What Do I Do Now, Ma?

Rating: 6/10 (13 July 2014)

A team of four astronauts is out in space repairing some floating piece of American technology. The team is led by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. Oops -- force majeur. An accident elsewhere in the sky sends an invidious junk yard of space debris hurtling in their direction. They can't escape it, and two of the team are killed as their entry vehicle is destroyed.
This leaves Bullock and Clooney spinning around without any way of returning to earth without getting burned up by the atmosphere. Clooney's solution: He tethers Bullock's space suit to the mobile chair he occupies and they head towards a nearby, abandoned Soyuz that has a workable re-entry system, as well as oxygen.
Bullock makes it. Clooney sacrifices himself, making cheerful wisecracks as he glides off in the general direction of Betelgeuse. Bullock is some kind of engineer and lacks confidence but she becomes resourceful. In the empty but pressurized Soyuz she has the good sense to strip off that hampering space suit so we can see her floating around in a tank top and a pair of tight black shorts.
Alas, the space debris comes whipping around in its orbit and bangs into the Soyuz and it tumbles around and Bullock dons a drab Russian space suit and launches a pod towards an old, decaying Chinese space station, and everything is whipped around as Newton's laws prevail, things are spun and bumped around like pin balls, there are loud thumps and WHOOMS, and I don't know what all.
We've seen danger in modern space stories before. "Marooned" and the like. They're all kind of interesting if they're at all well done. They raise provocative questions like "What the hell are we DOING out here where there is no IHOP?" This movie gets underneath all that tension but it does so too extravagantly. The viewer is overwhelmed by the (very good) computer-generated images. And, if nothing else, the musical score will pound you into insensibility. It's full of weird sounds, eerie noises barely heard, ominous electronic chords, drums beating faster than a sprinter's heart. And it's loud.
Stripped to its armature, what we have is one of those journey movies in which the lost person or persons must find their way from one watering hole to the next, hoping to hit the town or the railroad, as they plod through the desert and get bitten by rattlesnakes and stuck by vicious cholla. John Ford's "Three Godfathers" is a good example.
It's entertaining enough and sometimes thrilling. Clooney is such a likable guy, no matter his film character. And Sandra Bullock looks choice in a short haircut and short shorts. Can she really be fifty this year? She doesn't bring that much to the role. How could she? There is one touching moment when she is preparing to die and listens to an Eskimo singing a faint lullaby on the radio, but calls mostly for gasps and brief, breathless monologues. However, she speaks German flawlessly and I give her a bonus point for that. I give the movie a bonus point, too, for not being nearly as dumbed-down as most recent Hollywood productions, although this will challenge no one's sensibilities.