St. Bonaventure's Student-Run Newspaper since 1926

Defying ‘Gravity’

in FEATURES by

By Taylor Nigrelli

Sports Editor

 

 After viewing Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,” I spent the next few days searching for a way to sum up my feelings on the movie. I couldn’t do better than echoing the sentiments of iconic/pretentious folk singer John Mayer.

“Gravity, stay the hell away from me.”

Of course, the space thriller (or whatever the hell it was supposed to be) opened with near-unanimous rave reviews from critics and general audiences alike.

Wesley Morris of Grantland.com called it a “near-perfect movie-going experience.” The Atlantic Wire called Gravity “the season’s first must-see movie.”

I just wish I got to see the same movie these people did – it sounds phenomenal.

The “Gravity” I watched was littered with clichés, average acting, poor plot structure and wild inaccuracies.

The plot featured Sandra Bullock and George Clooney playfully bounding around the galaxy, trading exposition and generally avoiding the dark, eternal nothingness of dying in space.

The film’s faults were three-fold. First the “this could never happen/that’s not how space works” complaints. Issues such as these are common and not really a huge deal – movies wouldn’t be as fun if they were always completely realistic.

But this first problem creates a much more prominent second one: only a microscopic percentage of the audience understands anything about space. The director (in this case, Cuarón) is then free to do whatever he damn well pleases. There are no rules, and as long as the visual effects are incredible (and they were – in a nine-figure budget movie in 2013. Throw a parade), people will enjoy it and do their best to follow along.

The third and personally most annoying discrepancy was the surprising incompetence of the two main characters, played by Bullock and Clooney. Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) is a medical doctor who, for some reason, is sent to space and spends a lot of time fixing space crafts. Matt Kowalski (Clooney) is an astronaut with the personality of a cowboy and the apparent IQ of someone who probably shouldn’t be leading a mission in space.

Stone seems to be totally unprepared for an outer space mission. She has no concept of how to move through the atmosphere, she isn’t comfortable in a lower-gravity area and she even admits that she’s never landed a space craft before. Luckily, she’s able to learn on the fly, mostly by herself while struggling for survival in space.

In one of the movie’s many unlikely plot points, the two get to know each other after their spacecraft is destroyed. In fact, after what must have been months of training and at least a decently long flight into space, Kowalski had yet to ask where Stone lived. It was as though they were meeting for the first time. If, when you met someone for the first time, you spoke in a series of clichés and awkward first-date questions.

Since the film mostly featured Stone and Kowalski (usually just Stone), Bullock and Clooney’s performances would seem to be pretty important to the film’s success.

Clooney plays his usual charming self, but it was hard to wrap my mind around his character being an astronaut. Bullock’s performance was far more egregious. She was touted by her colleagues as a genius doctor, but she came off as a boring, bumbling, soulless being, floating from vessel to vessel constantly in need of rescue.

After watching the movie, reading a few reviews and giving it some thought, I’m not sure what the point of “Gravity” was. The lack of character development and ridiculous, yet somehow nondescript, journey through space will hopefully ensure that “Gravity” will be remembered for nothing more than its visual effects.

So if you’re still impressed with such things, go ahead and see “Gravity.” I’ll be at home, lamenting the impending death of plot structure and screenwriting in major cinema.

nigreltn11@bonaventure.edu

Latest from FEATURES

Go to Top