Gravity

We went to see Gravity in 3D last night. It was a difficult decision, because I’m not a fan of 3D. It makes me dizzy and just basically interferes with the film. The more action, the less I like it. I did not enjoy the previews and I really did not enjoy the ad for 3D at the end of the previews.

Then we proceeded to have our minds blown.

The best I can compare it to is the experience of seeing Blade Runner. I saw that film when it first came out in the summer of 1982 when I had just graduated from high school. My friend Kim and I went to the Lincoln Mall to see it because we thought Harrison Ford was cute. To say we were unprepared for the experience is a gross understatement.

The film gave a view of the world I had not before imagined. The futuristic urban landscape and the replicants were both terrifying and believable. The world of the story completely drew me in and each scene unfolded with a new delight. Suddenly I saw what film could do.

I think it was this experience that has kept me going to film, and sent me back into film archives looking for similar experiences. (Interestingly, it never sent me to reading science fiction. I like the visual experience.) Talking today to a 72-year-old friend who also saw Gravity yesterday, he said it was for him like the experience of seeing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater in 1968. Yes! Exactly!

And so I am happy to think of teenagers especially wandering into a George Clooney and Sandra Bullock movie and getting– this.

There was a time when I watched a string of movies about travel to the moon. It was probably right after Apollo 13 was released. In one, made before 1965, the space-suited men were connected to the spaceship by flimsy, long tubes that also provided oxygen. But most telling, the view of the sky from the moon showed, well, another moon, not the earth.

Our own vision of space and earth from space is now quite developed. In an early scene in Gravity, looking at the earth, I heard the guy behind me say something I was thinking: “That’s a big hurricane.” We all know what a hurricane looks like, right? And it added an unspoken level of perception: something bad was happening down there on earth, and we knew something was about to go wrong in space as well.

I can’t say that Gravity has a great story. It is a good-enough story. I am not even sure the acting is great. I think Sandra Bullock did a wonderful job, and her performance is wonderful and riveting– but she has some really lame lines (“I hate space.”) and in a way I kept comparing her in my head to Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. She kicks ass in this film and she also provides the human story that makes us care about her.

But I think we really care about her because we are her– and it is the director and the filming (the art direction, camera work, special effects and the soundtrack– what a fantastic soundtrack– and most of all the direction) that take us inside her space helmet.

I was not a fan of Avatar. I will not be seeing The Hobbit in 3D. But last night– like when we all jumped to warp speed for the first time or waited for Hal to open the pod bay doors, or walked out onto the street with Rick Deckard– I saw what this technology could really do.