One Hell of a Ride: Alfonso Cuarón’s Exploration of Human Fragility in Gravity

There is perhaps no location more terrifying than outer space, that infinite void where infinite multiverses expand in infinite directions at billions of kilometers per second. It’s an airless, pressureless vacuum with no heat except for the hot orbs of plasma we call stars—those gaseous balls of fire blown up and warmed by nuclear fusion. Because this environment cannot sustain human life, because humans fear what we don’t know, and because there’s no way of knowing how much of it we have left to explore, the mere concept of getting stranded in outer space is enough to leave most anyone paralyzed with fear.

Harboring a distinct fascination with the unknown, it makes perfect sense that Alfonso Cuarón would be drawn to outer space. The Mexican director is known for making movies that reckon with the despair that comes with losing control. Children of Men depicted a dystopian vision of the future that was frighteningly uncertain. Sólo con tu pareja and Y tu mamá también dealt with terminal illness and the anguish of knowing one’s life will be cut short, but not knowing when. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban explored the occult. Even Roma, his most grounded film, took place during the limbo of a family’s tentative separation amidst a similarly turbulent and unpredictable moment in modern Mexican history. Gravity, celebrating its 10th anniversary, takes this fear of losing control further than any other Cuarón film. 

A rare science-fiction thriller that’s packaged tightly at just over 90 minutes, the director’s seventh feature acts as both a tribute to human endurance and a testament to the fragility of life. It’s also a heart-rending tale about mourning that uses the void of outer space as a metaphor for grief, and for conquering that grief. This humanity is something that largely went unacknowledged at the time of the film’s release, when people were mostly concerned with picking apart its scientific inaccuracies—a strange fixation, seeing as Gravity is speculative by design, even if its story takes a more “realistic” approach than your average space thriller. Whatever verisimilitude Gravity has is merely an illusion employed to tap into our fear of the unknown and get us to reckon with it.

Veteran astronaut and mission commander Matt Kowalski (an effortlessly charismatic George Clooney) and his quiet foil, first-time space traveler Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock in a career-best performance), are on a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Explorer. It’s in Earth’s orbit to service the Hubble Space Telescope, where Stone is set to perform a series of hardware upgrades. Their mission is upended when their spacecraft is struck by an expanding cloud of space debris, disabling the communication satellites, killing the rest of their crew and leaving Stone and Kowalski tumbling through space. 

This arbitrary incident and the breadth of destruction it leaves behind are Gravity’s first illustrations of the fragility that is human life and its susceptibility to the risk of chance. As we learn later on, the life Stone left behind on Earth is its own existential void. A freak accident not unlike the one that left her and Kowalski stranded had snatched her 4-year-old daughter from her some time ago, when the child slipped and hit her head on concrete while playing tag at recess. It’s why, when Kowalski asks her what she likes the most about outer space, she says, “The silence. I could get used to this.” Space is a long way from the problems she’s yet to recuperate from—or so it seems.

Luckily, Kowalski is able to use his propulsion unit to locate Stone. From there, the plan is to use the unit to reach the International Space Station, about 900 miles away. Upon arrival however, they find that the station’s crew has evacuated, leaving behind a spacecraft that cannot take them to Earth because its parachute was already deployed. Low on air and fuel, Kowalski suggests using the vehicle to travel to the nearby Tiangong Space Station, where they could board the Shenzhou spacecraft and return to Earth in one piece. But before they are able to do this, Kowalski triggers his thruster, hurtling them at a high speed.

“Brake! Brake! You have to brake!” Ryan shouts, grabbing hold of the tether.

“I can’t, the can’s empty!” he replies.

As they spin out of control, hitting the spacecraft, their tether tears along one of the station’s solar panels where Stone’s leg gets tangled in the Soyuz’s parachute cords, preventing her from drifting away. It’s here that Cuarón cuts from a medium close-up of Stone frantically clutching onto Kowalski, to the most terrifying long shot in the entire film: Against this black abyss bereft even of stars, their white suits appear as mere specs held loosely at the limb by a couple of sewing threads. 

“Hang on, I’m pulling you in!” Stone shouts. Instead, she’s pulled forward by Kowalski’s drift, and her foot slips from the hitch barely holding her in place. It’s clear that the ropes are too loose to stop them both from drifting away. Against her protests, he unlocks the hook connecting their cords.

“You’re gonna make it, Ryan,” he tells Stone before letting go of the tether and drifting off into the darkness, sending her tumbling backwards towards the ISS. Crashing against the spacecraft, she frantically grabs onto a handrail, then makes her way to the airlock.

Once inside, she sheds her suit and rests, arms curled and knees to her chest. The image of Stone suspended in the air in a fetal position, the backlight exposing a cordlike tube behind her, isn’t entirely subtle. Still, it’s a breathtaking illustration of humanity’s frail infancy in the eyes of the universe, even in the presence of such astounding technological innovation. Her simultaneous return to origin and manifestation of newness speaks to our contradictory nature: We’re Earth’s dominant species, but also one of the weakest under nature’s heel.

And yet, Cuarón finds power in this vulnerability. After angling the Soyuz towards Tiangong, Stone attempts to communicate with Earth, reaching the ham radio of a fisherman who does not speak her language. Despite their inability to understand one another, having established contact with another human being overwhelms Stone with emotions—first euphoria, then sadness.

“I’m gonna die, Aningaaq,” she says, her eyes welling up. “I know—we’re all gonna die. Everybody knows that. But I’m going to die today.”

Never have tears looked more breathtaking than in this scene, delicate droplets rolling down Stone’s cheek and floating into the air. Suspended in zero gravity, Stone’s lacrimal fluid is about as staggering as the blue-green sphere that is Earth viewed from afar, or the glow of the sunset as remarked upon by Kowalski earlier in the movie. Human life is just as delicate—always at risk of being cut short by a freak accident, be that a child’s fall onto concrete or an astronaut’s demise from space debris. 

But, Gravity seems to ask, isn’t that kind of beautiful? What if, instead of hiding from uncertainty, fear and sadness, we accepted these emotions as part of our miraculous existence?

Resigned to her fate, Stone cuts off the cabin’s oxygen supply. As she loses consciousness, she imagines Kowalski entering the capsule, telling her to rig the Soyuz’s landing rockets and propel the spacecraft towards Tiangong.

“Do you wanna go back, or do you wanna stay here?” he asks her. “You gotta plant both your feet on the ground and start livin’ life. Hey, Ryan? It’s time to go home.”

Much like space, grief is a vacuum. But, Stone learns, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be conquered. It’s not a matter of getting over the death of a loved one—most people never do. It’s about living in spite of this emptiness. There is always a reason to go on. She restores the cabin’s oxygen flow and rigs the landing rockets, propelling the spacecraft towards Tiangong. Once inside, she undocks the Shenzhou capsule right as the station enters Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“The way I see it, there’s only two possible outcomes,” she tells Houston over the radio. “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…it’ll be one hell of a ride. I’m ready.”

Outside, the space station bursts into flames, hurtling the control cabin she’s in like a comet towards Earth, the pieces breaking off as it continues to descend. Even before it successfully re-enters the atmosphere and lands safely in a lake, the crumbling pod looks awe-inspiring, with Steven Price’s triumphant score punctuating this moment as something extraordinary. How incredible—and incredibly fragile—is human innovation? Yes, we see her strength despite her susceptibility to the dangers of space, but Gravity gains a layer as soon as Stone makes it back to Earth in one piece: Resilience is a distinctly mortal characteristic, one separating human beings from (and perhaps making them stronger than) any piece of machinery.

Finally, we hear radio confirmation from Houston that Stone has been located and that a rescue team is on its way. With the capsule still burning, she manages to open the hatch and slip out of her space suit, nearly drowning from the pull of its weight. 

After making it to the shore, Stone collapses onto the earth, her hands squeezing the brown clay firmly as if to permanently recuperate it. She tries to get up but falls down, her body still readjusting to the planet’s gravitational pull. She laughs, tries again. Her hands sink further into the ground as she pushes herself upwards. This time, her legs cooperate, and she’s able to position herself on all fours. Slowly but surely, she stands upright, kneeling then half-kneeling, until she’s able to balance on both feet. Her legs shake as she looks up at the sky, breathing heavily.

There’s an obvious evolutionary allusion here: Her slow rise into bipedal form feels metamorphic, but seeing her stand up and turn her back on us precariously also recalls that childlike imagery from earlier. It’s the newness of life in all its forms: Natal, biological and reverberatory. Once again, Gravity illustrates the paradox that is our existence: Vulnerable yet determined, primal despite the millennia of evolution that precede us. Kowalski was right: It’s not a matter of what came before, but a matter of what we do now.

Ursula Muñoz S. is a critic, journalist and MFA candidate at Boston University who has previously written for news and entertainment outlets in Canada and the United States. Her work has appeared at Xtra, Cineaste, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. For further reading, feel free to follow her on Substack and X, where she muses about Taylor Swift and Pedro Almodóvar (among other things).