Film: Gravity

[liv]

Reason for watching it: I was already kind of intrigued by the idea of a thriller set in more or less the real world space programme, and although I've seen some people nitpicking the science, I've also seen very positive reviews of it. Plus, it's Hugo-nominated and I am still hoping to vote in the long-form Dramatic Presentation category.

Circumstances of watching it: Was home with jack this weekend and we wanted to spend an evening watching a film.

Verdict: Gravity is an exciting and visually impressive blockbuster, without much depth beyond that.

Gravity lived up to my expectations. It's really exciting; I ended up with sore muscles from clenching my fists so much in all the scary bits. I don't know very much about the actual technical details of life in space, but I did enjoy the portrayal of something that's at least vaguely related to realism, not just far future ultra-shiny space opera type stuff. I can see why people said it should be viewed on the big screen, with all the vistas of earth from space and the magnificent space-stations and so on. And I liked the attention to detail in presenting people moving in a zero-G environment.

It's basically a two person piece, with Bullock as the lead and Clooney as the secondary character. Both are strong actors and yes, it is nice to have a female lead for a big blockbuster action thriller like this. Obviously the film doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but it doesn't have any conversations between men either, there are only two characters at all. I don't think it's a great triumph of feminism in that Dr Stone spends a lot more of her time crying and panicking and needing to be rescued than you'd expect of a male lead in an equivalent action movie. There's no gratuitous sexiness; I appreciate she's wearing a lot less under her space-suit than would be realistic, but there's no contrived set-up so she ends up naked or shots posed to show off her breasts. On the whole, I'm more interested in a story of Dr Stone showing emotional depth and being in terrible danger she only escapes by implausible luck, than I would be in a story of her surviving through sheer kick-assedness. I found the stuff with her dead daughter laid on the pathos too thick, but I thought Kowalski's sacrifice was very nicely done.

That's about all there is to the film, though. Pretty CGI, a fairly novel setting, reasonable acting, all in the service of a story with just about the most basic shape imaginable, that our hero survives a series of terrifying dangers to return home to safety. I enjoyed it but I didn't think it was amazing.

As for the Hugos, I think I'm going to vote for Pacific Rim, which has any number flaws but is also definitely not run-of-the-mill. Gravity second and then Frozen, which are both good examples of what they are, and I rank Gravity slightly higher because what it is, a real world science based thriller with a female lead, is more interesting than what Frozen is, a Disney movie that plays to Disney's strengths and says something intelligent about love. Assuming I probably won't get round to watching Catching Fire before the end of this month, and I am not at the point where I'm going to get into the whole comic-book superheroes thing in order to appreciate Iron man.

Comments

[lovingboth]

Did Her and Monsters University fall outside the qualifying dates?

If I had a vote, I would struggle to vote for any of those on the ballot.

If I went for Pacific Rim, it would have been because Guillermo del Toro has done some magnificent work as well as the 'for the money' high budget pap like this one.

Frozen is at least an improvement on most Disney... but MU is better.

[liv]

I don't really know about eligibility. I think to be honest the Hugo ballot for films is a bit random, science fiction readers aren't usually film buffs and it's a matter of whatever happens to be popular. The Hugo for Best Novel doesn't always go to the actual best SF/F novel published in the past year, but I think it tends to land somewhere close to the mark more often than the film one does. I haven't seen Her and I suspect I would probably enjoy it, and I wouldn't be surprised if Monsters University were better than Frozen, which is fairly middling.

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

I didn't really enjoy Gravity at all - I didn't find it tense and I basically never connected with the main characters - it didn't feel like there was enough to them to connect to beyond character backstories that didn't really have any effect on anything in the actual story. I can see that it would have worked better had I seen it on a big screen as the spectacle was there. However one of my biggest problems with it was that even though I didn't mind some of the liberties taken with physics because obviously without them there would have been no plot, a few times I found them really getting in the way. It was particularly bad when what was clearly meant to be a big emotional and dramatic moment in the middle of the film had gravity seemingly working as if Bullock and Clooney were dangling from a cliff on Earth, rather than in orbit so they were already in free-fall. This killed my suspension of disbelief right at the point when the film wanted me to be most engaged, which can't have helped.

In the end the movie just went down in my head as "for some reason some space debris really has it in for Sandra Bullock, but keeps missing and I don't particularly care".

Sadly I also haven't seen any of the other Hugo-nominated films, but I really enjoyed Monsters University.

[liv]

I don't really have much intuition for how zero G physics actually works, so I didn't immediately spot the glaring problems. I could tell it was a bit inconsistent whether the characters were under gravity or not, but that didn't interfere with enjoying the film, for me. I wasn't hugely impressed with the characterization, it was ok but not wonderful. What I liked about the film was the setting, mainly.

It's quite possible I found it exciting because I don't watch a whole lot of films and am easily taken in by the most basic emotional manipulation in the medium!