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Gravity derives much of its strength from what it lacks. It's an action-adventure, but one with no bombs or chases or guns. Russian and Chinese spacecraft figure in the narrative, but geopolitical tensions do not. There's no enemy but space itself, in all its beauty and terror. There's not even much in the way of dialogue, and we get a good look at only two characters.
But there's a third character in Gravity, according to Cuarón, though she may be invisible at first. "The camera is neither an objective observer nor Sandra's subjective POV--the camera is a third astronaut, and that astronaut is the audience," Cuarón says. "The audience is floating in space, following these characters who are bonded by the loss of physics in zero gravity, floating and rolling and spinning. The idea is to immerse the audience so that your emotional experience is projected onto the screen in a primal way." That may be Cuarón's greatest trick: to wow viewers with a spectacle that seems to have sprung from their own imagination.