Watching Gravity for the first time at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival brought me back to a childhood trip to EPCOT Center in the mid-1980s, when the wonders of land and space were revealed through “Omnimovers,” lighting tricks, and rear projection. The core of the illusion was simply altering the riders’ line of sight, but the trick worked: For a kid who recoiled at the whiff of anything educational, it felt like a real amusement-park ride, even though the only movement was a slight jostle on an otherwise smooth track. A trace of Tilt-A-Whirl nausea was a small price to pay for immersion in EPCOT’s visions of tomorrow, and I may have been the only child in history to prefer it to the Magic Kingdom.
So it’s with great affection and nostalgia for my youth—and, okay, a measure of contempt for the script—that I’ve taken to referring to Gravity as Movie: The Ride. From the start, director Alfonso Cuarón never puts the audience on terra firma: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney drift around in open space, and they never stop drifting, whether they’re tethered ever-so-tenuously to a ship’s exterior, or detached from it entirely. There is no up, down, or sideways, and no relief from the series of life-threatening crises that beset them after a debris storm threatens to knock them into oblivion. Cuarón returns to the bravura long takes of Children Of Men, but without dolly tracks or Steadicam operators, his camera pirouettes around a wholly digital environment, whipping through space as if it were a third, invisible character. Not since the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol have I felt so physical an impact watching a movie, but this wasn’t just one sequence—it’s sustained throughout the entire 90-minute stretch.
Superlative adjectives aplenty could be applied to the CGI effects in Gravity—beautiful, seamless, exhilarating, etc.—but if the film could rightly be called one of CGI’s greatest triumphs, I think it’s also the most revealing of its limitations. While I should say upfront that CGI can be used in many different, often effective ways, from creating backdrops that would be unthinkable as practical sets to more subtle forms of image-tinkering, it’s always had a hard time making the visceral count. Because CGI doesn’t have to abide by the laws of physics, there are no rules dictating what CGI-heavy spectacles can or can’t do, which sounds liberating, but creates a new set of problems. When Apollo Creed punches Rocky Balboa repeatedly in the face, we can imagine the force that ruptures his cheek and causes his knees to buckle. But when Neo and Agent Smith have one of their epic battles in the Matrix movies, their mortality doesn’t register in the slightest—we can only guess what blow will finally be enough to punch their ticket. We have to resign ourselves to admiring their form.
By their nature, CGI action sequences differ from brick-and-mortar counterparts in that they aren’t about impact, they’re about the pursuit of perfection. In Wanted, bullets curve and bodies bend as no bullets or bodies can in the real world, which enhances the awe and evaporates any suspense or investment in the action itself. The best that can be said about movies like that is that they’re “cool.” Among the trashy pleasures of Neveldine/Taylor’s Crank movies is their open acknowledgment that CGI’s elasticity turns action movies into cartoons, so they push the series deeper into absurdity. But it’s a mistake to stage action with heavy CGI and expect the audience to feel the same tension induced by physical shoots, because they aren’t the same thing. Great directors like Steven Spielberg or Bong Joon-ho can give fantastical computer-generated beasties plenty of menace in Jurassic Park or The Host, respectively, but mostly through reaction shots and classic offhand effects, like registering the thunderous footsteps of a dinosaur through the ominous ripples in a glass of water.
This summer, there was a lot of debate about the images of mass devastation, specifically in reference to 9/11, that dominated escapist fare like Man Of Steel or Star Trek: Into Darkness, but I think the effects were partly responsible for their numbing quality. When building after building crashes down on the untold thousands in Metropolis, part of what’s disturbing about it is that viewers can’t feel the cost at all, just the enervating noise of digital structures collapsing in a heap of shattered glass and concrete. Watching a kaiju tear apart the Golden Gate Bridge at the beginning of Pacific Rim looks fantastic, but the audience never once mistakes it for an actual bridge, with snapping cables and crumpled steel and real cars plunging into the sea. To a degree, that distance is necessary—and appropriate for Pacific Rim, which pays homage to movies that weren’t interested in realistic action—but it’s also endemic to the effects. We can watch all of our monuments and landmarks destroyed again and again, and feel nothing. We can watch all of our heroes and superheroes deliver and withstand pain, and feel nothing, too.
Which brings us back to Gravity, a CGI movie that’s thrilling because of the lack of gravity. Computer effects and human stakes are rarely grafted seamlessly, but figures in spacesuits, cast adrift in a weightless expanse where they’re forever on the precipice, meshes them as few CGI films ever have. (Enter The Void is another, but mainly because the first-person camera eventually takes the ghost’s-eye view.) It’s going to be seen as an advance for effects, and properly so, given the awe and terror its green-screened crises inspire. But I worry that this affirmation of the marvelous things CGI can do will overwhelm any counterarguments about what CGI should do, and the limitations that will still exist after Gravity has come and gone.
Just contrast the mighty full-scale replica ships in Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World with the digital mock-ups in The Pirates Of The Caribbean, or the roaring Dodge Challenger tearing through traffic in Death Proof with the pinballing sports cars in the Fast And The Furious movies: The real ships and cars are heavy, powerful, and dangerous, and their navigators are playing for life-or-death stakes; the fake ones are speedy and malleable to a fault. Maybe the future will bridge the gap, and make a digital punch draw as much blood as a digital one. But for now, we just have to hope it looks cool.