GRAVITY
review by
ANIZ FILMVALA
*****
STORY.
Bio-medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone is a Mission Specialist on her first space shuttle mission, STS-157, accompanied by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, who is commanding his final expedition. During the final spacewalk to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Mission Control in Houston warns the team that debris from a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite has caused a chain reaction of destruction and that they must abort the mission. Shortly afterward, communications from Mission Control are lost, though Stone and Kowalski continue to transmit in hopes that the ground crew can hear them.
High-speed debris kills engineer Shariff and damages the space shuttle Explorer, sending Stone far away from it. Kowalski, who is wearing a thruster pack, navigates to Stone and retrieves her. Tethered together, the two make their way back to Explorer, where they discover it has been damaged far beyond usability, and the rest of the crew are dead. They decide to use the thruster pack to make their way to the International Space Station (ISS), which is in orbit only about 100 km (60 mi) away. Kowalski estimates they have 90 minutes before the debris field completes an orbit and threatens them again.
En route to the ISS, the two discuss Stone's life back home and the death of her young daughter in a schoolyard accident. As they approach the slightly damaged ISS, they see that its crew has evacuated in one of the Soyuz modules and that the other's parachute has been accidentally deployed, making it useless for return to Earth. But Kowalski says that the Soyuz can still be used to travel to the nearby Chinese space station Tiangong to retrieve another module that can take them to Earth. Out of air and maneuvering power, the two try to grab onto the ISS as they fly by. At the last moment, Stone's leg becomes entangled in the Soyuz's parachute cords, but Kowalski realizes that his momentum will carry them both away; over Stone's protests, he detaches himself from the tether so that Stone might survive, and the tension in the cords pulls her back towards the ISS. As Kowalski floats away, he radios additional instructions and encouragement to Stone.
Stone enters the ISS via an airlock but must hastily make her way to the Soyuz to escape a fire. Stone realizes the Soyuz's parachute cables are still tangled with the ISS. She spacewalks outside to release the cables, barely succeeding just as the debris field completes its orbit and destroys the station. Stone aligns the Soyuz with Tiangong, but discovers the craft's thrusters have no fuel. Stone resigns herself to being stranded and begins decompression of the cabin to commit suicide by painless hypoxia. As she begins to lose consciousness, Stone has a hallucination in which Kowalski appears outside, enters the capsule, and tells her to use the Soyuz's landing rockets. Newly motivated to live, Stone restores the flow of oxygen and uses the rockets to navigate towards Tiangong.
Unable to dock the Soyuz with the station, Stone ejects herself via explosive decompression and uses a fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster to travel to Tiangong. She enters the Shenzhou capsule just as Tiangong starts to break up on the upper edge of the atmosphere, having been knocked from orbit by debris. As the capsule descends to Earth, Stone hears Mission Control over the radio tracking the capsule. The capsule lands in a lake, forcing Stone to shed her spacesuit underwater in order to swim to shore. She takes her first shaky steps on land, in the full gravity of Earth.
CRITIC VIEW.
Director Alfonso Cuarón's film GRAVITY is a potent flick of space which will heave you towards the rim of your seat ,it’s a benchmark towards a space odyssey and rest will follow.
The movie gives you the experience to get close to the space; this is how close you get to the space.
Sandra Bullock who plays Dr Ryan Stone a mission specialist on her first space mission has given a sharp performance, you can feel the emotions the uncertainties as she overcomes her fears and gets back to earth.
There are few dialogues but only Sandra Bullock fighting for survival and surrounded by silence of the space she excels in the role of Dr Ryan Stone .
George Clooney as veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski is a smart aleck charmer.
Doing a lot of talking weaves his way around Dr Ryan Stone making her comfortable and giving her courage to fight back when she wants to give up and fold in .
The movie is an experience of future modernization of cinema, as you get the exquisite detailing of visuals,sound eg You hear silence in space where you hear even the most minuscule breathing sound made by Sandra Bullock.
The spectacular and truthful representation of how a film about space is, you will get tract on IMAX and in 3D,it will enormously give you value for the price of your ticket.
CAST.
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Produced by Alfonso Cuarón,David Heyman
Written by Alfonso Cuarón,Jonás Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock,George Clooney
Music by Steven Price
Cinematography Emmanuel Lubezki
Editing by Alfonso Cuarón,Mark Sanger
Studio Esperanto Filmoj,Heyday Films
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
