Krishna
You have to hand it over to this movie for the visuals. I think it is very hard to make a movie in which there are only two characters throughout (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) – and okay, the Indian accented voice of a third person. But just like Castaway, you do not even notice the passage of time. In fact, this is like a Castaway in space, where two, not one, persons are adrift.
My God, the visuals! Watch this movie in 3D if you can. The visuals take you right there, and make you feel that you are right there with them (without the need for a space suit of course). Even the view of the earth floating in the background (too big to be the pale blue dot famously alluded to by Carl Sagan but breathtakingly beautiful because of that) is awesome.
The story is a bit farfetched in parts. The story is about two astronauts working on the Space Stations (and therefore close to earth in space than they would be if they were travelling to the moon) caught in a shrapnel storm of debris caused by Russia destroying one (or more?) of its satellites which are past the end of their life,. This operation goes out of control when these hit and destroy other space objects, creating yet more shrapnel in a parody of a macabre billiard game of impinging balls.
I wonder if the contraption George uses to float around in space is anywhere near reality. I doubt it, but it is kind of cool. George plays the part of a wisecracking, funny, sympathetic astronaut but this movie is all about Sandra Bullock.
Wonderful scenes of her fight for survival, and the conditions of weightlessness in space and inside the spacecraft are fantastically portrayed. Even her tears at one point will not fall to “the ground” but float all over the spacecraft!
The Hollywood unreality creeps in and it is kind of both good and bad in my opinion. Good because it makes for good drama and you forget the passage of time. If those were not there, this would have felt like a documentary. Bad because the whole thing is so improbable. First, you have this premise that the debris storm hit them at almost no warning, though they knew of the destroyed satellites long ago, when it happened. (“They underestimated the time that these people had” is the lame explanation).
Second, everything goes wrong. Well, in Castaway, that is a real probability: his boat making efforts fail and he fails to attract the attention of the passing ship etc. Could happen, really. Here? Come on, with all the care taken to build space ships, one thing after the other seems to go wrong, not only with her own ship systems but also with the other Chinese space ship that she eventually reaches. Definitely improbable. But, like I said before, makes for good drama.
The ending? With the risk of giving a spoiler, I would say that she survives. Not much of a spoiler, it is almost de rigour for Hollywood movies. But the splashdown and the subsequent issues she faces is highly ridiculous. Again, taken to extreme for the sake of drama.
Finally, it is ironic that a Russian experiment caused the shrapnel and a Chinese spaceship played a part in the rescue while in reality, it is the Chinese who blew up, a year or so ago, one of their unused satellites in space, causing fear of space debris among the scientific community.
Improbable, it may be, highly dramatized, it may be, but the visuals are stunning, the movie races along without a moment of letting up, and keeps your eyes behind the 3D glasses glued to the screen at every moment. Also, it is not good to expect realism in a movie of this nature.
It is stunning to see, and definitely worth going to. I would give it a 7/10
— Krishna