Space....the final frontier. Immortal words spoken at the start of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek.
We always thought that the idea of being in outer space is cool.
But few would tell us how freaky space can get too.
My first viewing of the Gravity trailer - it looked like a 15 minute movie premise and reminded me of Open Water and another movie about hopelessness, Buried.
But we the rave reviews that I was getting, it perhaps seemed worth a watch. And watched it I did.
And my verdict? It was simply awesome. Terrifying, scary and lonely at the same time. Probably one of the best movies I have watched in 2013. Besides Pacific Rim (I will do a review of that later).
It reminded me of two similar movies about hopelessness in space. Ridley Scott's Alien (not the James Cameron shoot em up Aliens, which I loved too by the way) and Moon. Yup. I loved Moon. The trailer for Moon is below.
Anyway, back to Gravity. It was intense.
You get to see things being blown up without the explosive sound effects. They got that right. That there is no sound in space due to the immense vacuum!
Sandra Bullock well, was just Sandra Bullock. But it was awesome. And George Clooney played like he was Danny Ocean. Except that he was in space still cool and composed. Make no mistake. It was good acting from them.
Now you see, the premise is actually quite simple. Bullock and Clooney play these astronauts, one a rookie astronaut engineer and the other a veteran on his final mission and spacewalk, going on a simple (I'm guessing) mission to rectify the Hubble Telescope. All is well, until Houston sends a message to abort a mission.
It seems that an anti-satellite test conducted by the Russians (they basically blew up one their unused satellites) and it has caused debris to be flying around in space. Fatally damaging space stations along the way including the Explorer where Bullock and Clooney were based in.
With debris travelling at warp speed, things go horribly wrong and a simple mission suddenly becomes a life or death situation. One cannot help but imagine the horrors of perpetual floating, forever in space without anything to stop you from spinning on your own orbit and this was what happened to Bullock's Ryan. And this is where things got interesting.
Anyway, I won't spoil it that much for you. Go watch it in 3D. I didn't. I wish I did.
But, damnit! I enjoyed every minute of the 90 it had to offer and as I blog about this, I am also listening to it's haunting soundtrack on Spotify. I downloaded the soundtrack too by the way.
Is this movie Oscar worthy? I don't know considering it would be the shortest movie to win an Oscar (please correct me if I am wrong). But it is definitely generating a lot of buzz for all the right reasons.
So, this has been the best movie for me so far and it also makes me realize the harshness of space and it's beautiful emptiness.
I'm so glad to be in the safety of the Earth's gravitational pull. And I will never take Gravity for granted.
