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by Joshua Desjardins

Space…The Final Frontier…
No.  I’m not talking about the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  I’m talking, of course, about the new Alfonso Cuaron film, Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  To say this movie blew me away would be the milky way’s biggest understatement of the year, and after today, I learned that our solar system is a pretty intense and thrilling–well–”space.” (Don’t worry. There’s more space jokes to follow…)
First and foremost, the cinematography of this movie was–pun intended–”out of this world!” (I told you there’d be more…) I’m not usually one to see a movie in 3D, but if you don’t see this film in the way it was meant to be seen, then you are truly missing the full beauty of what Cuaron captures on screen.  The whole time I was watching, I actually felt like I was in outer space, right alongside Bullock and Clooney on their breathtaking adventure.  And it was the “gravity’ of this adventure (last one, I swear!) that really made me appreciate the nature of this film.
[SPOILER ALERT] Gravity is not just about what we see in the film’s trailer, which appears to be about two astronauts whose shuttle gets damaged by floating debris, thus causing our heroes to float endlessly above Mother Earth.  Gravity centers around Bullock’s character who, besides being a nervous astronaut in the deep unknown for the first time, throughout the film we slowly discover that she recently lost her daughter at the age of 4 and is thus looking for a quite “space” (I couldn’t help this one…) to escape her harsh reality.  But after Clooney helps her find peace with herself, Bullock’s only objective is to get home.  I never wanted to cheer so loud when Bullock landed back on Earth and could hardly walk to shore.
Gravity may have brought Bullock back down to our planet, but it was the gravity of this film that truly touched me.  Sometimes we forget how precious life can be, especially when we discover that life can be taken from us as quickly as a shooting star passes by. But if we only take a second to breathe and see the world for how beautiful it can be, we quickly realize that we, as human beings, can be a force that even gravity cannot reckon with.