1. The Double Meaning
This final element wasn't realized until the very end of the film, with Ryan crashlanding on Earth and struggling to pick herself up off the sandy beach. With Gravity, we're presented a story about survival. It's about Dr. Ryan Stone working with the best of her knowledge and skills to survive and make it back home. Along the way she must work with Matt Kowalski, her superior. After the satellite debris crashes into the
Explorer and kickstarts the conflict of survival, Stone and Kowalski must reach one another and depend on one another to survive. After making contact, Stone and Kowalski reminisce on Stone's life prior to the space mission, where it's discovered that she once had a daughter that died at her school's playground. Their journey then involves searching the devastated ruins of the
Explorer, journeying to a space station called the Soyuz where they can reach a source capable enough to get them back home. This is where Kowalski meets his end, because when crashing into the Soyuz it breaks their tether, separating them and leaving Kowalski to sacrifice himself so that Stone can make it inside before her oxygen runs out. Obviously affected by the loss of Kowalski, Stone tries desperately to survive, managing to make it inside and finding a way of contacting Kowalski to see if is still out there and alive. He doesn't answer, leaving Stone as the sole survivor. From there on it's one catastrophic event after another, with Stone escaping into an evac module with no hope of going anywhere after discovering there's no fuel storage left. Running low on oxygen again, it's revealed that Kowalski survived, making it back to the evac module and forcefully allowing himself inside the module via the air hatch. He informs her that the re-entry rockets are still available, so that they can use them to make it to the next station. He reflects on everything Stone told him, about her personal stories, and about letting go. It is then revealed that he never made it inside the module, because Stone was hallucinating. Looking to follow exactly what Kowalski said to her (via hallucination that is), Stone manages to make it the next space station, the Tiangong, and find the skills needed to make it back home, where she lands in an unknown area, alone and alive. Now I told this synopsis to tell you the nature of the title and its double meaning. While the title, Gravity, tells us that being lost in space at the mercy of gravity will play a serious issue, it plays another trick in the narrative that isn't truly revealed until the final scene of the film, strictly involving Dr. Ryan Stone. While she fights the gravity of space and miraculously survives circumstances that any sane person would falter, she pulls of the ultimate miracle: making it back home. And when she makes her way to the shoreline of the beach, she struggles to get up, proving that gravity is yet again an issue, albeit much less severe. But in the story, Ryan fights the personal gravity within. The loss of her daughter and the loss of Kowalski really set this scene inside Ryan where survivability is the absolute final goal. Despite the pressing need to give up and die alone, she persists that personal gravity and fights her way back home, where she fights the last remnants of both inner and outer gravity and walks away to an uncertain future. This is brilliant storytelling in this aspect. With a film as virtually powerful and emotionally devastating as Gravity, it brings a story of not only surviving perilous circumstances where survival isn't guaranteed, but surviving that inner struggle of never giving up, never caving in, really sells the film for me. It's a survival story wrapped inside a cleverly directed and intense thriller that will no doubt leave people breathless en masse.