《地心引力》:艺术与技术的完美结合

In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like 'Gravity.' What's new in Alfonso Cuaron's 3-D Space adventure is the nature of the motion. It's as if the movie medium had been set free to dance in a bedazzling zero-gravity dream sequence.

从19世纪中叶以来我们接触了这样那样的“运动影像”（即电影），但还没有一部可与《地心引力》相提并论。阿方索?卡隆(Alfonso Cuaron)执导的这部3D太空探险片，其新颍之处就在于它“运动”的性质。影片看起来就好像电影这种媒介挣脱了一切束缚，在一连串令人眼花缭乱的失重梦境中翩翩起舞。

Like many dreams of seizing intensity, this one is both deliriously beautiful and charged with primal fear -- not just fear of falling, but of hurtling up, spinning out, breaking loose from our planet's embrace. Two astronauts, George Clooney's Matt Kowalski and Sandra Bullock's Ryan Stone, are adrift in space after disaster strikes during a shuttle mission to the Hubble Telescope. Tethered to each other at first, they tumble wildly out of control, then try to regain their equilibrium, conserve their oxygen and, in a cosmic nowhere, find the wherewithal to survive. He's a veteran pilot with a gift of cheery gab that may have helped him ward off unwanted feelings in the past. She's a novice, a medical engineer with not much astronaut training, and she feels everything, from horror through dread and grief to resolve, rebirth and elation.

像很多扣人心弦的梦境一样，这一个梦境既充满了美感，也充斥着原始的恐惧，除了坠落，还有被抛起、甩出、脱离地球怀抱的恐惧。两名宇航员──乔治?克鲁尼(George Clooney)饰演的马特?科瓦尔斯基(Matt Kowalski)和桑德拉?布洛克(Sandra Bullock)饰演的赖恩?斯通(Ryan Stone)──在一次航天任务中出舱修复哈勃望远镜(Hubble Telescope)时，遭遇灾难性事故，之后他们便漂浮在太空。他们起初拴在一起，但身体完全失控地不停翻转，他们努力恢复平衡、节约氧气，终于在宇宙中一个不知名的地方找到了生存之所。马特是一名资深宇航员，生性乐观健谈，这一点可能帮助他忘掉了过去的不愉快感受。赖恩是新手，一位没受过多少宇航训练的医药工程师，从惊慌到恐惧，从悲痛到坚强、重生和欣喜，她感受到了一切。

We feel awe from the start. The film opens with a 12-minute sequence of seamless action in which Matt, Ryan, the giant telescope and the shuttle that brought them there float serenely above a vast, floating Earth until all hell suddenly breaks loose in the form of space debris. Newtonian laws of motion still apply in the maelstrom that ensues; the lawbreaker is the camera. It moves as no movie camera has done before -- so fluidly that its loops and glides transgress boundaries and film conventions. At one point it closes in on Ryan, then penetrates her helmet, without pausing at the visor, to study the stark terror on her face.

影片一开始我们就产生了敬畏之情。开场是一段12分钟一气呵成的情节：马特、赖恩、巨大的望远镜和带他们上去的航天飞机，宁静地漂浮在一个巨大的、悬浮着的地球之上，直到一切突然变成了该死的太空碎片。牛顿运动定律在接下来发生的混乱中依然存在，违背定律的是摄像机。它的运动有别于以往的任何电影摄像机──行云流水地转圈、滑行，逾越了界线和电影常规。它一度移近赖恩，穿透她的头盔，也未在面罩上稍作停留，而是径直去审视她满脸的极度惊恐。

As befits a superb movie, Ryan is a marvelous heroine. She has suffered an anguishing personal loss that resonates powerfully in her desperate present; until this galvanizing assignment, she'd only been going through the motions of her everyday life on Earth. She must have been an overachiever to reach a position of eminence in her profession, but her undertraining as an astronaut leaves her in a state of utter panic when chaos engulfs not only her shuttle but a whole tier of orbiting space stations and communication satellites in the extraterrestrial neighborhood. ('Half of North America just lost their Facebook,' Matt says wryly when all the circuits go dead.)

与这部一流电影相得益彰的是，赖恩是一位不平凡的女主角。她曾蒙受失去亲人的痛苦，这种痛苦在她绝望的当下引起了强烈回响；在这次充满刺激的任务之前，她经历的只是地球上的平凡生活。她在专业领域内出类拔萃，一定超乎常人，但由于宇航训练不足，当混乱不仅笼罩她的航天飞机，更笼罩了天外社区里一整层轨道空间站和通信卫星的时候，她彻底慌了。（马特在所有电路瘫痪的时候还幽默地说：“半个北美都上不了Facebook了。”）

If Ryan is to survive, she must augment everything she's recently learned with all the courage at her command. Before that, though, this wounded woman must replenish her will to live; that process is visualized through a silent, exquisitely grave moment in which Ryan becomes her own star child. (The filmmakers, you'll be glad to know, hold out the slim prospect of her making it back to Earth through a deliciously unlikely set of circumstances. She isn't quite doomed to exit the solar system, as Voyager 1 did last year.)

赖恩要活下去，就必须用她仅存的全部勇气去强化她刚刚学到的一切。然而在这之前，这个负伤女人必须坚定活下去的决心。这个心理历程通过描绘赖恩突然变得孤立无援这个无声而细腻的凝重时刻呈现出来。（你会高兴地看到，导演安排了一系列美妙的小概率事件，保留了她返回地球的微弱希望。她并不像去年的“旅行者1号”那样一样，铁定了要脱离太阳系。）

Until now, a Sandra Bullock film often turned on spunk or rue. The rue was a result of the loneliness that afflicted many of her characters, and became a vital ingredient of her hugely successful comedies. (My first column for the Journal, in 1995, reviewed her in 'While You Were Sleeping,' and noted the script's unlikely effort 'to convince us that this lovely young woman, this vivid life spirit with a lyrical smile, can't make friends, can't get a date.') The spunk found its finest expression in Jan de Bont's 'Speed,' an action classic that worked as well as it did largely because Ms. Bullock's Annie was so smart and endearing, as well as terrified at finding herself behind the wheel of a bomb-laden bus.

桑德拉?布洛克以前饰演的影片常常表现出勇气或悲伤的主题。悲伤源自她所演的很多角色深受其苦的那种孤独，这也是其大获成功的喜剧片中的一个关键元素。（我在1995年为《华尔街日报》撰写的第一篇专栏评论了她在《二见钟情》(While You Were Sleeping)里面的表演，提到电影剧本曾似乎徒劳地试图“让我们相信这位可爱的姑娘、这个有着灿烂笑容的活泼精灵竟然交不到朋友，找不到对象”。）勇气元素在扬?德?邦特(Jan de Bont)执导的经典动作片《生死时速》(Speed)里面得到了最精妙的表达。《生死时速》之所以那么优秀，很大程度上归因于布洛克饰演的安妮(Annie)是如此的聪明、讨人喜欢，而在发现自己开的巴士上安有炸弹时又是如此惊恐。

Two decades after 'Speed,' Ms. Bullock has found the perfect receptacle for her humor and intelligence: Ryan's courage is matched by her intellect. She still does her trademarked rue, particularly at the outset, when the novice astronaut can barely keep her lunch down during her first spacewalk. And she's still movie-star youthful, maybe more so than ever since her character's energy is so tightly tied to physical action. (One of the movie's myriad achievements is portraying Ryan's strength and athletic beauty without making her a sexual object.) Best of all, though, Ms. Bullock has replaced the spunk of her ardent youth with a complex woman's depth of spirit. It's the best performance of her career.

饰演《生死时速》20年之后，布洛克的幽默与机智找到了完美的展现机会：赖恩具备的不只是勇气，还有与之相称的智慧。她仍然表现了特有的悲伤，特别是在刚开始当这位新宇航员第一次太空行走差点把午饭吐出来的时候。她依然像电影明星般年轻，甚至可能显得更加年轻，因为她所演角色的活力是如此充分地体现在身体的动作当中。（影片的无数成就之一在于，它展示了赖恩的力量与健美，但并没有将她刻画成一个性对象。）然而最棒的地方在于，布洛克用一种成熟女人的精神深度取代她热血青年时期的勇敢。这是她从艺以来最好的表演。

Mr. Clooney is movie-star charismatic, even in a subordinate role, a feat that he manages almost entirely with his voice, since he's encased in spacewalk wardrobe from start to finish. His character isn't there for complexity. Matt's wisecracks, his corny stories, his swashbuckling expertise and, ultimately, his gallantry are all canny components of the movie's broad appeal.

克鲁尼星光四射，哪怕他只是扮演配角。他的演技几乎完全依靠声音来体现，因为自始至终他都穿着太空服。他演的角色不是为了让影片更显复杂。马特的插科打诨、老套故事、咋呼本领以及最后临危不乱的勇气都是影片整体魅力的巧妙组成部分。

The script, by the director, Mr. Cuaron, and his son Jonas Cuaron, is as shrewd as it is inventive. Matt gets a few lines, and deeds, of heart-stopping grace. 'You should see the sun on the Ganges,' he tells Ryan from a receding position in the void, thereby evoking, in eight words, the wonder of life on Earth. Mainly, though, he's very funny, a carefree cowboy on the high frontier, and his humor serves as welcome relief in a tale of barely endurable suspense -- one that's told with startling compression in the course of 90 minutes. Objections have been raised in scientific quarters to the depiction of the international space station as being in proximity to the Hubble Space Telescope; they're actually in different orbits. This isn't nitpicking, since that proximity figures importantly in the plot, but it isn't a cardinal sin against science either; no one would mistake this movie for a planetarium lecture.

导演卡隆和他的儿子乔纳斯?卡隆(Jonas Cuaron)共同写就的剧本既新奇又圆熟。马特的一些台词和动作优美得让人心醉。“你应该看看恒河上空的太阳，”他在无垠空间渐行渐远时对赖恩说。寥寥几个词，就让人联想起地球生活的美好。但他主要还是一个非常有趣的人、一个无忧无虑的太空牛仔。在一个几乎难以忍受的悬念故事中──情节在90分钟里令人极度压抑地展开──，这个角色让人感到难得的放松。影片里面国际空间站与哈勃望远镜距离很近，这一点曾引起科学界的反对，因为两者实际上是处于不同的轨道。这并不是一个小毛病，因为故事情节的展开非常倚重于这种近距离的场景设计。不过它也没有对科学犯下重罪，毕竟没有谁会把这种片子当作一场天文讲座。

Watching the tale unfold, you're truly awe-struck, but you can't help wondering from time to time how they did it. (Though the movie is loud, don't bother bringing earplugs. The sound design is hypnotic, most of all when Ryan struggles in tight spaces, and essential to the experience.) 'Gravity' is the culmination of a yearslong collaboration between a visionary filmmaker and a team of artists and technicians who had to invent elaborate new tools in the service of that vision. Chief among them are the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (he devised a radically new LED lighting system that came to be called The Sarcophagus); the production designer, Andy Nicholson; the visual effects supervisor, Tim Webber, and the editor, in conjunction with Mr. Cuaron, Mark Sanger. The 3-D photography is effective, sometimes stunningly so, but never calls undue attention to itself.

随着故事情节的展开，你会感受到真切的震撼，但时不时地，你又会忍不住思考他们是怎么做到的。（电影声音很大，但观众并不用戴耳塞。音效设计令人沉醉，特别是赖恩在密闭空间里挣扎的时候，这种设计对这个场景至关重要。）《地心引力》是一位想象力丰富的导演同一群艺术家、技术人员多年合作的巅峰之作。为了展现出这种想象力，这些技术人员不得不发明出各种精良的新工具。代表人物有摄像师伊曼纽尔?卢贝茨基(Emmanuel Lubezki)（他设计出一台全新的LED照明系统，后来被称为“石棺”(The Sarcophagus)）；制作指导安迪?尼科尔森(Andy Nicholson)；视觉效果总监蒂姆?韦伯(Tim Webber)；以及与卡隆共同担任剪辑的马克?桑格(Mark Sanger)。3D效果非常出色，有时甚至让人惊叹，但它本身从不喧宾夺主。

What you're watching at any given moment is likely to be partly or wholly animated. Long may flesh-and-blood actors thrive, but in the new world of tech-heavy productions they're only one of many elements in the FX mix. 'Gravity' floats on the shoulders of the Pixar giants -- especially 'The Incredibles,' which showed that computer animation could do almost anything live action can do, and 'WALL-E,' with its mysteriously somber opening sequence (and with its comic use of a fire extinguisher, which is put to very different use in 'Gravity'). The greatest artistic debt, of course, is owed to Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' which dared to use silence, serenity and space -- screen space as well as space space -- as never before.

观众在任何时刻看到的内容，很可能都是部分或完全的电脑特效。靠血肉之躯拼搏的演员可能还会红火很久，但在大量利用科技拍片的新世界里，他们只是特效组合中的诸多元素之一。《地心引力》站在皮克斯动画巨片──特别是《超人总动员》(The Incredibles)和《机器人总动员》(WALL-E)──的肩膀之上：《超人总动员》证明，现场表演能做的电脑动画几乎都能做；《机器人总动员》则是以一种神秘莫测的阴郁开场（且带有喜剧色彩地用了一台灭火器；《地心引力》中也用到灭火器，但用途大不相同。）但影片中艺术上最大的借鉴，还是来自于斯坦利?库布里克(Stanley Kubrick)执导的《2001太空漫游》(2001: A Space Odyssey)对沉寂、宁静和空白──太空里的空白以及银幕上的空白──的突破性运用。

Long before 'Gravity' went into production, it was choreographed to the nth degree. Yet there's a sense of everything happening spontaneously, of surreal freedom plus a fearful randomness that unleashes those debris storms. The newness is more than a function of the motion. We've never seen such striking images of the structures our species has built in space. When we're inside them, objects float, willy-nilly, with tiny lives of their own. (How odd that one of Sandra Bullock's films was called 'Hope Floats.') A movie has never brought us this close to tasting oxygen. (Or feeling mud.) And the randomness can be poetic. In the midst of that long and frightening radio silence, Ryan hears a staticky voice in an Earth language not her own, accompanied by laughter and a baby's cries. Hope floats indeed.

《地心引力》在投入拍摄之前很久就经过了反复的编排。但它给人一种一切都自然发生的感觉，给人一种超现实的自由感，和一种恐怖的随机感（太空垃圾风暴无端爆发）。其新颍之处不止于它对“运动”的诠释。我们从来没有见过如此震撼的画面描绘人类在太空建造的那些东西。当我们进入这些建造物的内部时，物体乱七八糟地漂浮着，各有各的弱小生命。（巧合的是桑德拉?布洛克演过的一部片子就叫《希望漂浮》(Hope Floats，一般译作《真爱告白》)）。从来没有哪部影片让我们如此接近于品尝氧气（或触摸泥土）。而随机性也可以是诗意的。在那段漫长而可怖的无线电静默期间，赖恩听到一串带杂音的语音，讲着地球上一种不是其母语的语言，伴随着笑声和婴儿的哭声。确实是希望在漂浮。

In the immediate future, 'Gravity' is certain to find appreciative audiences all over the world; it speaks the language of big-screen action with surpassing eloquence, and comes to a climax as thrilling as any movie lover could wish for. No one can predict what impact it will have on the movies' future, but consider what the film already represents -- the conjunction, within the studio system, of a singular cinema artist and a full array of Hollywood's most advanced filmmaking tools.

在不远的将来，《地心引力》在全世界各个地方肯定都会遇到知音观众；它无比流畅地讲着大屏幕动作片的语言，而且对于任何电影爱好者来说，其高潮部分都是要多爽有多爽。谁都无法预知它将对电影业的未来产生什么样的影响，但你不妨想想这部影片已经代表着什么──片场制下一名非凡电影艺术家与好莱坞全系列最先进制片工具的结合。

It's remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that Mr. Cuaron ever got the gig. He's no stranger to technology, having directed 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' and 'Children of Men,' but he's not James Cameron, with a long history of technical virtuosity and hugely profitable action adventures. More remarkable still, he has been able to translate his vision into a film that shows the world, and the filmmaking world, what wondrous new things big studio films can do. All too often in the recent past, Hollywood's most magical tools have fallen into the hands of sorcerers' apprentices who perpetrate the same old succession of explosions, car crashes and fireballs. 'Gravity' was made by a sorcerer.

细细思量，你会觉得卡隆有机会执导这部片子是一件难得的事。他导过《哈利?波特与阿兹卡班的囚徒》(Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)和《人类之子》(Children of Men)，所以对技术并不陌生，但他毕竟不是多年玩转技术、拍摄高利润动作冒险片的詹姆斯?卡梅隆(James Cameron)。更加难得的地方在于，他能够把自己的想象转化成电影，向全世界以及电影界展示大制片厂能够做出些什么样的新奇产品。近期历史上，好莱坞最具魔力的工具常常落入魔术师的学徒手里，爆炸、撞车、火球那一套被他们周而复始地玩弄。《地心引力》则是魔术师亲自打造的作品。