Gravity is more a technical marvel than it is any other aspect of it being a film. Director Alfonso Cuaron, known for his love and aptitude for long, elegant, impossible takes, here ramps that up to infinity, crafting some of the most balletic and beautiful action sequences ever put to screen. Your stomach drops, watching this stuff. You ripple with adrenaline and excitement in your seat. You hold your breath, again and again. It's such a unique and powerful film because it's such a precise visual achievement – an overwhelmingly exact and staggeringly complex choreography of terrible, majestic destruction.
That its marooned astronauts are just stuck above the earth's atmosphere – exquisitely milked here for all its singular, astounding beauty – adds a kind of profound and smothering loneliness to their situation. Just outside of human existence, we're reminded, there is a swallowing, impartial blackness. Gravity resubmits to the cinematic discourse the sheer immensity of space, and also its terrible inhospitality.
There's just so much to gush about in this film. Its score, for one, is terrific. Because there's no sound in space, the music has to be the looming groans of giant, expensive shapes hitting each other; of vast things catapulting off into space; of the recurring, dead-eyed threat of a fast-orbiting debris field. Go see it already. Gravity is too immense to do justice with words.
