There are good movies, there are revolutionary movies and then there is “Gravity.”
While watching Sandra Bullock and George Clooney fight for their lives in the most realistic zero-gravity portrayal ever presented in film history Friday night, I periodically had to pick my jaw up off the floor.
Recent films hailed themselves as game-changing endeavors that would forever alter the way movies are made, but “Gravity” lives up to the billing that so-called “iconic” films such as “Avatar” never did.
Every science-fiction movie made from this point forward will be compared to the sequences in “Gravity.”
At no point in the movie did I question the physics of moving objects. At no point could I pinpoint where physical actors and CGI began or ended.
In fact, at no point in the movie did I even question that everything I saw wasn’t real.
No science-fiction movie has ever sent the moviegoer into space the way “Gravity” does, and I suspect it will be a long time before any movie does again.
“Avatar” attempted the perfection “Gravity” achieved, and every so often in the midst of “Avatar”’s ripped-off plotline, painfully bad acting and not-so-subtle political statements, true strides in visual effects could be seen.
But “Avatar” never came close to transplanting me into a world where giant blue aliens live in oversized trees that humans need to destroy to mine the universe’s perfect mineral.
“Gravity”’s success is in its attention to detail.
Writer, director, producer and editor Alfonso Cuarón spent his time making every second of “Gravity” the most accurate and beautiful portrayal of space imaginable instead of blowing people’s senses away with the most expansive fictional world ever created by CGI like James Cameron did in “Avatar.”
Cuarón’s meticulousness succeeds and should be gratuitously awarded. I don’t want to say movies to be released later this year should abandon all hope for any awards this season, but short of the second coming of The Godfather hitting the screens, any awards for directing, editing, visual effects and sound editing should be reserved for Mr. Cuarón.