Few movies have been as universally well received as has been Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. The Rotten Tomatoes website, which aggregates reviewers' verdicts, says that 98 per cent have been favourable - quite unheard-of for a current movie, the sort of thing one otherwise expects of a Citizen Kane or a Godfather. Understandably: Gravity is, quite literally, spectacular. The two space-suited protagonists twirl weightlessly against the untwinkling stars, the immensity of Earth looming occasionally behind them, its rivered continents, it typhoons, its sparkling night-time cities occasionally visible. After the first few minutes, it's easy to suspend disbelief, and float along with the astronauts. Perhaps that is why, for once, 3-D is not a jarring experience - as a viewer, you're already adjusting to the strangeness and starkness of space, and a third dimension is not so much further to go.
What a pity, therefore, that Cuaron snaps you out of this trance by writing such an awful movie.
No, really. The writing is absolutely abysmal. I don't just mean that, in crucial moments, it departs from the exact scientific realism for which it's praised. Though that's a problem too. Astronauts zip from one clearly visible space station to another as if Earth's orbit is the size of South Delhi. You can propel yourself in space by using a fire extinguisher. And halfway through, viewers have experienced so much 3-D weightlessness that the instincts in their inner Newtonian hindbrains rebel at an act of self-sacrifice by one of the astronauts - for good reason, since the physics of it is all wrong. Cuaron builds up perfect realism for an hour just to destroy it in order to move the plot forward.
Which would be forgivable, I guess, were it an actual plot he was developing. But it isn't. In a movie with only two characters, you'd expect some thought would go into giving them some depth. But Cuaron reached into his clip-art folder for them instead. So one's a sunny flirtatious sort who tells tall stories and listens to country music; another's a first-timer with a tragic past who has to come to terms with it before she can succeed. This from a man whose previous movies included, for example, Y Tu Mama Tambien, in which three of the most memorable of characters went on a road trip. Still, that was written with his brother; and his last two, brilliant, outings - the third and best Harry Potter movie, and Children of Men - were based on tremendous books by J K Rowling and P D James, respectively. This one was written with his son, which is another strike-mark against dynasty, as if we in India haven't already had enough of those.
Not a single painful cliche is avoided: the old hand whose last tour of duty is struck by danger; the baby crying at a moment when death seems imminent; the ethnic minority crewmate who is killed in the first reel; the oriental icon that takes up the centre of the screen during a miraculous landing. In case you miss any particular cliche, the soaring strings of the score will helpfully draw them to your attention.
Nor is it the case that the plot is extraneous, that it is merely a peg on which to hang a thrilling 3-D ride. Sadly not. For example, we are treated to an extended hallucinatory sequence that's supposed to move character development along but is just laughable instead - and, barely have we recovered from that then we hear a ridiculous soliloquy addressed to a dead person about another dead person delivered by a character who, if a real astronaut, would have been seriously busy at precisely that point.
The problem, thus, is that anyone who is paying attention instead of gawping like a halfwit at the prettiness of it all will find their belief, so painstakingly built up by the gorgeous visuals, destroyed by the slapdash writing. These are not real people, your mind insists, however realistically their bodies may be floating through space stations.
So why exactly would something so brilliantly filmed be so poorly written? And why would 98 per cent of reviewers not care?
There are two, interlinked answers. For one, storytelling is no longer central to big-budget Hollywood movies. Studios are convinced that a generation of downloaders can only be lured into theatres by spectacle; characters and plot are best left to television, on which they're thriving. It's only the rare perfectionist, like the TV-trained Joss Whedon, who will bother to smuggle perfect narrative arcs even into an explosion-heavy blockbuster like The Avengers.
Meanwhile, film critics behave nothing like those who review novels or TV. Both, I'm sure, read and watch widely outside their chosen field. But for some reason, those writing about books or TV come to conclusions taking into account the best of various genre and media - as well as reality, or non-fiction if you prefer; but the latter seem content to judge solely according to the markers of their own preferred art. Their vision is restrictive and limited, and thus increasingly unhelpful.
As for Gravity - well, as someone who reads a lot of science fiction (and looks at a lot of high-resolution photographs of space) let me tell you one fact. In the 1950s, you just had to describe space well in your SF to win over your reader. Today, science fiction is about being human in environments massively different from our own. Gravity succeeds at the first, fails at the second. Perhaps it will take the film industry and its tame critics 60 years to figure that out.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
