how to conduct a situation like this, or he does not, whereas he seems swayed by Phillips, almost as if the white man saying that he does not know what happened to the crew is worth listening to.

For me, when Phillips is left to his own devices, the situation does not build a claustrophobic tension whose resolution one longs for, but one that drags, and where the visuals did not impress a sense of confinement on me. (However, we do have the very necessary element that all this happens at the time of the full moon.)

Hanks after that, though, is an excellent end to the film, focusing just on him, his essential responses and feelings, before we pull out from a wide view and close. Abdi and his fellow captors, especially Najee (Faysal Ahmed) and Elmi (Mahat M. Ali), are very strong, and suitably threatening.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)