After hearing all the hype, I finally spent $10 at my local cinema and watched Gravity last night. I want my money back.
This new space "thriller" starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock is probably the most overrated movie in history, or at least since that god-awful lesbian propaganda film Thelma and Louise.
First of all, I walked into the theater expecting this to be a buddy comedy, a sort of Beverly Hills Cop in space. But Gravity isn't funny and George Clooney dies like five minutes into the movie. I know this Alfonso Cuarón character is supposed to be some sort of genius, but the dude doesn't know the first thing about directing a hilarious action flick. (Protagonists can't die, dumbshit.)
Without the odd couple dynamic and crime-fighting antics, Gravity is basically the chick from Speed floating around in space for an hour and a half. Only unlike in Speed, the female lead is over-the-hill with saggy tits and a facelift not even a zero-gravity environment can save.
A lot of ink has been spilled saying how this movie's lack of dialogue makes it more of a visual experience. This is true. But if I'm going to spend 90 minutes staring at a screen, I think I should have a decent under-30 body to look at. Why couldn't they have cast Olivia Wilde, Jennifer Lawrence or Amanda Seyfried? Hell, I would have taken Kat Dennings over Bullock's haggard ass.
But a shortage of young T&A isn't this movie's biggest problem. Halfway into this thing I kept asking myself, where are all the fucking aliens? Movies in space are supposed to have aliens. Big green monsters can serve both as scary antagonists and zany comic relief.
The best sci-fi film ever made, Mars Attacks, brilliantly used aliens in both roles. And even that gigantic turd of a film 2001: A Space Odyssey had aliens. (Although admittedly I had to watch it three times to be sure.)
Another issue with this movie is that it throws realism right out the airlock. Are we seriously supposed to believe that in a struggle for survival, a woman can outlast a man? For that matter, since when do we even let women do work in space? Everyone knows their menstrual cycles go haywire the closer they are to the moon.
Personally, I would have paired George Clooney with a sexy NFL cheerleader who won a trip into space on the NASA space shuttle on a reality show competition. Just as sparks start to fly between the two -- BOOM -- disaster strikes and the sexy duo have to save the world to save themselves. It's Apollo 13 meets Bring It On. That's how you do a sci-fi movie.
