《地心引力》:藝術與技術的完美結合

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.

從19世紀中葉以來我們接觸了這樣那樣的“運動影像”（即電影），但還沒有一部可與《地心引力》相提並論。阿方索?卡隆(Alfonso Cuaron)執導的這部3D太空探險片，其新潁之處就在於它“運動”的性質。影片看起來就好像電影這種媒介掙脫了一切束縛，在一連串令人眼花繚亂的失重夢境中翩翩起舞。

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.

像很多扣人心絃的夢境一樣，這一個夢境既充滿了美感，也充斥着原始的恐懼，除了墜落，還有被拋起、甩出、脫離地球懷抱的恐懼。兩名宇航員──喬治?克魯尼(George Clooney)飾演的馬特?科瓦爾斯基(Matt Kowalski)和桑德拉?布洛克(Sandra Bullock)飾演的賴恩?斯通(Ryan Stone)──在一次航天任務中出艙修復哈勃望遠鏡(Hubble Telescope)時，遭遇災難性事故，之後他們便漂浮在太空。他們起初拴在一起，但身體完全失控地不停翻轉，他們努力恢復平衡、節約氧氣，終於在宇宙中一個不知名的地方找到了生存之所。馬特是一名資深宇航員，生性樂觀健談，這一點可能幫助他忘掉了過去的不愉快感受。賴恩是新手，一位沒受過多少宇航訓練的醫藥工程師，從驚慌到恐懼，從悲痛到堅強、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.

影片一開始我們就產生了敬畏之情。開場是一段12分鐘一氣呵成的情節：馬特、賴恩、巨大的望遠鏡和帶他們上去的航天飛機，寧靜地漂浮在一個巨大的、懸浮着的地球之上，直到一切突然變成了該死的太空碎片。牛頓運動定律在接下來發生的混亂中依然存在，違背定律的是攝像機。它的運動有別於以往的任何電影攝像機──行雲流水地轉圈、滑行，逾越了界線和電影常規。它一度移近賴恩，穿透她的頭盔，也未在面罩上稍作停留，而是徑直去審視她滿臉的極度驚恐。

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.)

與這部一流電影相得益彰的是，賴恩是一位不平凡的女主角。她曾蒙受失去親人的痛苦，這種痛苦在她絕望的當下引起了強烈迴響；在這次充滿刺激的任務之前，她經歷的只是地球上的平凡生活。她在專業領域內出類拔萃，一定超乎常人，但由於宇航訓練不足，當混亂不僅籠罩她的航天飛機，更籠罩了天外社區裏一整層軌道空間站和通信衛星的時候，她徹底慌了。（馬特在所有電路癱瘓的時候還幽默地說：“半個北美都上不了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.)

賴恩要活下去，就必須用她僅存的全部勇氣去強化她剛剛學到的一切。然而在這之前，這個負傷女人必須堅定活下去的決心。這個心理歷程通過描繪賴恩突然變得孤立無援這個無聲而細膩的凝重時刻呈現出來。（你會高興地看到，導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。她並不像去年的“旅行者1號”那樣一樣，鐵定了要脫離太陽系。）

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?布洛克以前飾演的影片常常表現出勇氣或悲傷的主題。悲傷源自她所演的很多角色深受其苦的那種孤獨，這也是其大獲成功的喜劇片中的一個關鍵元素。（我在1995年爲《華爾街日報》撰寫的第一篇專欄評論了她在《二見鍾情》(While You Were Sleeping)裏面的表演，提到電影劇本曾似乎徒勞地試圖“讓我們相信這位可愛的姑娘、這個有着燦爛笑容的活潑精靈竟然交不到朋友，找不到對象”。）勇氣元素在揚?德?邦特(Jan de Bont)執導的經典動作片《生死時速》(Speed)裏面得到了最精妙的表達。《生死時速》之所以那麼優秀，很大程度上歸因於布洛克飾演的安妮(Annie)是如此的聰明、討人喜歡，而在發現自己開的巴士上安有炸彈時又是如此驚恐。

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.

飾演《生死時速》20年之後，布洛克的幽默與機智找到了完美的展現機會：賴恩具備的不只是勇氣，還有與之相稱的智慧。她仍然表現了特有的悲傷，特別是在剛開始當這位新宇航員第一次太空行走差點把午飯吐出來的時候。她依然像電影明星般年輕，甚至可能顯得更加年輕，因爲她所演角色的活力是如此充分地體現在身體的動作當中。（影片的無數成就之一在於，它展示了賴恩的力量與健美，但並沒有將她刻畫成一個性對象。）然而最棒的地方在於，布洛克用一種成熟女人的精神深度取代她熱血青年時期的勇敢。這是她從藝以來最好的表演。

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.

克魯尼星光四射，哪怕他只是扮演配角。他的演技幾乎完全依靠聲音來體現，因爲自始至終他都穿着太空服。他演的角色不是爲了讓影片更顯複雜。馬特的插科打諢、老套故事、咋呼本領以及最後臨危不亂的勇氣都是影片整體魅力的巧妙組成部分。

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.

導演卡隆和他的兒子喬納斯?卡隆(Jonas Cuaron)共同寫就的劇本既新奇又圓熟。馬特的一些臺詞和動作優美得讓人心醉。“你應該看看恆河上空的太陽，”他在無垠空間漸行漸遠時對賴恩說。寥寥幾個詞，就讓人聯想起地球生活的美好。但他主要還是一個非常有趣的人、一個無憂無慮的太空牛仔。在一個幾乎難以忍受的懸念故事中──情節在90分鐘裏令人極度壓抑地展開──，這個角色讓人感到難得的放鬆。影片裏面國際空間站與哈勃望遠鏡距離很近，這一點曾引起科學界的反對，因爲兩者實際上是處於不同的軌道。這並不是一個小毛病，因爲故事情節的展開非常倚重於這種近距離的場景設計。不過它也沒有對科學犯下重罪，畢竟沒有誰會把這種片子當作一場天文講座。

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.

隨着故事情節的展開，你會感受到真切的震撼，但時不時地，你又會忍不住思考他們是怎麼做到的。（電影聲音很大，但觀衆並不用戴耳塞。音效設計令人沉醉，特別是賴恩在密閉空間裏掙扎的時候，這種設計對這個場景至關重要。）《地心引力》是一位想象力豐富的導演同一羣藝術家、技術人員多年合作的巔峯之作。爲了展現出這種想象力，這些技術人員不得不發明出各種精良的新工具。代表人物有攝像師伊曼紐爾?盧貝茨基(Emmanuel Lubezki)（他設計出一臺全新的LED照明系統，後來被稱爲“石棺”(The Sarcophagus)）；製作指導安迪?尼科爾森(Andy Nicholson)；視覺效果總監蒂姆?韋伯(Tim Webber)；以及與卡隆共同擔任剪輯的馬克?桑格(Mark Sanger)。3D效果非常出色，有時甚至讓人驚歎，但它本身從不喧賓奪主。

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.

觀衆在任何時刻看到的內容，很可能都是部分或完全的電腦特效。靠血肉之軀拼搏的演員可能還會紅火很久，但在大量利用科技拍片的新世界裏，他們只是特效組合中的諸多元素之一。《地心引力》站在皮克斯動畫巨片──特別是《超人總動員》(The Incredibles)和《機器人總動員》(WALL-E)──的肩膀之上：《超人總動員》證明，現場表演能做的電腦動畫幾乎都能做；《機器人總動員》則是以一種神祕莫測的陰鬱開場（且帶有喜劇色彩地用了一臺滅火器；《地心引力》中也用到滅火器，但用途大不相同。）但影片中藝術上最大的借鑑，還是來自於斯坦利?庫布裏克(Stanley Kubrick)執導的《2001太空漫遊》(2001: A Space Odyssey)對沉寂、寧靜和空白──太空裏的空白以及銀幕上的空白──的突破性運用。

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》在投入拍攝之前很久就經過了反覆的編排。但它給人一種一切都自然發生的感覺，給人一種超現實的自由感，和一種恐怖的隨機感（太空垃圾風暴無端爆發）。其新潁之處不止於它對“運動”的詮釋。我們從來沒有見過如此震撼的畫面描繪人類在太空建造的那些東西。當我們進入這些建造物的內部時，物體亂七八糟地漂浮着，各有各的弱小生命。（巧合的是桑德拉?布洛克演過的一部片子就叫《希望漂浮》(Hope Floats，一般譯作《真愛告白》)）。從來沒有哪部影片讓我們如此接近於品嚐氧氣（或觸摸泥土）。而隨機性也可以是詩意的。在那段漫長而可怖的無線電靜默期間，賴恩聽到一串帶雜音的語音，講着地球上一種不是其母語的語言，伴隨着笑聲和嬰兒的哭聲。確實是希望在漂浮。

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.

在不遠的將來，《地心引力》在全世界各個地方肯定都會遇到知音觀衆；它無比流暢地講着大屏幕動作片的語言，而且對於任何電影愛好者來說，其高潮部分都是要多爽有多爽。誰都無法預知它將對電影業的未來產生什麼樣的影響，但你不妨想想這部影片已經代表着什麼──片場制下一名非凡電影藝術家與好萊塢全系列最先進製片工具的結合。

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.

細細思量，你會覺得卡隆有機會執導這部片子是一件難得的事。他導過《哈利?波特與阿茲卡班的囚徒》(Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)和《人類之子》(Children of Men)，所以對技術並不陌生，但他畢竟不是多年玩轉技術、拍攝高利潤動作冒險片的詹姆斯?卡梅隆(James Cameron)。更加難得的地方在於，他能夠把自己的想象轉化成電影，向全世界以及電影界展示大製片廠能夠做出些什麼樣的新奇產品。近期歷史上，好萊塢最具魔力的工具常常落入魔術師的學徒手裏，爆炸、撞車、火球那一套被他們周而復始地玩弄。《地心引力》則是魔術師親自打造的作品。