Relativity Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (24 February 2020)

What goes up must come down and this film certainly let me down rather uncomfortably after exciting considerable anticipation.
Plotwise an incredible piece of utter bunkum that would have graced a b-movie of yore jarred conspicuously with a parred down aesthetic and a lean narrative style.
Having two major Hollywood a-list stars leading proceedings prevented any sense of impersonality and "this could sort of really be happening" suspension of disbelief on my part.
Which again proved incompatible with the obviously earnest and resolute direction and tone.
Also such obviously incongruous co-orbitals as the NASA Space shuttle (already retired with great fanfare) a live Hubble repair mission (similarly publicly discontinued....its on its own now) with the I.S.S. and the Chinese multi module space station (not yet built as of February 2020) further dented my interest in this "realistic" film.
Realistic, or realism, as a crucial value of this film was fatally undermined for me by all of the above considerations.
Almost every conceit of the film was beyond any sustained credit, for example: a mission scientist realistically dealing with the return space craft was an odd point to insist that we accept.
The travel between and arrival at each space station was equally comic book-ish.
I found one plot conceit to be utterly bewildering however and that was the radio message conversation with a non-English speaker on Earth.... I can not accept that no ground based space agency, certainly not NASA, would have failed to attempt this method of communication with possibly living astronauts of theirs within the situation of events depicted in 'Gravity'.
Preposterous is the best categorisation for this very notion.
All taken together I was unimpressed by 'Gravity' "in the round" and as much as I can complement some individual facets, as a whole it is much less than the sum of its parts.
Those positives include fair work from the two leading actors.
Good production design and impressive practical effects work.
A clear, albeit incoherent, inconsistent and self-contradictory, creative vision.
Therefore I rate at 4/10 where many features are highly commendable but the film as a whole delivers the highest of bunkum almost ripe from the fruitiest of early twentieth century science fiction literature let alone mid century b-movie madness and this creates a tonal mess of a movie which defies believability and frustrates enjoyment accordingly.