Vastly over-hyped CGI-fest

Rating: 1/10 (27 January 2014)

If you're easily distracted by shiny objects, sure, you'll love this movie - and hey, more power to you; it does look like a million bucks (well, lots of millions actually) no question about it. If, however, you like your entertainment having something resembling a plot and/or know anything at all about things moving around other things in space, you'll be brutally disappointed - the plot is thinner than a soap bubble and the science... well... let's just say there's nothing they do that doesn't break physics in some way.
I'm not going to try to pick apart every single thing here from why debris doesn't cascade like that to how shrapnel would either float past fairly harmlessly, zip past completely invisibly fast or not be in your orbit at all, to how there's no "tug" on a tether in space once all parties involved stopped moving relative to each other, to how you don't just skip between vastly different orbits at a whim etc; it's not any particular point when things get stretched thin, the whole wreck is running on pure fantasy from beginning to end. Others wrote at length about that already...
But therein lies the problem. There's suspension of disbelief, and there's mandatory lobotomy - this flick requires the latter, sadly. I have no problem with Warp drives in Star Trek or 1m long lasers in Star Wars - because they are admittedly fantasy worlds, never sold as "realistic", as something that is actually conceivably happening involving contemporary technology. "Gravity" on the other hand would have you believe just that - being in the same class as, say, "Apollo 13". Well, fat chance.
I mean, seriously - could you really watch, say, a police procedural allegedly set roughly in the present, in this universe where two cops in New York talk about taking the next lawnmower to Moscow with a straight face...? Would you really want to have your plot pivot on that...? If anything, that would be MORE realistic than the orbit-hopping-with-a-nearly-depleted-MMU-or-landing-rockets in "Gravity".
As far as I'm concerned, all the shiny FX in the world are completely worthless if the movie systematically makes it impossible for me to suspend disbelief, and doesn't at least attempt to reward me with an exquisite plot that would make up for it. "Gravity" puts all its chips on lots of 3D 'splodey things and whizzy things, and that is why it completely fails for me. If you can leave your brain at home going to see this, go for it. Everyone else: AVOID.