Sometimes I think I need to book myself a “Crazy, Table for One”. Everyone has been waxing eloquent about Sandra Bullock and George Clooney’s new movie Gravity. The only stunning planetary body you will find there is Sandra’s; she’s worked hard and each golden, toned muscle thanks her for it.
I love space movies, from ET to Mission to Mars, but I just couldn’t understand why the otherwise-terrific Alfonzo Cuaron didn’t figure out that for people like us.. we need to see, um, space. You know, the vastness of it, the silence of it, the terror of it, the nothingness of it. For the whole movie, Sandra is within touching distance of The Blue Marble. How are we supposed to feel what being untethered to life as we know it must be like?
While Gravity is not boring, it simply doesn’t realize its potential. The token Indian is killed off in the first few minutes because you know, Someone has to die, and Clooney gets to show off some classic Yankee humour (which is always good, I have to admit), and we wait with bated breath because we know Armageddon is on its way.
When it comes, the special effects will make you flinch, in a thrilling way, and seeing Sandra fight to survive will have you rooting for America’s Sweetheart who has donned the mantle passed on from Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts, but….she ain’t Ripley who’s as cool as the -455 degrees F of cosmic background temperature she’s riding in. And Gravity isn’t Alien Resurrection.
Missed opportunities come knocking throughout, once literally when Clooney’s character taps on the capsule Sandra is dying in….really? You want us to laugh while Sandra’s running out of oxygen? And at the end ,when touchdown is achieved, we want to see the heroic, immediate American response to disaster and rescue; this is the movies, after all, and how perfectly did Captain Phillips capture that. But this is where Cuaron decides, for once, to show nothingness.
Clooney, meanwhile, taking a leaf out of Brad Pitt’s trajectory vis a vis World War Zzzzz, now simply seems to be appearing in a film to play himself; you can’t see a trace of effort in what they do anymore.
I wish Breaking Bad was still playing. That at least made terrific, crazy, wonderful sense, yo.
Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian Express andCosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/