Spoiler:
Maybe she should’ve been taken out by a lion as she was getting her land legs back.
I’m going to be “that guy”. I thought it was an ok movie at best. Neither Clooney’s or Bullock’s characters grabbed me in any way. Maybe it was it’s because I had already read how “amazing” this movie was, and was expecting something else. I’m not a huge fan of over the top CGI, so I certainly wasn’t expecting some kind of Avengeresque CGI extravaganza.
It had it’s moments, mostly the depiction of the emptiness and harshness of space, and the panic moments were enough to raise the blood pressure, but neither the characters nor the story were all that interesting, beyond, “shit went bad, how do we get home”.
FYI, Children of Men is one of my favorite movies, so I was a little disappointed. I know I’m probably in the minority here, but it ended, and my first thought was “that was it?”
I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. The one point i wonder about that I have seen none of the debunkers mention yet, are the controls of a soyuz labeled in russian nad english in real life? or just russian?
I have no problem with artistic license and can completely suspend disbelief in a movie. But one thing really bothers me in the trailer: They are tethered together and when the tether catches it immediately snaps at one of the connectors. I can go to the hardware store and buy a cheap nylon strap and a carabiner that has “not for fall protection” stamped on the side, and I bet it would STILL hold up to the force demonstrated in that scene. NASA can’t afford actual nylon webbing and titanium carabiners so they use tissue paper and twit-ties? Really? The science can get deep enough fast enough for me to not be able to tell if much of it is true or not, but that’s just stupid. Is it nit picking? Yeah, but why go to all the trouble they did for this movie, and then leave in something as silly as that?
A great film in many ways, but fundamentally flawed: one can’t set up a terrifyingly perfect Rube Goldberg machine (here, the concept of humans being fucked with by space) only to give that machine a few escape hatches and secret levers to pull on when things get tough . . . or worse, when the filmmakers need a certain emotion or feeling to happen onscreen and are willing to violate the whole setup and concept of their movie to do so. It’s not just that the film violates the laws of science when, say, Bullock stops drifting when she lets go of Clooney (LOL LOL LOL LOL, sorry, but really, folks, damn). It violates the laws of cinema and of art as well: the laws of plausibility, suspense, and action, that things happen in a story for a reason, that actions have consequences, and, critically, that emotion, drama, and pathos arise naturally from the scenario and how it plays out, and are not injected into the story because we’re a half hour in and it’s time to make the audience cry.
That said, got-damn, what a movie. Cuarón is the best creator of visual poetry since maybe Tarkovsky: Bullock in the airlock-womb, the Christ/Buddha icons on the respective ships, using Bullock’s breath-smudge as a 3D element, my word. These miracles, for me, raised the film above the physics boners, which are legion: I just wish the Cuaróns and their science advisor had applied greater rigor to some of the physics. Kowalski, you not only didn’t have to die: your death made neither physical nor dramatic sense, and that’s a shame.
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