Gravity pulled me back into the world of space stations, astronauts, and dangers of space junk. A world of wonder that I experienced watching recordings from space shuttle missions and Hubble documentaries. And I am happy about it.
The main stars are Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), and they are the only people whose living faces we see throughout the movie. What we see are probably the best space visuals in a movie that have been ever part of a non-documentary. The visuals are crisp and steady. A welcome change from all the shaky-cam that we see in the recent cinema.
An interesting and refreshing point was proper use of the first-person camera. I felt as if I was looking from inside of the space suit. I felt that strange mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia that is possible to experience only in the vastness of space while being in this insignificant amount of fabric and tech. These shots were few which made them significant and were well established in the relationship to the surrounding so I knew where I was looking at all times. One of the harder things to achieve in the emptiness of space.
The film was perfectly paced for a space movie. Coming into the movie, I was ready for extremely slow space walks, but Cuaróns managed to beat my expectations by introducing welcome highly dynamic scenes to separate off the slower paced ones.
The plot was fairly standard, but here again Cuaróns managed to keep it very fresh by giving us one large surprise mid-film. One major problem with the movie was that it did not make me care for Stone which was essential to sink into the movie. Cuaróns made a strange decision to make her a person without family. Meaning that her only motivation to survive was her own survival instinct. But this decision meant that Stone could explore some topics that are available only to people without stronger survival motivations.
On a more nit-picky note, what was with that in-your-face symbolism of a womb in the middle of the movie. Either I have not noticed other symbols, or in a film with a very few symbols, there is one that is sticking out and heavily disrupting the flow of the story.
