What Goes Up

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I tried this morning to figure where this delay of a few days in me finally getting my ever humble opinion of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity out here into the world might land me - would I find myself plunked down in the middle of a backlash? Word was so rapturous beforehand that there were bound to be less-than-great opinions percolating up as more and more eyeballs took it in. Would I find myself amid a backlash to a backlash maybe? How would my words enter the world? On fire, rocketing through the atmosphere? Or just a cold plop in the sea, immediately sunk and forgotten?

Who knows! Who cares! In reality the consensus on the film has remained pretty unwavering - for the most part it's just been degrees of brilliance under dispute. It just seems to depend on how important people find things like "rich characters" and "not embarrassing dialogue," really - are you willing to overlook some clunkiness script-wise when the visuals are of the sort you will never, for the entirety of your life, forget?

I really don't have anything all that revolutionary to add to the pile, but I will say that I am entirely willing to overlook that flatness in storytelling - it reads more to me as a dedication to simplicity in storytelling anyway. The film tries to walk along the narrowest of ledges between giving us something to care about with its characters and not over-sharing at the same time, and I'll fully admit it feels uncertain, unsure, hesitant about when to step forward and when to stand stock still, at least in these terms. I do feel as if that sensation might slough off with a second viewing though, with the arc of Bullock's character's small yet essential journey already in place. I think what seemed a little forced (all that emotional nattering) will snap into place - I mean really, wouldn't you talk to yourself when faced with an endless eternal void that's trying to suck you into it at every turn?

These are complaints only in terms of me feeling the need to address what I've seen as people's fair criticisms after the film though - my actual viewing experience, me and the movie together as one, was a rapturous skeleton-shaking eyeball-bulging time. I'm not one to leap about or gasp audibly in a theater, but this movie had me pretty much folded right into it from the get-go; there I was, actually gasping for air at times, dodging left and right, pushing the heels of my boots into the theater floor - I'll probably never take up Sir Richard Branson's offer to toss my cookies on his galactic aeroplane, and now I feel like I've no need to worry about that. I've been to outer space now, thanks to Alfonso Cuarón.

There's such humanity in Cuaron's horror - he shows us the world (literally here) as awesome (as in awe-filled), tethering together both sides of that coin - it is beautiful and it is terrifying, it will swallow you up and it's a struggle not to want to let it to do just that. Because good goddamn look at the Ganges from up here! That's not a bad way to go. But there are so many beautiful things to see - endless beautiful things. Why stay with just one? Why not fight to see them all in all of their endless iterations? The glassy surface of an eyeball, a globe-spanning circle of clouds above their land-locked fury, frog legs and cartoon martians and an hollowed-out skull shattered and horrific and yes, as awesome as anything else. We want to look, and Cuarón wants to show. I want to see.

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