( EW.com ) -- In `` Gravity , '' George Clooney plays a veteran astronaut who looks amusingly like Buzz Lightyear , and Sandra Bullock is a medical engineer who is taking her first voyage into space and is having a hard time keeping her lunch down . They float around in the inky silent darkness , bobbing and gliding , with Earth spread out beneath them like a giant luminescent screensaver . Even when tethered to a spacecraft , the two are really out there , exhilaratingly and terrifyingly free . The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón , using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command , places the audience right up there in space along with them . Gravity is an awesome technological daydream of a movie , one that might be classified as science fiction , except that it is n't a futuristic fantasy . It 's a tale of disaster and grief and survival rooted in the possibilities of space travel as they exist today . Part of what makes the film so thrilling is that it gives its characters no easy outs . The famous 10-minute tracking shot in Cuarón 's `` Children of Men '' was a bravura act of staging , yet watching it , you could tell that it was thought-out and choreographed . In Gravity , though , the director works in such an ingeniously flowing and sustained way that his images all but transcend the essential visual grammar of `` the shot . '' The camera glides through space , twirling and doubling back , following the characters through pod doors and into the cramped interiors of satellites and then out again , giving the entire movie the spontaneous feel of a single unbroken shot — a free-floating galactic reverie . Sandra Bullock keeps defying 'Gravity ' with her career . At the beginning we hear radio burbles of talk between the astronauts and Houston , and then , almost imperceptibly , a spacecraft drifts into view from the right side of the screen — it 's a U.S. shuttle , and the astronauts are walking outside of it , attempting to repair a problem on the ship . You 'll surely be reminded of `` 2001 : A Space Odyssey , '' because what Cuarón echoes from Kubrick 's great film — and what still seems eerily surreal in an outer-space movie — is the creeping rhythm of space , the weightlessness that places everything in a trance , turning the action into moment-to-moment semi-slow motion , a feeling of life suspended . Simply as an out-of-this-world , zero-friction `` ride , '' `` Gravity '' is unforgettable , yet the real essence of Cuarón 's achievement is that the film 's technical virtuosity and its emotional grip become one . Clooney 's Matt Kowalski and Bullock 's Ryan Stone are on a routine mission , but then there 's a bulletin from Houston . A Russian satellite has exploded , causing a chain reaction . A shower of debris is about to come flying right at them , so they must abort the mission . It 's too late , though : The debris hits them , full force ( the 3-D places us right in the hurtling metal thick of it ) , tearing the ship apart . Seconds later , there is no ship . They are lost in space . What Buzz Aldrin thinks of 'Gravity ' The ebb and flow of `` Gravity 's '' story is deeply organic — it seems to be making itself up as it goes along , and that 's how it hooks us . Yet what sustains our absorption is a rather tricky synthesis between our involvement in the characters ' plight and our head-scratching wonder at the matter-of-fact way that the film brings the physical realities of space to life : the sheer cosmic terror of it , the images of satellites cluttered with drifting matter , from chess rooks to tears . The actors are phenomenal . Clooney shows a haunting chivalry beneath his bluster , and Bullock is as desperate and resourceful and anxious and brave as Sigourney Weaver in the last half of Alien . When Stone wriggles , slowly , out of her space suit , we realize that we 're seeing a tale of rebirth , and Bullock 's acting attains a new purity . She floats through this movie yet grounds it , letting `` Gravity '' connect with all of us these days who feel just a little adrift . Grade : A. CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . © 2011 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star in `` Gravity '' Reviewer says ebb and flow of the story is deeply organic . EW gives it a grade of `` A ''