#290: Gravity

Release Date: October 4th, 2013

Format: Blu-ray

Written by: Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón

4 Stars

Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film, Gravity, is an examination of grief. 

The film’s brilliant technical aspects and its white-knuckle action set pieces are what drove its box office gross to over $700 million, but peer under the cloak of its space-adventure genre trappings and you’ll find a story about a mother grieving the tragic, sudden death of her school-age daughter. 

What was Dr. Ryan Stone’s (Sandra Bullock, in possibly her greatest performance) life like down on Earth before taking a job with NASA to maintain the Hubble Telescope? She tells her astronaut partner, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney, perfectly cast), that after her 12-hour shifts she’d get in her car, turn on the radio, and drive aimlessly through the night. 

For anybody who has experienced depression, you understand Dr. Stone’s attempts at coping and avoidance immediately. Those quiet nights, alone with your thoughts, oftentimes still in the physical space that remind you of your trauma, are unbearable. For many, sadly, even suicide seems like a more viable option.

So when Dr. Stone and Kowalski are struck by space debris while on a mission, killing their other crew members instantly, and she is left with dwindling oxygen in freezing cold space, doesn’t she have every reason in the world to simply choose to go gentle into that good night?       

This is the heartbeat of Cuarón’s film. Is life worth living? 

What I love most about the film is that it engages your mind, your eyes, and your heart on equal terms. Not a lot of big budget action movies can say that.

It’ll keep you breathlessly entertained during those action sequences, sure, but it’ll also have you leaving your home or the theater and taking a deep breath, thankful for your life on this pretty blue orb in space that we call Earth.