Gravity (2013)

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.