If there’s one truly intriguing Avatar-enabled film in the pipe, it’s certainly Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity,
about a man and a woman left stranded on a space station, after the
death of the rest of their crew. Intended to be carried almost entirely
by a single actress (lightly supported by Robert Downey Jr.), with over
half of the film composed of computer generated imagery, and some shots
lasting up to 20 minutes without an edit… Gravity
sounds ambitious, if nothing else. This kind of project represents the
potential happy fallout from the mammoth success of a tech-driven film
like Cameron’s opus.
Unfortunately, according to Deadline,
Angelina Jolie has passed for a second time on the project, leaving
Warner Brothers and Cuaron without an A-list female to carry an $80
million motion-picture. While I don’t weep for the loss of Jolie
specifically (she neither bothers nor excites me), I am worried that
this puts the film as Cuaron envisions it in jeopardy*. Deadline
lists a number of women WB spoke with or tested for the role and,
frankly, nearly every one of them seems like a more interesting choice
than Jolie- “the
studio tested or made approaches to actresses including Sandra Bullock
and Natalie Portman (word around town is the studio’s intrigued with
both), Naomi Watts, Marion Cotillard, Carey Mulligan, Scarlett
Johansson, Sienna Miller, Abbie Cornish, Rebecca Hall, Olivia Wilde,
Blake Lively.” It’ll be a
goddamn shame if Warner Brothers has lost all of these actresses’
numbers and either shut the project down, or force Cuaron to warp the
film’s focus.
It remains to be seen what these developments mean for Gravity overall, but I’m crossing my fingers that it is just a small setback on the road to a better film. More when we hear it.
*More
than a touch of irony here, considering another visionary filmmaker’s
large-scale cosmic drama was hamstrung by the departure of her equally
A-list partner, Brad Pitt.