Early Buzz: Everyone Loves Gravity

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s first narrative feature since 2006’s Children of Men, just released this new poster, and while it will be at least two or three weeks until I get to see it, and you normies will have to wait until October, the film’s currently playing the Venice Film Festival and the reviews are starting to trickle in.

SPOILER ALERT: They like it.

I’m thoroughly sick of 3D movies and, until this morning, at least, I would have been happy to never have to look at one again. But I wasn’t prepared for the way Cuarón uses it to explore both wonder and despair, in Gravity. Forget stretched-out blue people, Peter Max–colored flora and fauna, and explosions comin’ at you: This is what 3D was made for.Village Voice

…a science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance, in which two astronauts come perilously unstuck from their moorings.The Telegraph

It comes blowing in from the ether like some weightless black nightmare, hanging planet Earth at crazy angles behind the action. Like Tarkovsky’s Solaris (later remade by Clooney and director Steven Soderbergh), the film thrums with an ongoing existential dread. And yet, tellingly, Cuaron’s film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.The Guardian

Space has never seemed bigger, more unknown, more outer than it does in “Gravity.” …it’s 45 years since Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” effectively patented the description “the ultimate trip,” but that doesn’t mean Cuarón and his team can’t further serve and substantiate it.Hitfix

The film comes as close as most of us are likely to get to actually being in space (undoubtedly aided by the 3D: this is one film that’s really worth paying the extra bucks for to see in the format, whether the lens is capturing a tiny spinning speck in the distance or debris flying in your face). But it shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere rollercoaster ride—even if your instinct, as at a theme park, is to finish the experience and line up again for another go. When all’s said and done, the action is in service of character.ThePlaylist

Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron maintains he would have been an astronaut if he had not become a film-maker. So it is no  surprise that he has George Clooney and Sandra Bullock floating about in space in Gravity, the first 3D film to open the prestigious Venice Film Festival.EveningStandard (I chose this excerpt because it’s one of the more hilariously dull ledes I’ve read).

Not unlike earlier triumphs of 3D and vfx innovation such as “Avatar” and “Life of Pi,” though conceived along less fantastical, more grimly realistic lines, “Gravity” is at once classical and cutting-edge in its showmanship, placing the most advanced digital filmmaking techniques in service of material that could hardly feel more accessible.Variety

Getting all excited for a movie like this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives me something to look forward to besides the chilling embrace of death. On the other, if it’s not the best Sandra Bullock movie since Demolition Man, it’ll add to the growing list of ways the universe has disappointed me. Don’t think I’m not keeping track of this shit. It’s all up to you, Cuarón.

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