Truly amazing

Rating: 10/10 (25 November 2013)

Believe the hype this is an amazing film. It truly is. You may have seen survival films before but not like this. Go see it now.
Unlike many films set in space this focuses on realism. You'll find no aliens in this film, no laser guns and no space battles. Instead this shows us a snap shot of how astronauts working in space, notably the difficulty in operating in a completely hostile environment.
Many people will watch this film and love this visuals especially if seen in 3D. Whilst I agree it looks great in 3D seeing this in 2D would still be impressive. But even if the visuals weren't impressive this would still be a very memorable film.
I was mostly impressed with how space is presented; not as a beautiful, magical area with endless wonder, exploration and potential for adventure (like sailing the seven seas). But instead space is shown to be an environment where the slightest thing changing or going wrong results in death or the threat of death. Even with high degrees of safety and training we cannot control this environment. And the physics which applies to space I've had a concept of but never seen just how different it is to Earth is shown to be a danger itself. WOW.
Onto the characters. There is only two of them. And both do a great job with George Clooney easily portraying the calm, experienced astronaut; Sandra Bullock portraying the technical proficient and capable yet flawed and inexperienced astronaut. Well done to both of them for giving a very memorable performance.
Lastly I want to praise the running time of the film. Too often I see movies which run long because it is seen as best practice. The result is a drawn out story which can loose audience interest and therefore fail to entertain us. At 91 minutes long it absolutely captives you from start to finish. I would rather see a very concisely told story that is only 1.5 hours long than sit through a so-called 3 hour epic which is uninteresting, unnecessarily long and not entertaining in segments (e.g. The Hobbit).
Go see the film of 2013 today.