Arts & Entertainment Editor

In the 1979 space fantasy Alien, there is a famous line that sums up the visceral terror of the loneliness of outer space: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It is easy to imagine that this line was at the forefront of director Alfonso Cuaron’s mind during the creation of his newest thriller Gravity. With a script stripped down to minimalist status and an official cast list of only seven actors, Gravity aims to achieve isolation in the starkest sense. The beautiful and sweeping cinematography and poignant direction of one breathtaking scene after another, however, that makes this movie so special to watch.

Gravity centers on a NASA repair mission gone wrong. Repairwoman Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side) is a highly intelligent Ivy League graduate on her first spacewalk, during which she struggles more with keeping down her lunch than repairing the software problem she was sent to fix. Juxtaposed with Stone’s amateur apprehension is the calm and cool veteran Matt Kowalski (the always calm and cool George Clooney, Michael Clayton). With the swagger of a man in his element, Kowalski gracefully flies around in his jetpack while he swaps stories with mission control (the voice of Ed Harris, a nod to his role in the space classic Apollo 13).

All in all, it is a very peaceful scene: there is no music and other than the radio-controlled voices and the burst of the jetpack thrusters, there is no sound. It is the kind of peacefulness that is made to be broken, and, soon enough, mission control alerts the group that the debris from a Russian space station has fallen into a deadly orbit heading straight for them. The team scrambles to save themselves, but it is too late. Moving at speeds faster than a bullet from a gun, the debris slams into the spaceship, and what follow are 10 minutes of breathtaking cinema. The debris reduces the metal spaceship to pulp like bullets through wet paper. Suddenly, Stone and Kowalski have no one to hold on to but each other. The sole goal of the mission now: survive.

During the course of the film, the audience learns of Stone’s tragic past. Maybe it is because of the way the dialogue was written, or maybe it is simply because there are so many other distracting facets of the movie, but Stone’s backstory is at times tedious. It is hard to invest too much empathy in Stone’s past life when her current situation, floating-in-space-with-nowhere-to-go, looms over the audience just as the Earth looms behind her. But Cuaron’s decision to make Stone’s past a focal point of the story creates an interesting philosophical theme. In space, no one can hear you scream about your past. Your personal frustrations are minuscule. For Stone, it takes a trip to the quietest, loneliest place in the universe to potentially be able to leave behind her past. In this way, Cuaron flips the script: Earth is the place of Stone’s floating-in-space-with-nowhere-to-go situation, and it is in outer space where she needs to find the thrusters, flip the switch and move on.