I figure I’ll review 25 albums this week but if I see even one movie, I’ll be surprised. Movie reviewers can take in 15 movies a week, and like record reviewers, it is a specialized art form and it changes the viewer the way listening to music endlessly changes the listener.
My point? The 97% approval rating of the admittedly excellent director Alfonso Cuaron (he did the standard bearer Potter flick “Prisoner Of Askhaban”) has more to do with the specialized taste of the reviewers than the big nothing much on the screen. Imagine, if you will, “Alien” without the alien mixed with “2001: A Space Odyssey” without the acid, and you have the incredibly unexciting “Gravity”.
This pas de deux and then pas de une around the earth finds an asteroid field heading in the direction of a space shuttle while Sandra Pollack and George Clooney attempt to fix a telescope. 90 minutes later and, well you can guess what happens within 90 minutes. Getting them back to earth has its moments and it looks fabulous, but there isn’t much to it.
In the end, how much difference is there between “I Dream Of Jeannie” weightlessness and “Gravity”? It’s the same stuff floating in the same space to the same end. And I saw it in 3D and IMAX and I guess it was wow but more wow if you are starving for a movie you haven’t seen before than if you are happy with just people who love people clobbering each other.
Clooney is OK playing Clooney, Bollock has morphed into the actress Julia Roberts thought she was and every thing else is darkness and light signifying nothing very much. It is, in a sense, a shaggy dog story. We keep execting something great to happen, we are quietly waiting, but nothing great does happen. It can only go in one direction (back to Earth) and that’s where it goes.
Oh, it is a pretty good movie, and a lean 90 minutes so at least you don’t fall asleep, and I guess if you thought about it long enough it would be impressive. But what you get is just a pleasant (yes, pleasant, it certainly isn’t a tense, nerve wrecker) outerspace travelogue. You know, like the earliest motion pictures, it looks cool.
Grade: C+