This is a film that really deserves to be watched on the big screen and I regret not making an effort to watch it in the cinema. I’d paid some attention to it when its marketing campaign was going on and I knew that this would be a film with some amazing visuals, but on some level, I dismissed it as just another action film.

But there are action movies and then there are action movies. True, this film doesn’t have much of a plot and it really is quite ridiculous that the destruction of a single satellite could wipe out Earth’s entire space infrastructure. Its character development is rather typical Hollywood fare. The best that can be said on this front is that it succeeds in engaging the viewer and manages to avoid being too overwrought.

Its visuals however are something else entirely. They are so superlatively good that this is a breathtaking film in the most genuine sense of the word. This is space as you’ve never seen it before. Cold, dark and utterly terrifying. Earth, so close yet so far away, is portrayed as the warm, welcoming cradle of life. The sense of immersion is exquisitely deepened by alternating views of the astronauts in space with shots from within Sandra Bullock’s helmet, capturing her frantic confusion, disorientation and fear.

Then of course there’s the tension, which never stops ratcheting up. Given space for proper reflection, it seems quite comical how Bullock’s character is forced from one crisis to another in a perfect manifestation of Murphy’s Law. But in the heat of the moment, it is impossible not to be completely engrossed by the sense of emergency.

Finally none of these would work without the verisimilitude afforded by the impressive amount of detail in the various pieces of space equipment as well as respect for the laws of physics. Even the explosions are silent and the film instead uses the soundtrack and the sounds that the astronauts are actually capable of hearing from within their suits to fill in the emptiness. The scientific realism isn’t perfect of course but it’s close enough for dramatic purposes to satisfy even the pickiest of nit pickers.

The cinema is a visual medium of course and this film is a fantastic reminder of how true this is. With this film, director Alfonso Cuarón succeeds in showing us space as we’ve never seen it before, even after decades of science-fiction movies. For my part, after watching this, there’s no way I’m going on a space-walk before the invention of force-fields.