gravity: a review

I watched Gravity at long last with my cousin yesterday, during my week's sojourn in this magnificent city i' th' South, as a result of which I find myself in the curious position of being able to review it. And so I shall, contrary to the precedents I have set on this blog of not writing anything remotely connected to sublunary life. But if one looks closer, one will realize that this is in fact just the sort of shallowness that my blog has been created to enshrine. 

To begin, thank goodness for its shortness. Anything longer would have made no sense at all, given the purpose of the movie. Its length of ninety minutes (or so) was just enough so that the unremitting intensity didn't overwhelm. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that the annoying male astronaut was George Clooney, since I hadn't paid close enough attention to the movie to learn who starred in it (other than Sandra Bullock). 

I shall assume that the merits of the movie are self-evident, and move on to appraising its flaws, which is the more interesting part of any review. The characterization was the most irritating of them. George Clooney was... well, George Clooney, which is enough to drive anyone with an eye for art up and down the wall forever. The smooth, slimy, infinitely competent, and oppressively insouciant American male, whom writers of cheap thrillers (such as David Baldacci) love writing into their novels, with a hand perpetually in their pants, is perhaps the worst characterization of Americans I can think of. The exaltation of characters like George Clooney in modern culture has become such a problem that it can only be described as onanism of the circular variety.

Sandra Bullock's character was thankfully likeable, but a bit overdone. Her bathetic back story about her daughter and her strange habit of driving aimlessly were not only irrelevant but made it difficult to accept that she was the more worthy of returning to Earth between her and G. C. Apropos the irrelevance, I accept that it's difficult to carry on in a movie like this without giving the characters some kind of back story, and the inevitable lesson in this for all of us is that those who are most worthy of life are often prevented from living it; and apropos her being the only survivor, I accept that this is a natural result of her being weak of character and G. C.'s being altruistic as only a white American male can be. 

The gratuitous Indian astronaut, who died right at the outset, was responsible for endless forehead slapping. I find the weirdly grotesque characterization of Indians in Hollywood movies more than a little irritating. They are quaint and exotic in the worst sense of the word, and it is impossible to take them seriously. Compare with the Indian scientist in 2012, or pretty much everything in Life of Pi (a tale unique in its ability to discomfit the sensitive reader/viewer), or any Indian character you might ever see in a Hollywood movie. I'm sure other Asians suffer similarly at the hands of Hollywood, and can sympathize with my sense of having been intellectually violated.