Gravity (2013)

[Betsy Speicher 0]

imdb.com listing for Gravity (2013)

Movie suggested for rating by Jim A..

[Jim A. 0]

I liked Gravity for a number of reasons, but most of all because it is one of the few space films I've seen that take place in a universe with absolute laws (I guess you would call that an Aristotelian universe?). The "Force" isn't in it, and everything that happens is scientifically plausible. I didn't give it a sense-of-life rating of more than "7" because the film does seem to present the absolutes of the physical universe as being scary--absolutes like gravity, inertia, and temperature--but it also presents their absoluteness as good, because you know what they can do and you can rely on them. I see that as being part of a benevolent universe. I remember someone once telling me that there are no absolutes in life, and that if there were we would never have made it to the moon. Gravity would tell this person that there are absolutes in the physical universe as well as in philosophy and life; if there were not, we would never have made it to the moon--or back to earth. And watching this film in 3-D (which I highly recommend), during a scene in which one character starts drifting away into outer space, I found myself, like the film's characters, yearning for the absolute of gravity.

[A N Other 0]

I found the multiple catastrophes, near misses and crashing action a bit tedious after a while, but perhaps they are necessary to the two most moving parts of the film. Her final deliverance, having to remove even her spacesuit to reestablish finally her life on earth was very moving and if not deliberately symbolic, worked as such. The triumph of technology is its service to human life.

But the most poignant part of the film was her monolouge regarding her impending death, with her tears floating in space around her; followed by the resurgence of the will to live and survive and the summon of new resourcefulness. I wonder what, if anything, goes through the minds of Progressives and other neo-Nazis when they see that. How could anyone be indifferent to the presciousness of the individual human life seeing that?

I would like to believe those moments had a lot to do with the popularity of the movie.