Gravity

Judged on structure and on the economy of the telling, and the spine resists the subtractive test. The debris returns on its orbit, and every station Stone reaches is the only one in range, so the order of places, Hubble, the International Space Station, the Soyuz, the Chinese station and the Earth, is compelled by orbital fact; ninety-one minutes leave no slack scene. What gives lies inside the episodes. The fire on the station and the tangled parachute lines are obstacles placed more than consequences required, and the near misses become serial, each refuge failing in a new way so that the next can be reached. Kowalski’s anecdotes are colour the film could lose, and the dead daughter is given in one block of talk. The vision of Kowalski is the one late device that is also necessary.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: grief can become a weightlessness in which a person drifts by preference, untethered, and the return to life is a choice made against that preference, with the loss kept. Stone, who since her daughter’s death has driven in silence, lives in orbit as she has lived since, in the quiet, in no direction. The image carries this and counts in full: the curled body in the airlock, the oxygen turned back on in the Soyuz, the weight of her body on the shore. Held low because what is disclosed is simple and close to a mood, the vertigo of isolation and the relief of rescue; because it is partly said aloud, in a backstory and a monologue; and because space itself discloses little beyond its own peril.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The terror: the first debris strike, silent, Stone spun off into the black with the Earth wheeling past her visor, the camera passing through the glass into her helmet and out again; the destruction of the station given without sound, reaching her only through her hands on the hull. The grandeur: the Earth itself, the aurora and the sunrise over the curve of the planet, held as setting and never as postcard. The film rises again at the end, in the burning capsule, the lake and her first steps on the shore. The height is repeated, not single. Held below the top because the elevation is often astonishment at the means, at how it was made, and because the score at its loudest tells the viewer to feel what the image has already given.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The myth is built and bears weight: the film is constructed as a birth. The tethers are umbilical; in the station’s airlock Stone curls in warm light in the position of a foetus, a hose crossing her body like a cord; at the end the capsule falls into water, she sheds the suit, swims up, crawls ashore past a frog and stands, so that the close recapitulates life’s passage from water to land and a person’s from womb to walking. Her name and the title, the force that pulls bodies home, are made part of the structure, and the figure stays particular, one woman and one daughter. Held below the gate because the construction is announced more than buried: once seen it is fully read, and it does not deepen into the larger matter, the gods, the dead and the earth, that the planet below seems to offer.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the survival thriller, one person against the elements and the clock, ending in rescue. The departure is in the telling, and it is real and costly. A large studio film was made with essentially two actors, one of them a woman alone for most of its length, in near real time, with no up or down, in takes long enough that the cut becomes rare. The means had to be invented: faces filmed inside a box of light that projected the surrounding image onto the actors, robotic camera rigs, the whole film previsualised and the performances fitted to animation fixed years ahead. The stake was large. Held below the bar because the turn is in the means, and the means serve a proven form: a wager placed on a proven path, a swerve in how and not in what.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Change the form and much of what the film knows is lost. The long takes bind the viewer to Stone’s continuous time, with no cut to relieve the danger; a camera without a floor makes disorientation the condition of viewing; the passage into the helmet and out again makes the shift between the cosmos and the person a single motion. The rule that sound comes only through contact makes touch the film’s way of knowing, and the 3D is composed as depth and debris, not ornament. These choices are the instrument of the ordeal. Held lower because what the film knows beyond the ordeal, grief and the choice to return, is carried by conventional means, dialogue, a monologue to a stranger on the radio and a vision, and could be told in another form without loss.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Thirteen years of evidence, a short span, and it points one way. The film yields most at first encounter and in the theatre: much of its force is a new means seen for the first time and an ordeal whose end is not known. On return the craft repays study, the long opening, the rules of sound, the staging of the station’s destruction, and the birth imagery yields more on a second viewing than on a first. But the human matter is near exhausted once seen: Stone’s history is told plainly, Kowalski is a type, and the radio scene, the richest passage, is brief. Writing on the film has turned largely to its technique and its physics. On a home screen in 2D much of the power is reduced, which bears on return and is weighed here.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a digital world and live performance could be joined so completely that the long take, once a matter of choreography in a real place, could be built in a virtual space, and that 3D could be composed as depth and peril rather than added. That reorganises a part of the medium’s possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film opened a cycle of large and serious space films, Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015) among them, and set the terms for Cuarón’s own long takes after it; its seven Academy Awards are presence, not proof, and are not weighed. Held below the gate because the redirection lies in technique, in how films are made more than in what they say.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirteen years. Form: the film as released survives whole, one cut, nothing lost and nothing altered. Presence: continuous and wide for its span, on home release, television and streaming, and in common reference for space and for the long take. Two things hold it where it stands. The surface is fixed to a technology and its moment: the film was composed for 3D and IMAX 3D, presentations home viewing does not carry and that have receded from exhibition since, so the film most viewers now meet is a reduced form of the one released, and part of its astonishment is the astonishment of new effects, the surface that ages. And presence beyond its technique is narrower than its fame. Thirteen years is a short demonstration.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in several departments. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera moves without a floor, and the light is designed so that faces in a box on a stage carry sunlight and earthlight matching a world built years before. The sound is a rule kept: silence in vacuum, vibration through contact, voices by radio, and the rule makes the station’s destruction more terrible than noise would. Sandra Bullock carries most of the film alone, much of it in a rig, and the breathing, the panic and the exhaustion on the shore hold. The costs fall on the script and the score: Kowalski’s banter is stock, the backstory and the radio monologue state what the image shows, Steven Price’s score sometimes drives where silence would serve, and the physics bend at Kowalski’s release.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One physics governs most of the film, literally: momentum, orbit, tethers, the inability to stop. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s long weightless drift and the crushing weight of the shore: one law governs both, and they answer each other, as the film moves from no weight to the full weight of the body. The tones hold too: dread and the scale of the Earth are one register, and the vision of Kowalski is placed as lawful, the sight of a woman starved of oxygen near death. The law breaks twice. Kowalski’s release asks for a force the film’s physics, kept with care elsewhere, does not supply, so the law is given up to sentiment at the turn that most needs it; and Kowalski’s cheerful talk runs on a buddy film’s conventions, a second register the film then drops.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The orders held are few and are joined: one consciousness, a loss in a family, and the natural order in its plainest form, the planet, physics and the passage from water to land. The grief, the body and the physical law are one structure, not a list. The state and history stand at the edge: the debris begins in a Russian missile strike on a satellite, and the escape runs through American, Russian and Chinese vehicles, so that the stations of national programmes become the stations of one life, but this is setting and is not opened. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, in Stone’s work on the telescope, faith, in her saying that no one taught her to pray, and other people, in a man on the radio with a dog and a child, are touched and left. A short form, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.6 / 10