Clooney and Bullock ‘roller coaster’ coming to Thame Cinema

THE film GRAVITY,  Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, will be screened at Thame Cinema 4 All, at the Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame, on Saturday, January 11, 2014. USA 2013, 91 minutes, 12A certificate – Directed by Alphonso Cuaron.

Cuaron’s staggering, visually breathtaking film is an edge-of-your-seat thriller set in present day space. Bullock is Dr Ryan Stone, sent to install a monitoring device on the Hubble telescope under the watchful eye of Clooney’s Matt Kowalski, a cavalier old timer perfectly at home in the deep and endless silent blackness, and the strange white structures that are home to the communities that live and work there.

As the film opens the two are at work, bobbing about in (zero) gravity, tethered to their station like foetuses with long, snaking umbilical cords, Matt trading humorous anecdotes with Mission Control back in Houston. But disaster soon strikes: a collision with the debris from an exploded satellite hurtling through space like vast bullets means that Ryan and Matt are at risk of being killed or being permanently cast adrift into the lifeless nothing-ness. What ensues is an hour and a half of almost unbearable tension. But for all its nods to the classics of the space movie genre (2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris…) this is not science fiction but an old-fashioned action thriller – the will they / won’t they make it storyline – that happens to be set in the magnificent blackness of space, with the glory of planet earth ever present in the background, the place and the life and the future that might never be returned to. Gripping and heartbreakingly moving in equal measure – a real roller coaster of a movie.