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Gravity (2013)

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Writer: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller

Premise: While on a mission to upgrade the Hubble telescope, a Russian missile strikes a satellite causing a shower of space debris. The debris go into orbit around Earth destroying everything in its path. The space shuttle is destroyed stranding Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in space.

Review: And that's where they should have been left!...in space!
Gravity is nothing more than a dressed up disaster movie with one harrowing death defying escape after another, and another and another...and another! It's cliche ridden with unbelievable cartoon like characters who act so ridiculously that it's hard to buy into the movie.

Sandra Bullock is the likeable but goofy Ryan Stone. Ryan is a klutz, who's crashed the shuttle landing simulator every single time and yet NASA sends her into space anyway. She can't hang onto her space tools, can't follow an abort order and panics easily. Hardly astronaut material. But wait she's not the worst.

George Clooney is Matt Kowalski, a wise cracking space cowboy who spends his time flying around circles in space with his jet pack. Maybe he should have saved some of that pressurized gas just in case a disaster strikes and he gets stranded in space, ha. Apparently NASA didn't teach him too well.

The director, Alfonso Cuarón also wrote this film, so it's his fault. He packs his Hollywood CG block buster flix with such tiresome recycled hash as:

The dream sequence where a dead astronaut comes back to life, magically appearing at the air hatch...opening it as Sandra Bullock (who has removed her space suit), pleads, don't open it...it will kill her.

The feel sorry for her scene, where Ryan reveals to the audience her daughter was killed in a traffic accident so now she's sad and just keeps moving though life. This is suppose to tug at our heart strings, ack.

The rip off of 2001 A Space Odyssey scene where Ryan floats in a fetal position, ugh.

Gravity's main selling point is it's massive CG special effects. On the big screen and in 3-D this movie must have looked impressive with it's wall-to-wall eye candy. But there's no hiding the fact that there's no story and no character development. Just one over the top thriller-disaster-survival scene after another. As soon as Bullock escapes a near death tragedy, another pops up to challenge her. And that's called good movie making?

In the films: Apollo 13 (1995) and Marooned (1969) we also see astronauts stranded in space, the drama is told to the audiences by superb acting and it's the actors who make us believe what we are seeing is real. That's why those films work. In Gravity its all about the CG and space thrills, and believable acting and dialogue is out the window.