Awards
season is over, and I breathed a sigh of relief when Gravity failed to take home best picture at the Academy Awards.
Still, I couldn't help but be a bit bothered when it grabbed an award it definitely did not deserve in the best director category,
as well as being nominated for a ridiculous amount of others. Meanwhile other
far better films like; Place Beyond the Pines, Elysium, and Rush were not
even nominated for a single Oscar. Gravity
follows in a recent tradition of films that put special effects above story,
along with Life of Pie, and of course
the one that started the craze, Avatar.
All of these movies are visually stunning but lack compelling plot. However, none
of the previous offenders have been so devoid of interesting story, characters
and social commentary as Gravity.
Now I
don’t want anyone to get the impression that I have something against modern
special effects, far from it, I love them. They allow filmmakers to do some
amazing things, things they would never have been able to do in the past. Many
of my favorite films from the last few years, like Inception and Hugo, have
been loaded with special effects. The problem arises when the plot exists to
prop up the special effects, instead of the other way around. Gravity might look amazing, but when the
audience can’t connect to the characters in a character based film, there is a
big problem.
I remember
the first time I saw a trailer for Gravity,
which I believe consisted of about 90% Sandra Bullock’s annoying cries, I
laughed in the middle of the theater because it looked so terrible. Instead of setting up the plot or introducing the characters the trailer was a single scene that told viewers all they would need to expect from the movie; Sandra Bullock is in space and things go wrong, oh and the movie looks amazing. Then I saw
that Alfonso Cuaron was directing and I realized right then and there what kind
of movie this would be. After seeing Children
of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban I felt like I had a pretty good feel for the kind of movie he
makes. Both Harry Potter 3 and Children of Men are some of the coolest
looking movies around, but seem to sacrifice plot for stunning visuals. Even so,
both are still pretty good movies (although not as good as they should have
been) because they have an advantage Gravity
does not, they are based on novels. The novels have complex plots, and even
while those plots are partially removed or changed they still are the backbones
of the movies. Without a strong starting point like that the plot of Gravity is paper thin and is made up
entirely of Sandra Bullock’s character moving from one destination to the next.
The movie’s
runtime is only about 90 minutes but somehow it manages to feel longer then the
second Hobbit movie. The reason for
that is simple, nothing happens. The second half is worse than the first
because (spoilers) at least in the first there is some dialogue between
characters, while in the second it’s just the ever aggravating Sandra Bullock
talking to herself. Of course there is nothing wrong with a solitary character
struggling conceptually speaking; it’s the execution in Gravity that is wrong. Cast
Away, for example, is a brilliant movie because Tom Hank’s character, Chuck
Nolan, is one that we as an audience cared about on a deeper level. In fact I
actually care more about Wilson the volleyball than Sandra Bullock’s character,
and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.
The
reason we can connect more with a volleyball than Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock’s
character) is due to the fact that Chuck treats him like a real person, he has meaningful
conversations with him and Wilson floating away is one of the saddest moments
of the film because he has kept Chuck (relatively) sane for the past five
years, and was his only friend. Once Wilson is gone Chuck has lost the only
thing in the world he had left, we see him at his lowest, which makes his salvation
more spectacular. At some point in the movie Dr. Stone reveals she had a son
who died, which explains why she is such a sad mopey character. It also
explains that she lost her only motivation in life, which makes her struggle to
get back to Earth alive more symbolic and meaningful as she decides she has
something to live for. Regrettably, her change from mopey astronaut who has given
up on life to mopey astronaut who wants to live happens, not over the course of
the movie, but in one scene where she hallucinates/dreams about George Clooney and has a brief interaction with someone she can't understand.
The
rest of the movie is just Dr. Stone getting from one place from another while
we are hit over the head with how visually stunning the film is. She travels
from one space station to the next, each one is miraculously intact until the
moment she needs to leave it, when the cloud of space debris return and
destroys the station she is currently on, but luckily for her, not the next one
she needs to get to, until of course she reaches it and the process starts
again. Basically Dr. Stone travels at the speed of plot, but makes sure to take
breaks to do things like pose for an overly long shot where she looks like a child
in a womb, which Stanley Kubrick did better back in the 60’s.
So
really, why am I so upset by the success of Gravity?
It’s because despite the fact that it is a terrible movie, it still was received
overwhelmingly positively by; critics, moviegoers, and the Academy. Its success
is a bad thing because it means that the thing that really matters in a movie
is not plot or character development, but special effects. The more that films like Gravity and Avatar succeed, the more they dominate the film landscape and other
more original thought provoking films are passed over in favor of simplistic
hollow films. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, Avatar
4 has already been announced despite Avatar
2 not even having entered pre-production. On the other hand Blade Runner, one of the best science
fiction films ever made, actually lost money at the box office back in 1982 and
Ridley Scott’s planned sequel still hasn’t arrived after 32 years.
Gravity’s
message comes across sloppily; Cuaron attempts to make us connect to Stone by
giving her a child who died pointlessly, and then having Clooney’s heroic
sacrifice awaken her once again giving her life meaning. Clooney’s death scene
is nearly identical to a scene from the much reviled Mission to Mars, and it’s just as unmoving. Even Michael Bay pulled
off a better scene where a character sacrificed himself to save someone else in
Armageddon. For the life of me I can’t
understand why such a poorly acted, thinly plotted excuse for a movie has such
universal renown other than this; it was a great experience. However, film isn’t
about taking the viewer on a cool ride; it’s about telling a story, or at the
very least making a connection to the audience.
There
are all kinds of theories about the deeper meaning of the film, which isn’t
surprising to me; when something is particularly shallow it can be interpreted
any number of ways. The film certainly provides a sense of awe, but for all the
wrong reasons. The only way Cuaron seems to be able to connect to audiences is
through visuals, so instead of having a relatable character we can root for, or
even like, the things that are meant to move us are include Stone crawling from
the mud in some kind of weird visual metaphor for evolution. Gravity totally fails when compared to the films it emulates, (or rips-off if I'm being honest) movies like; Moon, Apollo 13, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even Wall-E. All of these films deal with many of the same issues that Gravity touches on like; isolation, hope, making a connection to your fellow humans and dealing with your own humanity, but these better films address these themes in a much deeper and more profound manner.
It’s
honestly extremely saddening to me that the movies which often boast such incredible
new special effects are so bland in terms of plot and character. It doesn’t
have to be this way of course; Jurassic
Park was groundbreaking in its use of CGI, but that wasn’t what made it
great. It stands the test of time because we connect to the characters and
relate to the movie on a deeper level than “Man, those dinosaurs look cool.”
Gollum in The Two Towers is another
great example. Modern technology brought to life a classic literary character
and it let us see his tragic story in a way we never could before. Special
effects are one of the greatest tools a director can use, but the danger comes
when the film exists just to show off its own technical merit and simply look pretty.
