This is
Sandra Bullock’s film; George Clooney is there for the ride. To be fair he does
do a good job to introduce us to space and the mechanics of floating around to make repairs to the spacecraft.
Within the
space of 90 minutes we are taken on a dramatic ride in orbit first on a space
shuttle craft, then the international space station and lastly a Russian space
craft that is leaving orbit to return to earth. From the beginning we sit in
awesome wonder at film of the earth and the firmament as seen from the spaceman
and woman’s perspective. She is servicing an exterior gadget and hooked up to
the craft while he is whooshing about using a rocket pack and having inane
Clooney type conversations with Ed Harris who we don’t see because he is the
voice from Houston.
Then bang! It
may not be Big Bang but for Bullock and Clooney it may just have been.
A collision
in space has caused a Chinese satellite to smash into the Russian space craft
and the remnants are hurtling on the same orbit as our heroes.
From minute
to minute we watch almost in real time as our space crew try to find and make
sense of a way out after losing any hope of getting their craft to work and
floating into – gravity.
What is
gravity ? It is nothing. It feels almost indescribable and that it is what
looks like when we watch the attempts to home in on other spacecraft to find
some method of rescue. Gravity is not just weightlessness; it is the physics of
movement, the transfer of force from one moving object to another. It is also
the sheer beauty of a tear drop as it leaves Bullock’s face and floats towards
the audience looking like a glistening cut diamond. On this occasion 3D really
works.
“….you just
point it to the earth…..it’s not rocket science…..” Clooney tells Bullock. But
when you know your way around a space craft and can read a manual on how to
operate it, he is probably right.
There is a
poignant scene where viewers of a spiritual persuasion will summon up their
beliefs. But all you need is your humanity to understand the sense of longing
and loss. The fight for survival is a human one, not a godly one, and
everything we see is what any human being with a longing for life would do,
including old world heroics that Captain Oates reminds us of.
After this
film, I don’t want to go up into space. Been there, seen the film.
