Art and commerce miraculously intersect in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,’’ a visually enthralling popcorn movie with two big stars (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) that will rivet vast crowds for every moment of its 90-minute running time with not a second wasted.
Compared by some to “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ Cuarón’s relatively intimate space epic is equally groundbreaking in the spectacular way it depicts space.
But this film, which owes a debt to top-drawer, fact-based space dramas such as “The Right Stuff’’ and “Apollo 13,’’ is no cerebral contemplation of the universe: At heart, it’s the ultimate woman-in-peril movie, sort of like “Alien’’ without the alien.
That woman is Bullock’s Ryan Stone, a medical technician on her first space mission. We’re introduced to her as she floats weightlessly 372 miles above the luminous surface of Earth while installing an upgrade to the Hubble telescope.
To say a lot happens in this enthralling, 13-minute opening shot would be an understatement.
A cloud of debris generated by an exploding Soviet satellite, comes flying straight at Ryan (silently, because it’s in space) and mission commander Matt Kowalski (Clooney) while destroying their shuttle and killing two other astronauts.
Kowalski, a cool-headed space veteran, tells bad jokes to the rightly terrified Ryan to keep her from sucking up all her oxygen — even as he’s desperately struggling to attach a tether to keep her from spinning endlessly head over heels in space.
Lost in space and cut off from contact with Earth, their only hope for survival is using the limited power in Matt’s jet pack to travel to a Soviet space station. There, they may or may not find a usable escape module before another shower of lethal debris arrives.
Spoilers don’t worry me as much as they do some of my colleagues, but this is a very rare case where I think it’s worth respecting a film’s secrets.
So if you like, you can stop reading right after I tell you that Oscar-winner Bullock — in a tour de force as Ryan confronts not only mortality but her very will to survive — owns this remarkable movie as much as her inspired director. Both of them, as well as the film and its technical crew will be getting lots of attention come awards time.
Clooney has a much less screen time than her, but he provides a crucial dose of humor, charm, exposition and hard-earned wisdom to leaven some of the film’s most intense scenes of peril.
Cuarón — the Mexican director who helmed “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,’’ the best in that series — guides his camera into the claustrophobic confines of various spacecraft.
Inside, the taut script by Cuarón and his son Jonás has our heroine confronted by such challenges as fireballs and operating manuals in unfamiliar languages.
The film’s biggest wow moments, and there are many, take place in space, which has never seemed as real, visceral and simply gorgeous in any previous fictional film. The illusion is enhanced by the remarkable special effects used to simulate weightlessness.
I am not generally a fan of 3-D movies, but it’s extremely well deployed here to emphasize the vastness of space and to further immerse the audience in the story — in a manner comparable to “Life of Pi’’ and “Avatar.’’
I haven’t seen the IMAX version, but I strongly suspect it’s worth the surcharge if you’re seeing it on a classic-size screen like the six-story behemoth at the Lincoln Square in Manhattan.
How strongly do I recommend “Gravity’’? Well, I’ve seen it three times already, more than any other film, ever, before release. It’s the sort of movie that reminds me why I loved movies in the first place.