3. Everything Goes Wrong Too Often
As I've already mentioned, it's difficult to take a film seriously when the lead character is as careless as Ryan Stone, but it's not simply the manner in which things go wrong in Gravity, but the sheer number of times they go wrong. Most obviously there's the high-speed debris which can't be helped, but Stone gets herself stuck in her crane thing at the beginning, and later she has an oxygen problem, Matt spins off into space, there's a fire, she's knocked unconscious, her capsule is tangled in ropes, she has no fuel, her capsule fills up with water on Earth... when she started to get tangled in the weeds underwater there were plenty of laughs in the cinema. And as I was leaving the building I heard one girl say "I thought at the end she was going to get hit by a piece of debris and die." I wouldn't have ruled that out. In fact, it's interesting that the final scene was shot at Lake Powell, Arizona, because that's the same place several Planet of the Apes (1968) scenes were filmed. I mention this because I seriously thought Ryan would look up at the end and see a half-buried Statue of Liberty. The fact that so much goes wrong so frequently makes Gravity a comic target, unfortunately. Films where it's non-stop disaster are almost exclusively comedies, such as The Hangover, The Naked Gun, and most silent comedies, such as those by Chaplin and Keaton. If a film doesn't know whether it's coming or going, why should it win Best Picture?