After a critically acclaimed Broadway turn earlier this year and another hit movie under her belt (Iron Man 2), Scarlett Johansson has at last picked up a new film gig. The New York Daily News reports that she’ll co-star in Alfonso Cuaron’s planned 3D sci-fi opus Gravity with Robert Downey Jr., who was set for the film a few months back.
Johansson has reportedly “verbally agreed” to play “a woman who attempts to make her way back to earth after a satellite crash sets off a chain reaction of further crashes.” Based on that short description, I would assume that Downey Jr. will be her man back on Earth that she’s trying to get back to. While I felt that Iron Man 2 was among the worst of Summer 2010, I know that both Johansson and Downey are top-quality performers and they deserve a chance to make up for the dismal Marvel sequel with a film of significantly higher quality like Gravity promises to be.
Though we now know who will topline the film, little else has been revealed about it’s plot. Most of the attention that Gravity has gotten is a result of the ambitious visual style that Cuaron aims to deliver. The filmmaker has been claiming that it’s “the most ambitious film, technology-wise, since Avatar”, with a mind-blowing 20 minute take rumored to open the movie. The brain boggles over exactly what that 20-minute sequence would look like; with an incredibly talented director like Cuaron at the helm, who hasn’t made a film since 2006’s Children Of Men (which had it’s own set of stunning visuals), this could be a modern masterpiece in the making.
Gravity is scheduled to begin shooting later this summer for a tentative 2012 release.
Source: NY Daily News
