How to Act Like You Watched Gravity

As you should already know, Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity had a record-breaking opening this past weekend, immediately making it the movie that everybody is talking about. But what if you haven't made it out to see it yet? What if you're waiting for that second mortgage to come through before you can afford to go to the movies again (amiright)? What if you can't pay attention to anything while the United States of America is in the NO FUNCTIONING GOVERNMENT club (what's up, Somalia)? Wouldn't you like to avoid the awkwardness of having nothing to contribute to a conversation about America's new favorite movie?  Well, friend, it's exactly these sorts of situations that we're here for. Just follow this handy-dandy guide to acting like you've already watched Gravity, and you'll have something to say in just about every imaginable situation. WARNING: Spoiler-ish, especially towards the end.   What to say to your bros/lady bros: "DUDE. Whoa. Just . . . whoa." You will find no one on this planet who will argue with the assertion that Gravity is an amazing spectacle. Despite professional hater (and coolest/smartest person alive) Neil Degrasse Tyson's objections to Sandra Bullock's gravity-stricken hair, Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and the rest of the technical crew did an outstanding (it bears repeating -- OUTSTANDING) job at making the film's space scenes believable. But not only are Gravity's special effects sublimely awesome, they're also graceful. The way the characters move and interact with objects in not-really zero gravity is so utterly believable and seamless that I sat through at least 45 minutes of the movie before I started wondering how the heck they did it all. If you had to pick only one movie to watch in a theater this year, Gravity should be it. The spectacle alone is worth the price of admission. And that goes double for the 3D. Generally, I stay way from live action 3D, because it usually either adds nothing to the experience or is so poorly retrofitted to the cinematography that it's distracting. For example, the 3D trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug that played before Gravity looked like it was shot in a third-grade shoebox diorama, with characters and scenery cut out of paper and layered on top of one another. The 3D IMAX version of Gravity, on the other hand, is a must-watch. Not only does the extra-large screen enhance the aforementioned spectacle, but there are at least a couple of excellent old-school 3D gimmicks that made me jump in my seat.   What to say to your contrarian friends: "Sure, it looked awesome. But the dialogue SUCKED."  The only problem with all of that amazing scenery is that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney almost foul it up with some seriously hackneyed dialogue. Examples include Clooney's character -- which is such a broad caricature of an astronaut that Wesley Morris accurately compared it to Buzz Lightyear -- attempting to distract Bullock's character from the danger at hand by asking "where's home?" even though they've supposedly already shared the close quarters of a space shuttle for a week, and Bullock going through the motions of a tepid "tell-my-dead-daughter-she's-my-angel" speech during the run-up to the film's finale. In fact, the most generous way to describe the characters themselves might be "familiar." For his part, Clooney plays a cross between Danny Glover and Buzz Aldrin, the seasoned vet out on his last mission before retirement who gets caught up in some crazy misfortune. I'm pretty sure Clooney doesn't actually say "I'm too old for this," (NSFW) in Gravity, but I couldn't swear to it. And that's all before he gets his deux ex machina all over the place as a not-ghost who shows up to save the day at just the right moment. Bullock's character is only a little better. Because she's on-screen alone for most of the movie, she has more to work with. At first, she seems like a basic rookie-out-of-water archetype, until the revelation that she had a daughter who died clues us into the fact that she has some serious demons. When she finally lets Clooney's character and the audience in on her secret, she also reveals a bit of the crazies. Everyday after work, she claims, she doesn't go home. She just keeps driving. But something about the character's slow reveal -- maybe the wooden dialogue or Bullock's delivery of it -- just feels jarringly unnatural.   What to say to your film/literature professors: "The was the biggest little movie I've ever seen. Those amazing effects, that seat-gripping suspense, the tense, near-hopeless spacewalks, they were all just a metaphor for what it takes to keep on living in the face of all that life throws at you."  You have to love a movie that gives away its punch line at the beginning, just to see if you're paying attention. Gravity opens with title cards explaining the extremely deadly conditions in the space outside Earth's atmosphere, ending with a foreboding "Life in space is impossible." Which surely prompts savvy viewers, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Wayne Coyne to all immediately think "but, don't we all live in space?" And by the end of the movie, it becomes obvious that yes, that's the entire point. Bullock's character suffers through two near-universal nightmares -- losing a child and being stranded in outer space -- that no one wants to experience, and while the latter is what gives the movie its punch, it's the former that carries the bulk of the emotional weight. Most obviously, the decision she's forced to make in the movie's climax is as much about whether to go on living in spite of her daughter's death as it is to will herself to survival after a space disaster. Gravity's message is that both of those lives -- the one she's living in space and the one she's living without her daughter -- are impossible, just like every life ultimately is. Whether or not we're faced with either of those particular nightmares, in the end we all have to deal with the original nightmare of mortality. And like Bullock in Gravity, we all have to decide how we're going to deal with it; whether we're just going to keep driving, or whether we're going to go home. And that's what makes the trite dialogue and clunky character development in Gravity forgivable (oh, and there's the awesome special effects -- I mentioned those, right?). Because when you're talking about something that big and that small at the same time, what else can you do but be trite and clunky?