Went to see Gravity in 3D at the Gold Class cinemas last night thanks to a gift Mr K received from some work colleagues… because fuck knows, it’s become completely unaffordable otherwise. Would you believe that tickets for the Gold Class cinemas are now $42.50 each? I have no idea why this has occurred – it’s not like the service has intrinsically altered or improved from when they first starting appearing in Australian cinemas, and yet the prices have nearly doubled. Not only that, but there is no concession rates for children or students or pensioners AND when booking online… which we are all being encouraged to do these days… you get slugged with at $3.25 per ticket ‘booking fee’, plus a couple of dollars for 3D glasses. So that’s $93 and ‘thanks for coming’ before you even decide if you want popcorn with that. 🙁 Must be a strategic effort to keep the riff raff out of the fancy cinemas or something. Anyway, I digress…
Gravity is about some astronauts who are working on fixing some shit on the Hubble telescope when things all go horribly pear shaped. I’m not going to go into the whats and wherefors, there are plenty of people writing proper reviews if that is what you want (hell, why would anyone come here for a movie review! 😛 ). The main characters are a medical engineer with a tragic past, Dr Ryan Stone, and her fellow astronaut, Mat Kowalski a veteran of many space missions who has the gift of the gab – played by the gorgeous, Sandra Bullock (looking remarkably unmade-up and human for a change), and the devilishly handsome, George Clooney, respectively.
As I was saying, they are doing a seemingly routine space walk, working away trying to fix some computer panels on the Hubble Telescope or some such crap, when a debris field heads their way and things go tits up big time. What ensues is a big ol’ mess and lots of frantic ‘I’m going to die’ moments, poignantly interspersed with god awful interludes of denial and disbelief, anger and resentment and a veritable plethora of emotional lumps in the throat for the viewer to digest.
I can’t imagine how absolutely horrifying it would be to be literally ‘lost in space’ – adrift from all mankind, and prospects of assistance non-existent. This film certainly hits home on the frailty of human mortality front. There is a good deal of panic, extreme calm under pressure followed by more panic etc., as the film carries on in a terrifying but quasi-predictable story arc. We’re not 100% sure what’s going to happen, but it’s Hollywood, so odds are in your favour it won’t contain a tragic ending of Shakespearean proportions.
Anyway, I don’t do spoilers so I’m not going to write anything about what happens next, but I highly recommend this film. In fact, if I can find the time I intend to go see it again while it is still in the cinema, because visually, it’s really quite stunning.
Speaking of spoilers though – did everyone see the Neil deGrasse Tyson Twitter rantings about the ‘Mysteries of #Gravity’? I tell you what, that’s exactly what I’d want if I had just presented a $100m film to the movie going public – an international renown astrophysicist picking on my latest artistic project because it’s well… set in space. 🙂 NDGT had a field day pointing out anomalies in the film that were incongruous with known conditions in the space above Earth’s atmosphere, but was later quoted as saying that his criticisms were actually a compliment – if they had totally screwed the pooch he wouldn’t have bothered!
