Polished visuals elevate this movie higher than it deserves

Rating: 6/10 (17 December 2013)

Gravity is one of those movies that is a great watch, but when you get to the end, you realise how utterly contrived and lacking in substance it was. I was particularly irritated but the perfect timing and convenience of the disasters. One, even two would have been plausible, but seven was just stretching credibility (3 debris hits, the suit air supply, Clooney's thruster fuel, the fire on the Russian station, and the Russian shuttle's lack of fuel).
The very opening premise seemed to me to be flawed - after all, it seems extremely unlikely that of the millions of square miles of potential orbital trajectories, the debris would happen share the exact same flight path as all three international space missions. After all, who places geo-stationary objects in the orbital path of a satellite (and if they weren't geo-stationary, how did the debris catch them)? As a piece of switch your brain off story-telling, Gravity was masterful - it had pacing, pathos, emotion, and in spite of the fact that most of the movie features a single actress not interacting with anyone, it never felt laboured or boring. However, you must understand that this movie is all style and no substance.
Ignore the incongruity of a medical doctor working on a space telescope - ignore the incongruity of navigating an escape vehicle a hundred miles on landing jets only, ignore all of the many plot holes, and you are left with a movie that is still implausible on every conceivable level.
Yet for all that, damn it, I still liked it. I think it's because humans have an innate love of the concept of space, and weightlessness, which this movie brought to life superbly.
I see people calling this best space movie ever. It wasn't. Sunshine, Mission to Mars, Event Horizon, Outland, even Alien, did space better than this, but Gravity is certainly supremely polished and tightly edited, although the entire Indian lullaby scene left me cold.
Overall, worth the watch solely for the quality of the space re-creation - everything else is a bonus.