‘Gravity’ Review: Its not a movie, it’s an experience. One of my favourite movies of all-time!

The only negatives in ‘Gravity’ are that Indian Cinemas force an interval into it and that the movie ends. An experience beyond words, coming out after watching ‘Gravity’ is perhaps the only time I have ever felt that a review couldn’t do adequate justice to a work of art as supreme as this.

Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a Medical Engineer and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are astronauts who try finding their way back out of space and back to Earth after having their colleagues and their space shuttle destroyed by travelling debris. And that is pretty much the story! Something that would sound rather disengaging on paper turns out to be an experience that tickles all senses of your body and keeps you hooked like a little child spreading her eyes with wonder.

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who has also made Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth in the past, Gravity takes the viewer through extreme emotions of fear, solitude, loneliness, helplessness, failure and hope. Imagine the prospect of being lost and all alone in space, surrounded by scary, limitless darkness on one side and the allure of your Earth on the other. Imagine having given up any hope of survival and then mustering all your will for a fresh lease of life. Imagine the most dangerous experience ever that ends up being the single most transformative incident of your life. Imagine being a puppet to the pull and push of Gravity, not being able to feel your body and floating away into infinity if not cautious.

Although just a 3D film, at the end of ‘Gravity’, you feel as if you have just descended from an altitude of lesser gravity and find your limbs much heavier than before. That is the kind of reaction that Director Cuaron has been able to extract through this masterpiece. Being submerged in a swimming pool, with the World drowned out of your life is the closest you would come to experiencing ‘Gravity’ without being in Space yourself.

Much like Danny Boyle’s ‘127 Hours’, ‘Gravity’ too is picturised in confined spaces. You feel suffocated and feel the urge to be free. Although ‘Gravity’ is perhaps the first full-fledged Space movie that ordinary Indian cinema-goers would have seen, they will remember this film less for being set in space and more for the fear and subsequent ecstasy that they feel when the lead makes it to Mother Earth alive. Amongst the best endings a movie has ever seen, the last scene depicts Sandra Bullock lying on a beach attempting to get up by pushing herself off the ground like in Space and then laughing at herself, only to pull herself up and enjoy the gravity under her body. That is the highlight of the movie and appropriately justifies the wonderfully chosen title of this film.

Sandra Bullock is flawless as the vulnerable yet perseverant Ryan Stone. George Clooney is a delight as usual with his witty one liners and his character’s perennial will to survive. The music or lack of it is another vital cast member, making its presence felt several times in visuals that leave you cold and shaken up with their chilling silence or instant build-ups; a technique being used in Cinema rather frequently now. The soundtrack with the end titles of the movie is spellbinding. But the real heroes of this experience are its Director and its special effects Team. Without their vision and hard work, this wouldn’t have been the landmark movie that it turned out to be. Apparently, the movie Studio wanted the Director to unforgivably inject a lot of commercial elements like a romantic story, flashbacks, a hero’s welcome back home and so on but how you love Cuaron for fighting them away!

You will never have hated a mobile phone as much as you will when someone in your cinema hall plays around with it while watching ‘Gravity’. And as my friend Zahir said, “just like Woody Allen blocked his film from being released in India for the Anti-smoking videos and warnings, if Cuaron knew about these intermissions, he would never have allowed this movie to get released in India”, that is how disruptive the noisy interval feels.

You would have committed a crime if you miss this one. It isn’t a movie, it’s an experience!

6 out of 5