GRAVITY

“He had never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed necessary but barely noticed.”- The pendulum, O Henry

 

When I was little, The “EARTH SONG” would never fail to make me cry.

The reason, apart from the fact that it was related to the environment that we share with the species that we so unsympathetically kill for our survival, was that the song would suddenly make me stand on a ground where I no longer take anything for granted. It had the potential to make me sentimental and if anybody will even dare to ask me at that very moment ‘how do you feel?’ I would cry rivers out of the guilt of mankind.

Other than that song, it is usually documentaries that can make me mawkish. I KNOW it sounds lame, ‘how can anybody cry in a documentary’ but I’ve cried when I saw HOME & I admit that I got extremely ‘sensitive’ when I saw THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH and I also admit that I apart from not using plastic bags, there’s nothing much that I’ve done for the environment.

It’s not just about environmental documentaries, but if you look at it, at least for me all documentaries are inspiring and make a very compelling argument to impel.

For a layman (like me), documentaries are a technique that tells us about a factual event or subject and often through which you relate its importance and understand the value of the aforesaid or in some cases it’s just a record of a historical event.

Though it is often said that most of the movies follow the “Three act structure”, it is not always reliable as sometimes twisting the chronology can make the story telling a little more interesting as it reduces its predictability, documentaries do not have a predefined plot with “characters” like a feature film.  So, basically, sometimes you don’t need a story line with countable artists/ actor, you just need an event.

Or,

You just need a feature film like GRAVITY with a fictional story line and “two characters” to tell you the relevance of an undisputable yet unacknowledged (for me) Newton’s subject.

Well, Dr. Ryan Stone is trained to do whatever she does, but every breath she draws keeps you on toes. For every hit she takes against the International space station you don’t feel the pressure that she might be hurt but you ponder ‘how will she balance?’. The emotion is same as when you crash your dad’s car and you don’t think about your injuries but think about what your dad will say.

Barely there George Clooney, who a lot of my friends complained “was an irrelevant character”, gives Dr. Stone axiomatically something that is most needed at the kind of situation she gets in. A boost. The ruthless relapsing of the storyline against that boost is what brings her the determination and engages her to take a trip back to earth.

While the rest of the movie has its thrilling undulations, the thing that hits you right in the core is the contented endeavor that she puts up when her feet show resistance to their humble ground. Such mockery.

It’s the same as the father of a bride would feel. He knows it’s the ritual of world, she knows it’s the same, there’s no extraordinary story behind it, yet suddenly something makes the bond impactful and brings you to tears.

I don’t really care about the scientific accuracy either and I am pretty sure neither did the $720,000,000.

I AM NOT A PHYSICS PERSON & I HATED KINEMATICS.

I will never go to space, not (only) that I don’t want to but also because (even if I did pass all the tests) the idea of being in a scenario where one side is vacuum, the other side is the “gone in 60 seconds” life source (O2) and the only this segregating them is some high absorbency bladder like textile, scares the bejesus out of me.

But there’s something in that film that I found more relevant than the core subject. It’s the totem of total unpredictability and the “what keeps you going” idea. It’s the epitome of the life itself.

“All right, the way I see it, there’s only two possible outcomes. Either I make it down there in one piece and I have one hell of a story to tell…or I burn up in the next ten minutes. Either way, whichever way…no harm, no foul! Because either way…it’ll be on helluva ride.”

What kept me intrigued was its verisimilitudinous and it was worth every penny I spent.

 

 

P.S.:  Shariff Dasari sings “mera joota hai japani”.