Proof that originality is dead

Rating: 1/10 (31 January 2014)

First off... I didn't go into this film with very high expectations, and that's probably why I wasn't as disappointed when the credits started. It is a visually stunning film, don't get me wrong there, but mercy is it an easy to skip movie. The plot is simple, and so is everything else. Bullock and Clooney are a pair of astronauts repairing Hubble when Houston gives word that the Russians launched a missile to destroy an old satellite which creates a mess of debris circling the earth at 20,000MPH. Of course if you watched the trailer you know that the debris hits and strands the two hapless stars in orbit high above earth with no way home. And that's when the frustration set in.
I used to say that any great actor/actress could save a horrible script. This was simply not the case. Bullock is great, but she gets very annoying in this film- and her character is about as dumb as a brick. Clooney babbles incessantly about nonsense for a good portion of the film, and doesn't act like a professional astronaut. The dialog is often laughable and way too candid to be realistic at all. Now I have to go back and watch some of these two actors' better films just to wash the nasty taste out of my mouth.
Speaking of realism... Some of the things Bullock's character does in this film teeter on the verge of what you'd see in a bad video game. Without giving anything away I'll just say that the viewers are exposed to three "stunts" (it's all CGI anyway) repeated a few times. It's as if the writers liked how one dilemma looked, repeat, did another dilemma, and repeat. Not to mention the complete lack of scientific research as to what happens in the vacuum of space.
DO NOT READ THIS PART AS IT CONTAINS A SPOILER... You've been warned. In the end, I reflected that this movie was silly, unrealistic, I didn't sympathize with the character at all, and I thought that Sandra Bullock's character is the luckiest person in the history of humanity... 5 times over! Only luck could have brought her to the end, as she makes one miraculous life-saving maneuver after another that in the real world would have left her cold and dead in the empty vastness of space.
This movie flat out sucked. If you want a good space film, check out Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff.