Saturday, October 5, 2013

Gravity: An IMAX 3D Experience

I will join the chorus of approval for Gravity, a film which has a real buzz going for it. "Immersion" is a word you hear a lot around these IMAX / 3D films, and while that may be the new aesthetique du jour—take people someplace, anyplace—Gravity somehow has managed to be something that can only be communicated in the film form. How it got ground through two studios, various casts, and still found its singular greatness has to be attributable to the iron-clad will of director and co-scenarist Alphonso Cuarón.

The story of this film is so slight, that to speak about it at all almost requires giving the whole thing away, but Cuarón has fashioned a film so different from what we normally encounter at the movies today, a film which is both moderate in tempo and incredibly involving, allowing the viewer plenty of time and, uhh, space, to philosophically react to the events depicted.

And how this is done is especially interesting. I am sure that the first shot of Gravity will go down in history as one of film's most stunning achievements (if you exclude the opening of Robert Zemeckis' Contact [1997]). In what must be at least a 15 minute shot from on high looking down on Earth, all the players and the instruments and vehicles they are working on whirl into view. It is such an amazing ballet of images, performance, exposition, and staging, that it could only be accomplished by a director who has a genius for scene-setting.

I found it a very effective method to get all the techno-wonks (of whom a picture with a space theme would surely attract), to forget about "how did they do that?"; the shot goes on for so long that eventually, you find yourself forgetting all about how it must have been filmed, and when you are able to forget about how they did it, then you are able to actually be out there in space with the characters.

This is only the beginning.
During this long spacewalk outside the space shuttle Explorer, we are introduced to Sandra Bullock's character, Stone, who is trying to diagnose a troublesome faulty circuit board on the Hubble Space Telescope, while Clooney's character, Mission Commander Kowalski, is sort of skylarking around, assisted by a jetpack. They are both talking to Mission Control in that easy manner employed by people who must be very clear about what they say.

This tranquil atmosphere is broken when Mission Control informs them that debris from a detonated satellite is heading their way. And this is where I find that Cuarón's command of this film hits the ceiling - without really altering his staging technique of the first shot, the two astronauts find themselves having to pack it in, the telescope and the Explorer are destroyed, and our pair (focusing on Stone, who has no jetpack) are cast adrift in the immensity of space. The way that this sequence of events is depicted, with all of these huge objects whirling about the screen and exploding in silence is just stunningly viceral. Totally unique. And this is only the beginning.  There's more - lots more.

The space suits worn by both Bullock and Clooney somehow allow us to see them as people without our usual associations with them as movie stars. After Clooney does one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen him do, Bullock manages to get into the International Space Station, and it is here, after Stone has become a real person to us, we can really feel her release when she pulls off her space suit inside the station. We are with her as she curls into a fetal ball.

To say the this picture is a triumph for Sandra Bullock is something of an understatement. I am not sure she holds the picture together the same way Garland does in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but she comes close.  Unlike the actors in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Cuarón wisely never allows the technical stuff to overtake Bullock, who is allowed to carry the picture. She even manages to hurdle over that bugaboo of all performers who are in a film where they are lost and on their own: talking to themselves. All filmmakers resort to this, but only really gifted actors can pull it off.

I am somewhat at a loss as to how to explain how the rest of the picture effected me. I will try. I found the whole thing done in a style that was for me the most elegant way of telling the story, revealing the characters, and showing the settings. While at the same time, I found my mind free to wander; not over  "How did they do THAT?" but over "how do I react when things go wrong?" or "Do I believe in an afterlife at all?" The room the picture has in it for the viewer to reflect, is what makes Gravity so much more than a mere sci-fi potboiler.

When you read a novel, your mind fills in the pictures, and this has always been literature's strength. In Gravity, there are actors, pictures, and sounds, but there is also you, your own mind. You are allowed to speculate, if you will, on your own life. I tell you, I had a very strange feeling upon re-entering my car down in the dim parking garage after the film. . .

Gravity reminds me of the great films where everything is working together on the same high level. Script, performance -  the scale of the piece, which contrasts the two characters with the huge environment they are in - the music, all of it is contributing to this theatrical effect that you can't get on a stage or in a book, or on television or a video game. It gracefully pulls you in, and you stay there.  It's incredible.

In more mundane matters, the Chinese is running this film on their 87 foot wide IMAX screen with no masking top and bottom.  Having studied the situation carefully, I am pleased to report that the screen is much more deeply curved than what was originally proposed in the plans presented to the public prior to the remodel. Screen curvature is measured by the "rise", which is the distance between the "chord" (a line drawn between the outer edges of the screen), and the center of the screen. At the Chinese, the "rise" is 9 feet, and thus, the aspect ratio of this space is 1:9.66, which is just slightly shallower than the original short-throw CinemaScope specs (usually somewhere around 1:9, 1:8). so the new IMAX screen is in approximately the same place with the same curvature as the older screen we all loved so much.

Gravity is the first modern film with a more-or-less conventional score to play the IMAX'ed Chinese, and I have to say that the Achilles heel of most theatre sound systems is present here: really thin sounding high strings.  High strings don't sound like that, fellahs.  The rest of the sound range thunders along most agreeably, with the sub-woofers doing a very creditable job of vibrating everyone without that false rattle that sounds so much like the old Sensurround speakers from Earthquake (1974). . . But massed strings, choirs, and pianos - tough things to reproduce, all. The Chinese is running Gravity with the sidewall curtains open throughout.

I attended the first show, hastily added on at 9:30 AM.  I was hungry, so I ordered a hot dog. The attendant said that the dogs were not ready, but that she would bring one to me when they were done.  She offered to walk me to my seat to find out where I was sitting, but I just gave her my seat number, and she brought it right in on a tray with condiment packets - very nice.

Anyway, Gravity is a great picture, and I hope it makes a lot of money, which hinges on whether people return to see it again.  I would.

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