Review: Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013)

                  Ever since I was a little kid, I've always been fascinated by space. That infinite void we're floating around in that's all around us, yet so mysterious. For the longest time I wanted to be an astronaut. It was a dream of mine, until I looked into all the education and insanely high test scores you need to even begin towards this unique career and realized that it probably wasn't feasible. Even today I still have a desire to go to space, and see what our planet really looks like from out there. So when I saw the trailers for Gravity, a realistic film about astronauts working on a space station, I was naturally excited. When I saw that it was directed by Alfonso Cuaron, the man who brought us the excellent 2006 sci-fi picture Children of Men, I was even more intrigued. The hype for this movie was pretty huge, and now that I have seen it I can safely and confidently say that Gravity delivers and makes good on all of its promises. It's not only a visual and technical masterpiece, but a well written, emotional story with intriguing characters and almost too much suspense to handle.

                Gravity almost exclusively takes place in space, as expected. It is the story of astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and their experience when their mission goes awry. Stone and Kowalski are working on the Hubble telescope, when ground control informs them that the Russians have performed an anti-satellite strike test that has inadvertently caused a chain reaction that may send debris their way. This "may" quickly turns into a "does" and our two protagonists are pummeled by satellite parts, sending Stone spinning off into space. Kowalski rescues her and tethers her to himself, as he is wearing a thruster pack that allows him to move freely. They return to their ship to find it almost completely obliterated by the debris, the rest of the crew dead or missing. Running low on fuel and air, Kowalski and Stone begin a tense journey to the International Space Station to retrieve an escape module and land on Earth. At this point it is revealed that Stone had previously had a daughter, who had died from a head injury. As they are approaching they realize that the one remaining pod's parachute has been accidentally deployed, making it useless for reaching Earth. However, Kowalski insists that it can still be used to reach a nearby Chinese station and acquire one of their escape modules. Landing on the ISS proves difficult, and ends in a heart-wrenching scene where Kowalski cuts himself loose and drifts into space to his death so that Stone can survive. After this Stone makes it into the ISS, detaches the pod by walking out into space to free its tangled cables, and points herself towards the Chinese station.....only to realize she's out of fuel. Here comes one of the most emotionally powerful scenes of the film. Just as Stone resigns herself to death, she hallucinates that Kowalski enters the pod. He tells her how to get a final boost of speed from the pod, convinces her to go on with her life, and then disappears. This motivates Stone to keep on living, and she eventually makes it to the Chinese ship, and lands one of their escape pods safely on Earth.

                 This is one of the most visually stunning films I have ever seen in a theater. In terms of both spectacle and subject matter, I can only compare it to (what else?) Stanley Kubrick's flawless masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wasn't around to see that one on the big screen, but I imagine it would have felt something like this. Gravity is completely riveting from start to finish. The first shot alone lasts several minutes, and has the camera twisting and turning, ducking under appendages of the space station and rotating to give us a jaw-droppingly beautiful view of both our protagonists and the universe. I despise people that talk during movies, but there were several shots in this film that made me just gape in disbelief and say "wow" out loud. One particularly memorable shot is when Kowalski is pulling Stone to the International Space Station, you see them both head on with Earth in the background, and the sun is rising. It's so gorgeous. Another has the sun setting on one side of the planet, while we can see the Northern Lights forming on a whole other continent. Awe-inspiring. Cuaron uses the camera quite effectively to create or relieve tension, and to accentuate the beautiful view from up there. For a lot of the movie you can see Earth in the background, and this is comforting. The planet looms large for the majority of the story, and it sort of grounds us and keeps us mindful of where the action is taking place. The real terrifying scenes are the ones in space where you can't see Earth, and the universe is just a massive, endless expanse of stars. There are also several POV shots of Stone, which really emphasize her panic and how scary everything truly is for her.

                  But while this film is visually astounding, that's not all it is. Gravity has a very emotional and tense story which isn't entirely predictable, but packs a few surprises. The scenes where Stone is suffering, or trying desperately to reach anyone and communicate her situation, are totally heartbreaking. She's all alone up there, and the nearest people are six hundred kilometers below her. She's a very sympathetic character. It was also saddening to watch Kowalski die. He was a very likable character, and had he survived he would have been able to guide Stone to safety easily with his experience and expertise. Something I also noticed about Gravity was its symbols of infancy and rebirth. While working in space, the astronauts are always connected to the space station with cables that look very much like umbilical cords. There's one scene where Stone finally makes it onto the ISS and curls up into a fetal position in the tiny airlock, like a fetus in a womb. A Buddha statue is show on the Chinese station, which could be taken as a symbol of rebirth. When Stone lands on Earth she falls into a lake, and since she is unaccustomed to Earth's gravity she has to claw her way out of the water like some primordial being taking its first steps onto land. Gravity isn't a particularly thematically or philosophically complex film, but these motifs are interesting and definitely add to the experience.

                I loved Gravity. It gave me everything I wanted and more. It's an emotional, gorgeously shot, well scripted and acted film, and it deserves to be seen by everyone. It's best viewed in IMAX 3D, this format makes the massive depth of field in space seem even bigger. This is one of the very best films of the year.

Horror Month: Vampyr (1932)

                  This was a new one for me. I really don't watch enough old films like this. Vampyr is really, really good. It's a very well shot film with a tense, unnerving atmosphere and sublime use of shadows. I found the story as well as the visuals to be very engaging, the protagonist is a student of the supernatural named Allan Gray who travels to a small French village to study and is almost immediately assailed by all kinds of evil spirits and hallucinations. Death imagery runs rampant in the film, one of the very first shots is the picture above, an old man with a scythe. At one point Allan is led to a castle by disembodied shadows that appear to have no human origin, and upon entering he finds a doctor's office full of skulls and skeletons. The entire film has an eerie, almost dreamlike tone, and although this is a sound film there is very little talking. Much of the backstory is developed by Allan or another character reading a mysterious book that is left to Allan about demonic creatures called Vampyrs who feed on human blood and essentially serve Satan. It's quite a bit more dark than most vampire films, vampires are often referred to as demons but this movie deliberately portrays them as servants of the devil. The role of the vampyr in this particular story is to enslave the souls of the living, drain their life force and eventually compel them to commit suicide, delivering their souls to Satan. It's pretty heavy stuff, and the visual aspect of Vampyr reflects this as well. The whole movie just feels like one long nightmare. The tone is dark and intense right from the start, and it never lets up on the suspense until the very end. Many may not appreciate the technical elements that serve Vampyr so well as a horror film, but I would say that this is one of the best and most entertaining vampire movies ever made and anyone who is a fan of these mythical, horrifically evil creatures owes it to themselves to watch it. 

Horror Month: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

            Note: For this post I watched the 2003 Director's Cut of the film. I have found that some of Ridley Scott's films in the past have been much improved by his creating his own version later on. Kingdom of Heaven's extended Director's Cut is a great example of  this, and is exponentially better than the theatrical version. 

             Alien is a fantastic horror film, and one that I've come to appreciate more and more with repeated viewings over the years. It offers a perfect mixture of science fiction and horror, with enough of each to more than satisfy fans of each genre. It truly is a classic of both science fiction and horror, and has been hugely influential in films of both genres in the past 30 years. 

            I watched Alien today for the first time in ages, and was instantly struck by the meticulous detail and eerie yet beautiful aestheticism of the sets. The vast majority of the film takes place on a spaceship, and the environments are futuristic looking yet practical and believable. Some of the hallways and rooms reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece Solyaris and there were a few space shots of the ship that I found evocative of Kubrick's 2001. Everything is constructed in striking detail, and the special effects work well with the sets to create an unsettling environment. Strobe lights flash, steam rushes from burst pipes, and the whole ship seems to be a mess of machinery, a labyrinth of human ingenuity. I especially liked the special effects in regards to Ash, the android played by Ian Holm (who will always be Bilbo from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy in my eyes). It is very well hidden that he is not human, right up to the point where his true motives are revealed and he attacks Ripley. When he is killed we see white synthetic blood spray everywhere, and robotic veins and wires all over the place. It looks very real, and was likely horrifying in its time. I really like that this movie was made before CGI was really a thing, and to make something look realistic and believable the special effects team had to work very hard. And in Alien,everything looks spectacular, other than a few artificial-looking explosions. The blood and gore looks very real, and most importantly of all the alien looks very lifelike and menacing. The atmosphere is tense and suspenseful as well. This is another film that understands that the less you show of your monster the scarier it is. We do see the alien onscreen several times, but mostly it is hidden, and even though we can't see it, the audience and the characters know that it is out there just waiting for them to fall into its trap. Interestingly enough, we don't actually see the alien kill any of the crew members onscreen until closer to the end of the film. Until then, the death scenes consist of a character investigating a noise or roaming the ship, when they encounter the alien and the shot cuts away. This leaves the grisly details to our imagination for the most part, which is a smart directing choice by Scott. I also found it interesting that out of all the weapons they could have used, the crew members chose a flamethrower. Fire is one of mankind's oldest inventions, and they were using it to fight a monster that Ash claims is the absolute pinnacle of evolution. 

              I really like Alien. It's a visually appealing, entertaining film with excellent pacing and atmosphere. I could write a lot more about it, and the (mostly sexual) subtexts it presents, but it's three in the morning and I'm falling asleep as I write this. 

             

Horror Month: Shaun of the Dead (2004)

             

                     I wanted to watch something funny today because I was looking at the list of movies I plan to watch this month and there's a lot of really scary ones left. I suppose Shaun of the Dead isn't a complete horror film, the majority of it is way too funny to be scary in the slightest. And that's a great thing. This movie is wittily scripted,  well paced, and superbly acted with a fantastic cast. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are both well known actors with a strong body of work of their own, but together they form a powerful comedy duo with incredible onscreen chemistry that they showcase again in the equally as excellent Hot Fuzz. 

                    Shaun of the Dead follows the story of average, mediocre Shaun (Pegg), his video game playing, pot smoking, unemployed best friend/roommate Ed (Frost) and various others, including Shaun's girlfriend and more than slightly oblivious mother. A zombie plague breaks out, as it is prone to do in films such as this, and the characters must find safety. As I mentioned before, this is first and foremost a comedy. The dialogue between all the characters is cleverly written and well delivered, with a plethora of English phrases and expressions that North American audiences will either be baffled by or find completely hilarious. But still, there is a horror element. In the scenes with zombies there is a lot of realistic gore. People get eaten and bitten very often, and blood always gushes from their wounds. It's excessive in some cases, but still believable. One scene has Shaun blow his own mother's head off after she is bitten and turns into a zombie. Another character (who is a total dick) gets ripped apart and disemboweled by a horde of undead. It's pretty jarring to see in a film that for the most part has the audience laughing, but still, it's a zombie outbreak. There's gotta be blood.

                There were some very clever scenes at the beginning that showed people sitting in buses, or waiting in line at the supermarket, just standing there oblivious to their surroundings like.....well, zombies. Shaun's world is so dull, monotonous and repetitive that even after the plague begins, it takes him a long time to even notice that something is wrong, just because things haven't changed for him that significantly. The events of the film are almost like a wake-up call for him, something to shake him out of his boring life and reignite the spark between him and his significant other, who spends the majority of the first few scenes lecturing him about how pointless his life is and how he needs to change. The apocalypse offers Shaun a chance to prove that he's capable of greater things, and he does this by taking leadership of the group, even though he indirectly leads most of them to their deaths. 

But hey, he tried.

Horror Month: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

                 I watched this one early on in Horror Month on purpose. The reason for this is that I wanted to get it out of the way because Blair Witch Project is horrifying, and one of the very, very few movies that continues to be scary after repeated viewings. I'm not really a fan of the "found footage" horror films that have become so popular over the last decade or so, they're pretty repetitive an uninspired (with a few exceptions of course). These types of movies certainly existed before Blair Witch, but this was the one masterfully made one that got very popular and influenced all the others. And since it came out, no found footage film and very few horror films in general have reached the levels of suspense, terror, and intensity that The Blair Witch Project achieves.

                I think that the extremely low budget of this film worked for it rather than against it. If the filmmakers had had a huge pile of cash to work with, they may have produced a more polished, technically intricate experience, maybe thrown in some expensive but unnecessary CGI or just thought too big in general. No, Blair Witch is brilliant in its simplicity, and that's one of the main reasons it's so great. The picture is grainy because it wasn't shot on professional cameras, there are no big name actors, and you literally see absolutely nothing of the film's eponymous monster in the entire movie. The two former work toward its staggeringly powerful realism and the latter is a main component of the scariness of Blair Witch. This film adheres to a rule that's simple in concept but can be very difficult to follow: The less you show of your monster, the scarier it becomes. And since you don't ever see the Blair Witch at all, she becomes absolutely horrifying. All of the scares in this movie come from your own imagination, when the characters are straining their eyes searching all around them for the source of the voices that torment them at night, you're transfixed on the screen, expecting to see a monster, a person, an animal, anything. But you don't. You're left confused, scared, and on the very edge of your seat. All we see of the Blair Witch is piles of rocks that appear around the students' tent at night, humanoid stick figures hanging from trees, strange symbols carved into the walls of that terrifying house they find at the end, and a bundle of sticks containing hair, skin and teeth of the first of her victim in the film (RIP Josh). It works so incredibly well because everything is in the viewer's imagination, and the more active that imagination is (mine works overtime 24 hours a day) the scarier it is. And above all, the way it's presented is just so....real. You feel like this really happened and the Blair Witch is really out there in the woods. 

                   That's a scary thought. 

Horror Month: Hausu (House, 1977)

           This is one of the weirdest films that I've ever seen. House is the almost nonsensical story of seven teenage girls who go to one of the girl's aunt's house for a summer of relaxing, only to be methodically  devoured and murdered by the house (or a demonic cat, or ghosts, it's really hard to tell sometimes). In terms of plot and characters, House is pretty conventional. This is basic 1970's horror movie stuff. The girls even have stupid names that correspond to their one-dimensional personalities. The main character/hot one is called Gorgeous, the tough, athletic one is named Kung Fu, the smart one that can't see anything without he glasses is Prof, and the girl who plays instruments and loves music is named Melody. Yeah, pretty lame. 

         But House's strengths aren't in it's plot or characters. Just judging it by those, it's a fairly lame movie. What makes this film remarkable and entertaining is it's ingenuity, both visually and in terms of editing. All of the sequences where the protagonists are attacked by the house are really, really strange. Most of them left me going "What the heck did I just watch?". I was especially confused after scenes where a character is quite literally eaten by a piano only to turn up later trapped in a grandfather clock that's oozing both blood and another unidentified green liquid, and another memorable one where another girl is attacked my mattresses. Mattresses. Pretty much anything in the house is apparently capable of killing people, near the end Kung Fu is eaten alive by a deranged light fixture. All of these scenes contain retro animation and ridiculously crude special effects, which are hilarious and very charming. Seeing the screen flicker different colours while a victim screams at the stump oozing cartoony animated blood where her hand used to be is really entertaining, and though they're not believable in the slightest the special effects are extremely creative. I won't soon forget the climactic scene near the end when a painting of a cat spews out blood until it fills up the entire room, or when one of the final survivors is pulled into this lake of blood by what appears to be a jar with teeth. It's just so over the top you can't help being entertained by it. And I definitely was.

Horror Month: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

               This is another fantastic horror film I've seen before. Silence of the Lambs is a brilliant thriller all around. Its deliberately slow pace in the beginning builds up into a stellar climax that leaves the viewer reeling afterwards. The performances are particularly remarkable, Jodie Foster is great as an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer called Buffalo Bill, and Anthony Hopkins delivers arguably one of the most intense and memorable performances in modern film as charming, brilliant, but deeply disturbed killer/psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. It's hard to think of him as a main character since he's only actually onscreen for 15-20 minutes of the whole film, but every scene he's in is deliciously tense, and his unpredictability makes him all the more enthralling. One of the best scenes in this movie is when he brutally murders two police officers and escapes from a maximum security facility by cutting one of his victim's faces off and putting it on his own, allowing him to escape in an ambulance. Hannibal's seems relatively passive and nonthreatening most times, but as soon as an opening appears for him he's all violent insanity.

             Another scene that I have come to appreciate after repeated viewings is the end of the film, where Jodie Foster's character is exploring the den of Buffalo Bill, trying to find and arrest him. The set design is perfect, creating an extremely sinister, foreboding atmosphere. Everything is filthy, the house is in a severe state of disrepair and the whole place just seems to be a labyrinth of doors and rooms, containing countless hiding places for the  fleeing killer. This leads to an incredibly suspenseful scene where the killer turns off the lights and approaches Foster with night vision goggles on. We see the entire encounter through his eyes, her groping around in the dark, oblivious to his presence while he slowly approaches her and readies his pistol. Although she eventually does kill Buffalo Bill and end his string of grisly murders, the ending of Silence of the Lambs is bittersweet, because while one killer is dead, a much more clever, cunning and brutal one has escaped. This sets the stage for the sequels nicely, but in my opinion none of them are near as good as this completely brilliant thriller.