Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’

It is likely safe to say that no movie has received as much hype as Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” this year. Trailers herald it as “the glory of cinema’s future” (TIME Magazine), and perhaps it is. But there’s more than just some impressive special effects to this movie.

Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are part of a crew sent  on a space mission, when debris hurtles into their site, killing the rest of the team and leaving the remaining two adrift.

When Stone and Kowalski briefly return to their shuttle to see if any of the crew have survived, a small figurine of Looney Toons character Marvin the Martian slowly floats past them. This sophomoric detail carries significance.

Stone and Kowalski’s first attempt of solace is the Russian Space Station, where there is an escape pod. In pure disaster-film fashion, nothing goes according to plan, and the plan alters to taking the pod and piloting it to the Chinese Space Station, another several hundred kilometers away.

Inside the Russian pod, the camera focuses several times on a small card above the hatch of a medieval-style drawing of Christ. As more crap hits the fan, Cuaron continues to direct the audience’s attention to that drawing.

The second stab at escape from space at the Chinese station also features a symbolic detail. In the Chinese pod is a small Buddha statue, which gets as much attention as Marvin and Jesus did.

With all the stress and mayhem dominating the movie, it’s easy for these three figures to get lost, but they serve a notable purpose.

Buddhism is one of the largest religions in China, with a recorded 102 million followers in 2012, so the Buddha figurine represents the importance of religion and harmony that followers want to project, making a statement about what matters to the Chinese.

Orthodox Christianity is the traditional and largest religion in Russia (75 percent of the population follow it), so the crude drawing of Jesus seems a logical representation of what Russians value.

But the Americans in the movie iconized Marvin the Martian. Sure, Christianity is supposedly the largest religion in America (78 percent of the population), but Cuaron is trying to tell us something statistics won’t always indicate. Although we may have a majority of Americans claiming to be religious, it’s highly probable that we worship something else, like pop culture, for instance.

Going further than that, the American characters (and thus, the American audience) looked at what the Russians and the Chinese posted up in their pods and used that as a gauge to decide what those nationalities were like. We were headed that way just a second ago.

Cuaron could’ve easily CG-ed a crucifix or a Jesus fish in place of Marvin, but he didn’t, because that was Americans’ clue that sometimes things are not always what they seem. Just like we know we often put trivial things before religion, we could begin to think that other countries may not be so much more holier than we are. And we may not be holier than they.

Depending on your religious convictions, that could be good, or that could be bad. Or maybe you’re still (forgive me) “floating around” on the issue.