Gravity

There’s that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the ape man throws the bone into the air and we cut, four million years in 1/24 of a second, to the satellite orbiting the Earth. There’s that scene in Star Wars where the Imperial Battle Cruiser comes from behind us and spreads its titanic bulk across the sky. And now there’s another, a scene that literally made my jaw drop and gave me goosebumps … and this scene lasts fourteen minutes without a cut. You can’t really call this a science fiction movie because space travel, of this sort, anyway, is real. But what I can call it is simply the best action movie of the 21st Century thus far. Yeah, yeah, I’ve read all the carps about how you can’t get from the Hubble telescope to the ISS without a pretty powerful rocket, and all the others, and in any other context I’d probably carp with the critics. (Of whom there are few; it’s scoring 96% at Metacritic, which is the highest I can remember for any movie.) But this time I just didn’t care. Actually, the fact that all this mayhem and destruction is happening in space without the customary whooshes and booms we have all been conditioned to expect by George Lucas and 1000 other “space” films atones for almost any goof they might have made. I really can’t praise this film highly enough.