Gravity's weight

Cuaron's Gravity came in with a bang but has kind of gone out with a whimper, as it's garnered few award nominations this year - but let's not lose sight of the achievement of this really entertaining film: at its heart, it's just a simple adventure story, plot can be told in a sentence - two astronauts, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney - are only survivors of an in-space catastrophe and have to keep cool and think straight as they desperately try to get aboard a working landing device and make it safely back to Earth; Bullock is not exactly an astronaut, she's the on-board scientist, so she's of very limited skills with spacecraft. Anyway, it's a nail-biter through and through, a very simple film with only two actors (some radio voices and one character in for a very short time) - and it's a technical marvel (unfortunately I didn't see it in 3-D), with absolutely beautiful footage of earth from space and a very realistic sense of the challenges of managing navigation through space and of the ergonomics, the engineering, the physical difficulties, and the very real limitations on human capacity - namely, first of all, oxygen, and 2nd, fuel. Bullock does a fine job - an under-appreciated actress with good comic-dramatic range; the scenes in which she's desperately trying to make radio contact with other craft or earth stations is very fine and haunting. Her back story - a dead child, a workaholic - is a little simplistic, and the screenplay relies pretty heavily on having her speak her thoughts aloud - but maybe there's no other way for us to understand what's going through her mind. I've posted a lot about movies that are just too damned long, and part of the beauty of this one is it knows less is more and comes in at only 90 minutes. Bravo for that.