"A movie is not about what it is about; it is about how it goes about it." So goes Roger Ebert's famous first rule of movies, and it's a rule that finds itself perfectly applied in explaining what makes Gravity a masterpiece. If you focus only on Gravity's story, you'd be forgiven for wondering what makes it so great; at its core, the story is just about two astronauts who end up adrift after a catastrophic accident and their struggle to survive. And while there's some basic character development, in the end, that's basically all that Gravity is about - their plight and their fight to survive. And yet, none of that can prepare you for the way Gravity utilizes every tool in the cinematic toolbox to create a visceral, incredible experience that left me drained and astonished. From the incredible long takes (and yes, I know they're CGI-assisted, and I don't care - it's their use I care about, not how they were achieved) to the constantly moving camera that uses the openness of space in incredible ways; from the lack of noise that results from the vacuum of space to the use of a relentless, driving score; from two outstandingly physical performances to the impact of nothing more than facial expressions, director Alfonso Cuarón deploys them all brilliantly and to maximum effect, and the result is one of those all-too-rare films that doesn't just use the cinematic medium to its utmost - it pushes it to whole new places it's never been before. There are those who have argued that Gravity is shallow or simplistic, and while they're not entirely wrong, they're also missing the point so fundamentally that you wonder what they want out of a film. Gravity tells a story like I've never seen it told before, and Cuarón's astonishing vision had my heart rate spiking and my knuckles absolutely white almost throughout. In other words, how it goes about its story is far more compelling than what it's about, and how it goes about it is by making the most jaw-dropping, intense experience I've had in a movie theater in years.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
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