Visually stunning, so so story

Rating: 6/10 (21 October 2013)

I went into this with pretty high expectations after hearing all the hype and it getting an 8.6 on IMDb. I love Sci-Fi's, space flicks so this was definitely up my ally.
Visually this movie is pretty stunning. I've never seen so many beautiful pictures of the earth in a space movie. So in some sense it's similar to the old 2001 space odyssey or Avatar where it relies heavily on the visual aspect. But sadly for me I didn't find much more to it then that. The plot is very straight forward and for me seemed pretty hard to believe, even by "Hollywood" standards. I saw this in the theater thinking visually it would be one of those movies best seen on the big screen, and in that aspect it was as again there are scenes which are pretty stunning if you're at all into celestial scenery.
For me the story just got too unbelievable. It's not because she's a woman, but here you have Sandra's character, who is a green mission specialist, more or less a technician. Due to some chain reaction or something aboard a Russian satellite (of course, it's always the Russians right?) debris from it is flying around and disables their ship causing them to find another way home. My beef with this is think how big the earth is, well the orbit of earth is obviously much bigger, so we are to believe that some Russian satellite blows up presumably thousands of miles away yet in the entire vastness of the orbit of earth (think three dimensional here) that debris heads right in their path? And not once, not twice, but three times I think as it rotates around earth? So right there I was a bit turned off as nobody seems to really get how "BIG" space is. Anyway if that wasn't bad enough somehow this first gen mission specialist gets propelled into space, rescued via Clooney who's wearing a thruster pack, then they travel to some other space station, where she gets on board within seconds of Hypoxia killing her, and disaster immediately strikes, yet she can quickly launch and pilot the escape vessel to a Chinese space station, which is pummeling towards earth, which she enters and quickly figures out how to launch the escape pod to. Yeah okay...
Again the movie is "okay" by my standards, certainly not an 8.6 although visually it is great, but we've come to expect that nowadays with technology and CGI being what it is, so outside of that the story itself is basically your typical sinking ship overcoming incredible odds survival kind of story and that's about it. I won't be renting this when it comes out on disk and if I catch it sometime for free I might watch it again, so that's how it ranks in my book.