Film Review | Gravity

We've been telling stories to each other for quite some time. Be it through interactive art installations, webcomics, TV series, films, books and all the way down to the oral storytelling tradition, we've grown used to a wide number of formats to both tell and receive tales. Done well, time-honoured storytelling techniques can make a story more powerful; done badly, lazily, sloppily, they can come across as little more than a cliché, overused, predictable - in the worst possible ways - and, ultimately, boring.

The Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron tends to pick stories that are pared down to begin with, so that he can get over certain storytelling hurdles without having to worry about too much excess flab and background baggage, and cut to the meat - both narrative and thematic - of the story at hand.

The cult coming-of-age drama Y Tu Mama Tabien (2001) plunges us into a seemingly trivial teenage road trip yarn, but then unspools a politically sensitive and, in the end, emotionally resonant tale. Similarly, the science fiction cult classic Children of Men (2006), adapted from the PD James novel of the same name, presents a future dystopia undergoing an infertility crisis while never losing sight of its characters; the chaotic world becoming richer and richer before our eyes as the camera bumps and swerves as if passed around like a hot potato among its ensemble cast.

With highly anticipated space-thriller Gravity, Cuaron appears to have picked his most minimalist starting point for a film yet. Depicting the fate of two astronauts Matt Kowalsi (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) whose routine repair mission goes haywire after they're hit by debris from a Russian space station, it fully capitalises on the merciless environment of space to eke out thrills both visceral and existential.

What's particularly refreshing about Cuaron's new film is that, in an age where films rely so much on external pulls to attract an audience, here's a film that'll keep you firmly rooted in your seat solely by virtue of its keen, innate sense of spectacle and a clever handling of its emotional pay off.

This isn't a film based on a series based on a bestselling series of books which is in turn based on a remake of a film. The story is as bare-bones as they come (the above synopsis is all you're getting from me) and Cuaron is confident enough to not cake on contrivance after contrivance on top of it. Though a sizeable amount of what makes the film's climax so satisfying is owed in large part to a painful episode from Ryan's past - revealed early on and left to simmer until it finally comes to boil - there are no flashbacks - in fact, the film never shifts away from the astronauts'-eye-view.

Ironically enough, this creates a sense of total claustrophobia which works a treat to ratchet up the tension to nearly unbearable levels (space may be vast, but all that vastness means nothing to us: it's a large, hostile stretch that allows for no sound and that will leave you to die at the first sight of a chink in your space suit).

To call it perfect would be a mistake, however, as Cuaron does succumb to contrivance during the film's final third, opting for what is perhaps a too-neat resolution for our heroine's emotional quandary. It could be argued that we should allow him one little escape route from the necessarily airtight (!) corner he's written himself into. But we're not in the business of that around here and besides, the fact is that Cuaron has deliberately set himself a very high-risk challenge, which he then never quite succeeds in meeting half way.

But you're bound to forget this little bump very quickly as the film plummets towards a hair-raising climax. Starting off as a desperate grapple for survival, the film reveals itself to be much more than that. A glorious conglomeration of elements - Cuaron's consistent directorial hand, Bullock's melodrama-free turn, a sterling soundtrack by Steven Price - reveal it to ultimately be about rediscovering the thrill of living life at its fullest.

If that isn't an important kernel of what stories the world over should be about, I don't know what is.