Alfonso, Alfonso. Paving the way for us all.
If you've seen GRAVITY, slow down and read. If you haven't seen it, go see it.
I anticipate the following: under 23? You found the movie incredible. You will watch it endlessly. Over 23? You found it pretty cool.
Allow me to open the door to an enhanced viewing of GRAVITY; and I'm not talking about 3D.
Mine has been called the generation of apathy. The product of a long-dry-doubt-bout. Faithful to faithlessness, living in limitlessness. Represented thus: there is no strangeness to the endlessness of space. This is where we live. We live with the internet. Age 30 and over? You saw it under the convention that space-movies are sci-fi-movies. Yet this is not. Dr. Ryan Stone's spinning, solo flight does not describe your chronic condition, though perhaps condition by event.
Next up: reverse transcendance. Take a treat like American Beauty: learning gratitude, seeing the beauty in mundane, synthesis for happiness. All perfection and all based on a premise that is old-hat and long rejected by my generation, that is, that there is something to seek beyond the concrete.
Ryan starts out free flying in space, she does not end there. Her androgynous character, (well done, Sandra Bullock), accepts all aspects of her experience as arbitrary acts of life and science, with only so much meaning as what is assigned to them. She is in an extra-ordinary, extra-terrestrial circumstance; yet feels short of expectations, remember, her dad "wanted a boy." Nothing better descibes the listlessness of condition found in my generation.
Unlike her self-sacrificing co-worker, Ryan did not find a surrendering peace in free floating, in the sublime vastness of space, even when convinced of death. There was no romantic transcendence for her because she had never had her feet on the ground to begin with. She had never had a center, never had gravity.
If her experience of coming "DOWN TO EARTH" by relinquishing her previous sensibilities as opposed to gaining them does not reveal the element of rebirth in her arc for you, remember that shot generously given: fetal floating womb-like in the space station right after first removing her space suit, cords coiling around and above her. Umbilical cord as first link to focal point, gravity as last.
That's why her walk on earth is compelling. That's why some youth have connected to this film so strange, unable to explain the appeal beyond its sheer execution and visual effects (which are grand). It's not the bells and whistles, ladies and gentlemen, not that alone. We're quite used to that.
Forget the first step on the moon. This film provides a first step for how we can handle and cope with this world what changes so endless-drastic-immaterial as it does from one day to the next. Transient, and non-tactile; all I have done is hit buttons and clicked.
