Trailer for Sandra Bullock’s ‘Gravity’ leaves haunting impression

“We need to get the hell out of here,” George Clooney can be heard saying, through a space mask to an increasingly panicked Sandra Bullock, in the new trailer for Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity.”
Earlier marketing material for the into-the-blackness adventure focused on the quiet beauty before the trouble hits. This one gets right to the danger: debris is falling and hitting Explorer, the craft to which the pair of heroes are (tenuously) tethered. As Bullock is swung wildly by a space arm as though in a horrifyingly existentialist amusement-park ride, contact with Houston is lost and Clooney’s character tries desperately to save her (“Listen to my voice! You need to focus”). The salt-and-pepper one never seemed so out of options.

The trailer ends hauntingly, with Bullock’s Dr. Stone tumbling through space, becoming an increasingly smaller white dot in the void all around.

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The material will evoke recent space-themed movies with more humanist concerns on their mind -- “Moon,” “Sunshine” — as well as “2001”-like exercises from an earlier era. Tension and beauty somehow manage to cram into the frame in this spot, which is a kind of study in Space-Age minimalism.

The October release by Warner Bros. will open the Venice Film Festival before playing Toronto shortly after. Judging by what both festival programmers are saying and this new trailer, “Gravity” is shaping up to be a powerhouse.

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