An OK movie hidden beneath layers Hollywood hype

Rating: 6/10 (21 November 2013)

I saw Gravity last night in 3D and I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it. I enjoyed it as a piece of fluff, but at no point did I feel I was watching greatness.
For a start, I think the *ahem* "professional" film critics must either be a) on the studio's payroll, or b) so highly trained in the film reviewing art that they're seeing something in this film that I'm not, or c) they're so totally caught up in the Hollywood hype and nonsense themselves that they completely overlook the many failings. I personally believe it's the latter.
Lots of people have complained about the simplistic plot - personally I'm absolutely fine with that as not every movie needs to have layers and layers of complexity. It's a simple story covering a couple of hours of the lives two space technicians who's mission goes belly-up. Fine.
What's far LESS fine, are the blatantly stupid things that are in place. For example, Bullock's character (Stone) having had a mere 6 months training before being sent off to fix the Hubble. Stone not being remotely mentally up to the task due to a family trauma that is still clearly affecting her. Stone being allowed into space despite (apparently) crashing her simulator EVERY SINGLE TIME. Stone being able to operate not only American space vessels, but also (rather handily) Russian and Chinese ones too : apparently while she was crashing her American sim all the time, she was also doing crash-courses in foreign space tech too.
Then there's Clooney's character, Kowalski. A typical (for the movies anyway) wise-cracking (yet stoic in the face of danger) all-American heroic-type, with either a cheeky chat-up line for the girls, or a tension-breaking one-liner, who is always calm and controlled in the face of certain death. "My god, that's beautiful - the sun on the Ganges" says Kowalski as he slowly drifts off to death by suffocation. Also there is no way on Earth Kowalski would fly round and round the shuttle and the Hubble with his jetpack like he does for the first 15 mins of the movie. There is no way he'd waste the fuel, or risk a collision like that. No way. Same goes for the other astronaut leaping up off the shuttle to be stopped by his tether just for a laugh. Space is the most hostile place mankind has ever been, so clowning around to that extent just wouldn't happen.
Then there is all the nonsense of the space debris being visible coming towards them, even though it's moving "faster than a bullet". OK, so it's just done for dramatic effect, but in a movie supposedly being a realistic depiction of space, it's a little annoying.
Then there's the issue of the fact that despite being in space, everything is in apparently in the same plane and incredible close to each other - the ISS, the CSS, the shuttle, the debris field - all on the one plane and within a couple of hundred miles for each other. Useful to the story no doubt, but implausible in the extreme.
Then there's the re-entry sequence. Why does the rest of the CSS burn up (as it would), whilst Stone's re-entry pod somehow manages to orientate itself (despite being effectively blown off the disintegrating space station) so that it's heat shield is at the correct angle? And then the landing in the water where she nearly drowns, nearly gets stuck in some kelp (people were actually laughing in the cinema at that point!), before emerging helpfully close to land, and helpfully in a warm climate considering she's only wearing hot pants and a vest.
The CGI was OK - not sure where all the rave review are coming from about that to be honest. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn't strike me as truly ground-breaking either.
That said, (and I realise this review has seemed overly negative), I didn't dislike it is as a piece of entertainment. It's simple, reasonably well executed and with the right amount of tension to be worth an hour and a half of your time. For the movie alone I'd give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, but I'm knocking a point or two off for the idiotically sycophantic "professional" critic's reviews. 5 overall.