a great experience

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2014)

I am going to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and then proceed by defending why exactly that is and why I disagree with some of the movies criticisms.
the big thing I hear is that this movie is not completely realistic, and that this can break the immersion of the film.
I agree with this for the most part, but the parts that were unrealistic didn't break the immersion(at least for me), they helped the story, and it was in fact some parts that ARE realistic that people have problems with, such as...
*Major Spoilers below*
1.the rope scene- while many say that this was a not accurate, I (and many as well) say that it is. the thing is that the astronauts are NOT at a standstill at this point, while many are assuming that they are. if you look off to the side of the screen during the scene you will notice that the parachute is still being dragged, and that the pair is still decelerating (relative to the space station of course). while you might not have WEIGHT in zero G, you still have mass and inertia, making thing move differently in space. once your start moving in one direction, you don't stop, now the rope was slowing them down, but it wasn't doing it fast enough, it was getting untangled and very probably both of them would've been lost. when clooney let go, he lowered the amount of time and energy needed to come to a stop by more than half- giving Sandra the chance to stop pull herself back in.
also some people are saying that the in space the sun is actually white and not yellow like in the film because it is our atmosphere that gives the sun its color. this argument actually tells how hard the filmmakers worked to make the film as true as it is, because the sun IS white- the part where it is not is during the sunrises, in other words, where the light travels through the atmosphere. you can actually see the color fade as the sun rises far past the earths horizon.
as far as the story goes, it got better as the film progressed. some had issues that the "weakest" survived, but this is the wrong way to look at it. Sandra was the character that grew the most; in the beginning she was ready to give up and die,but it was when all was lost and she was staring death in the face, that she found the will to live. the film also used metaphors to suggest that Sandra was not truly alive in the beginning, when she reached the first space station we see the womb scene, then throughout the movie she changes as a person.
*also clooney didn't come to visit sandra from the afterlife, her brain was oxygen deprived making hallucinations common, and clooney didn't tell her anything she didn't already know; this was just her brains way of reminding her
I also felt the re-entry scene was very powerful emotionally, and when Ryan landed on earth reborn, taking her fist steps as a new person, with a new look on life... well lets just say that I left the theater very satisfied indeed.