Very pretty, scientifically flawed

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2016)

Gorgeous CGI. I'm not sure what planet we were looking at. They said it was Earth; I'll take their word for it. It was beautiful, whatever it was.
I'm no astrophysicist, but even I noticed the glaring implausibility of it all. Physics in space just doesn't work that way, you guys. The detail in the spacecraft looks amazing, though. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but I dabble. And this is a visually stunning movie.
On to the not-so-good.
The writing was mediocre at best, and cringeworthy often. Thankfully, there were long stretches of silence where one could just admire the view. The writers made Clooney into the most plastic, voice-box action figure I've seen this side of a counterfeit bargain-bin GI Joe. That was quite an accomplishment. There wasn't much to like in Bullock, either; the generic Damsel in Distress trope we all outgrew when we hit puberty.
SPOILERS ahead: Also, hats off to the screen writers for their continued tireless efforts to vastly underestimate audience intelligence. Bullock: "Oxygen: 2%" Clooney: *randomly keeps her talking, using up more oxygen* Bullock: "My display is redlining!" *panics* Clooney: "You have about 5 minutes of air in your suit." ... "So where do you live?" ... "What are they doing at 8pm?" *more talking, more oxygen*
At first it seemed odd that Bullock's character was unprepared for emergencies in space, but maybe it's not totally impossible that a person could hide past trauma or mental instability during the screening process and become an astronaut -- I mean, we did have a prior astronaut pursue a coworker across the US in her diapers that one time. She kept her crazypants hidden for a while, so I guess that's technically possible. And does literally every member of the crew, including researchers, need to know how to use every piece of equipment that every country has floating up there? If that's so, it's no wonder we're still sitting down here eyeballing the stars. That said, the eenie-meenie-miney-moe thing was still a bit silly.
Interesting how, though the debris orbited the entire planet every 90 minutes, causing massive destruction to wherever the protagonists were when it hit, there was negligible damage to the next place they would go? The ISS (until the debris hit while Bullock was there, destroying it), the Tiangong-1 (same). Seems they should have been destroyed before they arrived. There were several mistakes like this that didn't take a scientist to notice, and I understand they consulted several. This is unfortunate, because it starts to drop you out of the story quite a lot. If you actually are a scientist, I'll bet it's quite maddening.
Clooney's death scene, while dramatic, was stupid and would make Newton kick grass. But I don't think any of us were really sad to see him go. Later, when he showed up at the Chinese station and climbed in, I was ready to believe it because the science had been so all over the place by then, I was thinking, sure, why the hell not just throw open the hatch to space and scream and breathe and not wear a seatbelt and be fine. Whatever.
Far and away the most egregiously, mind-numbingly, unforgivably stupid scene in the movie for me came toward the end when Bullock was jaunting to the plummeting space station. Whoever decided to go with the fire extinguisher scene from Wall-E should be demoted to donut boy/girl until they've had time to think about what they've done. That was beyond asinine. The re-entry hatch entering bit was implausible, but the Wall-E reference just made it ridiculous.
Overall, I've know I've been hard on it, but I do think this movie is worth watching. If you're nerdy or a science buff, it's likely to raise your hackles a bit here and there, and if you're a physicist or work in space sciences, you might actually hate it. But it's visually beautiful despite its flaws.