Pop culture thoughts (2 of 2): "Gravity".

"Gravity" is officially my favorite movie, ever, and I've now seen it 4 times on the big screen.

== [ SPOILERS AHEAD ] ==


Several points:

1) The film is actually a subtle character drama, though you don't notice it the 1st time around since there's so much sh*t blowing up in space. 

Suspense also overwhelms the subtle points of the script, like the emotional stages that Sandra Bullock's character goes through (emotional distance, fear and realizations she's not ready to die, acceptance of death, renewal).

The 1st time I saw the film, it seemed like the background of Sandra Bullock's astronaut (esp. death of a child) came out of nowhere and rang kind of false, but that's actually the central plot, the space setting is incidental or at least secondary to the main plot...

I had run into some people at a bar before the 3rd time I saw the film, and one was like, "Oh yeah, that space movie," and the other was like, "Oh yeah, that movie about a woman getting over the death of her child," and the 2nd person's impressions are much more keyed into what the film really is.

On that note, for people who think it's a space movie, they're disappointed by the ending.  A guy I know from the student bar was kind of pissed how it just ended with Sandra Bullock climbing onto a beach and then walking off.  "I was waiting for the wild dogs to come out," he was like - which makes perfect sense if a person thinks the primary plot is her going through crisis after crisis with no larger point.

As Alfonso Cuaron has said in an interview, though, the film is fundamentally about "spiritual rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity."

2) Like the same director's Y Tu Mama Tambien, the film is really layered and makes more sense on multiple rewatchings, even with small details - for example, Sandra Bullock's obsession w/work resulting from the death of her daughter is what leads her to continue to repair the Hubble even as they're ordered to get back in the shuttle.

This is part of Cuaron's narrative technique, I've noticed, where he drops a crucial interpretative context pretty late in a film, which is odd, since often viewers don't go back mentally and re-read things.

3) Similarly, Sandra Bullock's emotional range is pretty amazing - for example, as she re-enters the atmosphere, she leadenly starts using lines from George Clooney's character on how she'll either die or have a great story etc and it seems cheesy - but then she turns inward and freshens up and is like, "I'm ready" - with the implication being "to die", and at that point you realize that the rest was just a coping mechanism where she was (badly) imitating Clooney's character since she really didn't know how to cope and that was all she'd been exposed to as a model.

4) The film only really works its magic at its fullest once, on an initial viewing on an immersive big screen. 

Effectively, it moves the viewer along with Sandra Bullock towards transfigured perception by disorienting them through long spinning shots for 80+ minutes, then re-experiencing the earth with her as she crawls on the beach and arises.

Interestingly, I've read online that the opening shot is like 12-15 minutes long with no cuts, and that's both for the effect, and also to mimic the effect of a space documentary where there's long shots since there's not a luxury of cutting (which Cuaron said in the interview that I linked to above).

Myself, I felt that the last scene with Sandra Bullock crashing into the ocean and swimming and then crawling out of the water was *endless* and took up at least a good 5-10 minutes.  Instead, it's pretty short, as I came to recognize on my 2nd and subsequent viewings.  Time must have been pretty distorted for me, that first time, above and beyond the daze that I had on exiting the film the 1st 3 times I saw it (though not the 4th).

5) Pretty much, I feel like the film just sucks you in, and as much as I try to pay attention to camera angles and music and sound and whatnot, it's difficult, because you just keep getting caught up in the plot or immersed in what's being shown... 

(The colors and compositions are gorgeous - so much to look at!)

My 4th and last time seeing the film was within 2 weeks of the 3rd time I saw it, and that prevented me from forgetting a lot and thus helped me tune stuff out and notice a lot more different stuff (e.g. the sound - tools and crashes can only be heard when someone on screen is touching something physical, since sound travels through vibrations and otherwise sound can't be experienced in space; I had read about the effect, which is subtle, but I had forgot to look out for that detail).

6) On that note, Cuaron said to see the film on IMAX or a place with a *great* sound system, and the 4th time I saw it the sound system was fantastic, and added a ton to the experience.

7) Overall, I feel that Cuaron is an incredibly obsessive person (even more obsessive than I am), and so that's part of what gels with the movie for me, beyond me buying in wholeheartedly to its major themes.

In many interviews, he compares making the film to being a fox chased by hounds for 4 years, and I think that's true, for him.

8) What's also nice about the film is that it's populist; Cuaron made it accessible, and he also erred on the side of enjoyability (and aimed for enjoyability and a total cinema experience as a goal!).

And, he did this while making a film about "spiritual rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity," which sounds like a pretentious piece-of-crap film.

Those 2 choices - enjoyability, intellectual depth - don't come along often; a Chicago Reader reviewer called the film an "intellectual blockbuster", which I agree with, except that the ideas of the movie are viscerally felt, not thought.

. . .

...I have no more to add for now, but will likely later...