A movie that mirrors moderns’ handling of everyday life and crises
IT’S NOT often that I go to the cinema, but “Gravity” had so many good reviews (even Rotten Tomatoes gave it 98 percent), such that I took my son along and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.
But what sticks most in my mind is not so much the breathtaking realism and beauty of it all, as how we have all arrived at this point in our modern technologically driven lives that the problems we allow to fester on Earth—like the horrendous, humongous mountainloads of dangerous, undestroyed, and runaway rubbish—are just as likely to accompany our missions beyond this planet. And so when the Law of Unintended Consequences (exploding undestroyed space debris) runs into the Law of Diminishing Returns (so much rubbish that its trajectory must coincide with our protagonists at the space telescope and their dwindling oxygen supply), tragic consequences necessarily follow.
This is not about special effects in space, or the quaintness of 3D (in Cagayan de Oro, only 2D is available), or the easy banter between the astronauts or how they manage to solve their never-ending problems to survive, but really about how we moderns have such a quaint childlike faith that “we have it all down pat,” it’s “just a stroll in the park,” and we’ll all be back on Earth just in time to go out for a drive and just listen to the radio.
But when things go wrong, then it can become a matter of life and death very quickly, and if fear turns to panic and annoyance to anger and rage, then reason lags behind and judgment is clouded, and a bad situation can only get worse.
The movie is about when it’s best to simply let go, and when it’s best to grimly hang on, and even when astronaut Ryan Stone has never prayed in (her) life, she finds herself doing just that, and the final scenes are a grateful affirmation that hope has borne fruit and paid off, but at a terrible cost.
This is amovie that seems to have a simple story line, but multiple interpretations of motivations, passions and commitments to go on living, despite the terrible odds and futility of it all. This is a movie that makes you wonder why we ever bothered to go to, but so glad that we had the vision and courage to go to—and go on.