Gravity

Gravity is both the best 3D film I have seen, and also the best film I have seen this year.

I would be surprised if Sandra Bullock isn’t at least nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of medical engineer Ryan Stone who is left stranded in space with veteran space walker Matt Kowalski played by George Clooney after their shuttle is hit by space debris.

The story is one of Stone’s fight for survival in an almost impossibly bleak situation and realisation that she wants to return home despite the trauma she has been through in her life. The various hurdles she has to overcome are realistic, the real-life spacecraft brilliantly recreated for the big screen, and action sequences are well-paced and not so over the top that’s you think it couldn’t happen. References to wombs and rebirth, some more subtle than others, seem to provide an allegorical artistic subtext to what is essentially a triumph of special visual effects and modern film making.

Four years in the making using revolutionary Real 3D techniques the finished result is a film as close to a perfect cinema experience as I can imagine. Alfonso Cuarón, probably best known as director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, has recreated the scary emptiness of space beautifully while presenting us with wonderful images of our home planet. Avatar showed the way, but with Gravity there is none of the layering that annoyed me so much with Cameron’s 3D offering, there is a really convincingly deep range between foreground and background and the close-ups of Bullock’s face are like amazingly detailed landscapes. You must see this on the big screen and you must see it in 3D, and if you can see it in IMAX I think your head might explode. Gravity is simply out of this world.