In the upcoming season, Eclectic Cinema will be showing Gravity;
Kicking off the so-called Mexican Oscars takeover (the award for Best Director went to a Mexican director five years out of six) was Alfonso Cuaron's 2013 Sci-fi Epic Gravity, which won 7 statues from 10 nominations.
The film opens in the endless expance of space during routine maintenance by a Space Shuttle crew, the confident, easy going Kowalski (George Clooney) and the nervous, inexperienced Stone (Sandra Bullock). A familiar voice from Houston Mission Control reports an unrelated missile strike on a satellite has created a field of debris orbiting the Earth at lethal speed. They are hit, severed from their safety tethers, sent careering into the blackness and left to find a way to get home, with little chance of survival.
Thanks in no small part to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 Magnum Opus 2001: A Space Odyssey, the influence of which can be felt here, Sci-Fi has long been a vehicle for filmmakers' expression to be let loose, and so it proves here. With plot points that throw the reality of the journey into question, there are heavy philosophical undertones and images that serve anything but the story, making this much more than a genre picture.
Cuaron's direction is arguably secondary to the immersive cinematography from compatriot Emanuel Lubezki, who himself scored a hat-trick of consecutive Oscar wins starting with his work here (he won for Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman in 2014 and The Revenant in 2015). With few visual bearings to anchor us in space, our perspective is constantly shifting in some of the most dynamic (yet amazingly not disorientating) camerawork ever seen. The best example is the oft enthused opening 17 minute long take, the technical genius of which has become a touchstone and also serves to effectively introduce the main characters.
This U.K. produced film, a symphony of visual effects created by British studio Framestore, uses groundbreaking filming techniques and wonderful editing to take us into outerspace. It is visually stunning, even astonishing. This is a must see on the big screen.
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