Entertaining, modern disaster movie.

Rating: 6/10 (9 March 2014)

To have yourself entertained for approx. 90 minutes the movie just works perfectly fine, containing all the usual clichés.
Pity the age of movies that build up a story seems to be gone. We are almost immediately in midst the action: Why is a medical doctor repairing the Hubble telescope? Who are these people? So I didn't care much about the other guy in the background to have a piece of debris shot through his brain. Nor did I care, other than pure curiosity if the usual clichés will be broken, about the fate of Kowalski and Stone.
It's perfectly all right to drop some realism for drama, so it doesn't bother me that e.g. the astronauts don't wear diapers under the space suit. Yet other stuff irritates me, e.g. various (expensive) space stations have been evacuated and are under threat of destruction, and the only guy she is able to communicate with is some drunken amateur radio operator in the tundra?!
I didn't know much about the story when I went to watch Gravity. I expected it to be more about drifting helpless in space rather than racing from one doomed space station to the next one.
The movie would have gained a lot by a slower pace: Build up story and characters, so the viewer cares about the people involved. And some more suspense instead of action.
One further remark: It is definitely not a science fiction movie, but a disaster/action drama. For a good recent SciFi movie stick to Sunshine, which is way too underrated.