Straps connecting astronauts to the relative security of their spacecraft are severed. The accidental explosion of a communications satellite silences Houston and, what’s worse, sends a blizzard of shrapnel hurtling toward the astronauts. It has been a long time since a filmmaker conjured the awe of “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the terror of “Alien” or captured afresh the spooky wonder of a trip outside our native atmosphere. After more than 50 years, space travel has lost some of its luster, and movies are partly to blame for our jadedness. But the main challenge facing the director, Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the script with his son Jonás), is not visualizing the unimaginable so much as overcoming the audience’s assumption that we’ve seen it all before. The defiance of impossibility is this movie’s theme and its reason for being.

(Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in spacesuits, as Mission Specialist Ryan Stone and Mission Commander Matt Kowalski Ed Harris, unseen and unnamed, as “Houston” down below).

Those tiny figures bouncing around on that floating contraption - it looks like a mobile suspended from a child’s bedroom ceiling - are people. As our eyes (from behind 3-D glasses) adjust to the vast darkness, illuminated by streaks of sunlight refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere, we detect movement that is recognizably human and hear familiar voices. “Life in space is impossible.” That stark statement of scientific fact is one of the first things to appear on screen in “Gravity,” but before long, it is contradicted, or at least complicated.

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