3. The Opening Scene
For those who've seen Gravity and are reading this article, you know exactly what I'm about to talk about here. While the entire film is relatively short in time, clocking in at about 90 minutes, about 1/9th of it is spent opening up the curtains and telling us what exactly is going on and how things go to hell rather quickly. To do this, the opening scene to Gravity is one long, continuous shot with no cuts whatsoever. It first starts off with an epic view of Earth up until after a minute the space shuttle
Explorer comes into frame and we see, in the most intricate detail possible, Matt Kowalski rotating around the shuttle via thrusters and Dr. Ryan Stone doing maintenance on the attached satellite, and even supporting character Shariff doing what most thrill fodders do. All three characters interact with one another, with their environment, with Mission Control, up when things go to hell and debris from another satellite crashes into the
Explorer, destroying the shuttle, leaving Shariff with a petri dish-sized hole in his face and both Kowalski and Stone veering of course and into space. And this scene runs unabridged for
17 minutes. No cuts, no lulls in pacing nor in visual trickery. It simply results in the most epic uncut scene in cinema history, period. Although I was hoping the entire film was like that (which would be unreal), I see why they chose to to make just the intro that way. In order to capture the vastness of what is happening and what will happen, all the detail must be shown in the prologue. The idea of showing us the complexities of working on a space mission before disaster ultimately strikes and sets the rest of the film sets in almost immediately. Also to reveal the amazing technology that was used to pull off all the tricks in the opening, and used later on. And what's even more mind-blowing about it: it's entirely digital besides the actors' faces, which were shot and added digitally into frame to make it seem like they were actually there. Incredible. Simply incredible.