"Life in space is impossible," says the tagline of the space drama "Gravity."
Several scientists and actual astronauts think so too, panning the film's wild liberties with scientific inaccuracies, down to even the tiniest details such as Sandra Bullock's hair not floating about her head in zero gravity.
However, several non-scientist reviews of "Gravity" have not been anything short of spectacular. Critics have called it a technical masterpiece.
Some "Gravity" reviews have said that the success of the film was not its dazzling graphics, or its loyalty to scientific fact.
"For all its stunning exteriors, it's really concerned with emotional interiors, and it goes about exploring them with simplicity and directness, letting the actors's faces and voices carry the burden of meaning. It's about what happens to the psyche as well as the body in the aftermath of catastrophe," says one "Gravity" review by Matt Zoller Seitz.
The humans at the heart of the film are Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), and Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) a Medical Engineer and an Astronaut respectively, out on a space mission to do repairs to the Hubble Telescope.
"Gravity" reviews praise Bullock's stellar performance, despite most of her being in a stuffy space suit for the duration of the film. "Bullock is the undoubted star and is seriously good here, giving Stone an inner steeliness that only the very deepest pangs of despair can unsheathe," says a review from The Telegraph, "Gravity teems with images of birth and rebirth, and from the cable that links Bullock's character umbilically to Clooney's, to the extraordinary shot of her hanging in an airlock in a state of amniotic suspension, Cuarón makes his heroine's sex a core part of her heroism."
While most of the most vocal "Gravity" reviews out there are of scientists complaining about inaccuracies, they may have completely missed the point of the film. Alfonso Cuaron himself has said that he did not set out for a documentary, and upon watching the film closer one sees that it is not truly a film about outer space. "Cuarón is telling a different but related story of terror and mortality and hope. With nothingness pressing in on all sides, in a place where the grip of someone else's hand is all that keeps you from the void, life really does seem like a miracle," concludes Robbie Collin of The Telegraph.
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