GRAVITY Words by
Jonathan Crocker
pace is just 80 miles away from every one of us. Closer than most people are to their own national capitals. But it feels much further than it should. NASA’s moon landings were meant to be the dawn of an epic age of space travel, lunar bases and missions to Mars. It didn’t happen. And Earth’s dreams of galaxies far, far away have faded over the past four decades. In his final public interview, Neil Armstrong lamented what humanity really lost: the belief that anything is possible. Armstrong, though, died a year too soon to see Gravity’s bravura 13-minute opening shot, a 375-mile high launch pad from which director Alfonso Cuarón’s spectacular odyssey makes your senses fl oat with new wonder at both space and cinema. At fi rst, you’re marvelling at Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s gamechanging digital accomplishments. Soon, you just… let go. The 3D technology disappears behind an enveloping sensorial experience that sends us into the void like no other fi lm in history. Never mind whether or not you can ‘hike’ across space with a fi re extinguisher. Awe trumps accuracy and quite rightly. It’s how Gravity makes you feel that makes it real. When a mid-orbit disaster leaves two spacewalking astronauts – rookie engineer
G R A V I T Y
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Jonathan Crocker is head of content and UX at Human After All
Sandra Bullock and star cowboy George Clooney – spinning helplessly away into the big nothing, Cuarón’s camera hauls us in close. We travel through Bullock’s visor. Her face petrifies with full-screen fear. Her gulping breaths fi ll our ears. Then, audaciously, we turn to gawp through her eyes at Gravity’s impossibly poignant backdrop: the endless darkness of space and the gleaming marble of Mother Earth. Micro-plotting their survival saga on the most epic canvas in existence, co-writers Cuarón and his son, Jonás, leave us hanging right here for the rest of the fi lm – oscillating between contemplation and desperation, astonishment and terror, serenity and anxiety.