Thursday, March 6, 2014

2013 - GRAVITY , visually impressive with sort of OK story

Well this film looks great.  That computer stuff is getting better every year.  All they will have to do is get the price down on these computer special effects is to get rid of these pesky actors with their million dollar salaries.


Apparently almost all of this film was computer generated which might account for the weird sort of soulless look astronaut Sandra Bullock has throughout a lot of this film.  The film is also shot in 3D so a viewer viewing it in 3D has to watch a bunch of junk float around while trying to concentrate on the story.  Gravity also has some long shots with no editing as the computer camera whips around astronauts and spaceships.  It's impressive but to me seems kind of pointless coming off more like a "look what we can do with this technology" stunt.

Probably the chief issue I have with this film is the story.  As if it isn't dramatic enough that Russian space junk is going to destroy our heroine, you have to sit through some personal Sandra Bullock drama about a dead kid and her decision to give up fighting to survive.  The resolution to this is really lame since it involves ghostly hallucinations or something.  The survival of Sandra Bullock in space is actually cribbed from George Pal's Destination Moon which also used a fire extinguisher as a rescue device.  There are just no original ideas anymore.


It seems that one of the goals of Gravity is to take a shot at being on the king of the science fiction film mountain that 2001:  A Space Odyssey occupies.  But for all of the advanced technology that this film used it can't touch that film's greatness.

91 minutes, written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón.

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