Alfonso Cuarón did a great job on his last film Children of Men, released all the way back in 2006, and so his next film has been gathering speculation and excitement in its wake like a snowball pushed by excitable children, but a snowball composed of cineliteracy. Said film will be Gravity, a sci-fi drama starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts who find themselves in a pretty bad situation. Here’s the official blurb:
Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney). But on a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone—tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness. The deafening silence tells them they have lost any link to Earth…and any chance for rescue. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into the terrifying expanse of space.
The very first footage of the film has been revealed in a tease for tomorrow’s episode of Entertainment Tonight, in all places. The beautiful looking footage has been chopped up, placed all out of context, and spliced amongst moronic narration:
It’s a pretty slim few seconds of actual footage but it’s enough to get the sci-fi obsessives excited. Alfonso Cuarón has promised a much slower pace for this film, telling Collider that in the two hour movie, there are only 156 shots, “many running six, eight, or ten minutes long.” He also promises a “seventeen minute opening shot,” which would be consistent with the slow-paced style he used for Children of Men, to great effect. If he pulls this off, Alfredo Cuarón is no doubt set to be the next Christopher Nolan, a mainstream director with vision and ambition for his chosen genre, and one that asks that the audience keeps up with him.
Gravity is due for release on the 4th of October.