Very good, but not great

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2016)

This is a very good movie. It deserved every one of the technical awards. Sandra Bullock deserved her Oscar nomination. What I find as fascinating as the movie is the number of 1-star reviews here, and how a certain group of people, us techie types, seem to hate this flick.
The movie does have two huge flaws, one dramatic, and one technical. The dramatic flaw is the scene where Sandra is coiled up like a fetus. If I was in the theater I would have stood up, pointed at the screen, swiveled my head back and said, "Look everybody, its Symbolism!" It was heavy-handed and inappropriate. It reminded me of that review of Snow Falling on Cedars, where the guy said he wanted to stand up and shout, "OK, we get it!" Worse yet, Sandra had just promised George Clooney she was coming back for him, and she is doing this little curl-up diorama. The audience is screaming-- "Hey darling, George is out there drifting away and dying of oxygen starvation!" People that almost die don't pause for a peaceful respite. They claw around and tremble from the adrenaline rush. The only thing worse would be if she found some scrap of a mirror and started touching up her makeup. I fault the studio here. They could have snipped this self-indulgent bit out. But like often happens, that which was expensive or hard to do gets kept, simply since it was expensive and hard to shoot.
The technical error is George Clooney drifting away after unhitching his lanyard. Sorry, there is some elasticity in the parachute cords, but it sure looked like they were both stopped. George would not have gone anywhere.
Those minor niggles aside, there is a reason this big-budget movie made back it financing double in the USA alone, and seven times return world-wide. Its a very good movie. I think the reason so many of us techie types hated it is that they thought there were going to see a science fiction movie, and this is not science fiction. Its an art film. It odd how the people that want to see make-believe BS with transporters and photon torpedoes also try to criticize the plausibility of this movie to explain their hatred.
Mostly they are wrong. The guy that says the Hubble is in geosynchronous orbit away from the ISS. No, its in low-Earth orbit. The guy (its always guys) that says she would have died breathing "pure CO2." No, she had an alert for high CO2. Over a few percent and CO2 turns into carbolic acid in your lungs and starts to kill you. The guy that said capsules land in the water and would not have sunk. No, Russian capsules land on earth, and even the USA lost a Mercury capsule when it sank.
Then there were guys that criticized Bullock, saying she was emotionally damaged and could not have gotten in the program. Nothing she did indicated she was totality screwed up from her kid dying, that came out in dialog as back-story. They despise her for playing enie meanee mo, but the movie makes clear the Chinese capsule is the exact same layout as the Russian one, and she is only trying to remember what she did 10 minutes prior. I loved the guy (its always a guy) that says the Chinese ship would have a setting you could change to make the buttons English. Dude, they are clear plastic with silk-screened characters, not 100 tiny LCD screens. Others say she was a bimbo for crashing the simulator. Dudes, there are military flight people and a science crew on the Shuttle. They don't expect the science types to be flight experts, that is part of the suspense. Speaking of suspense, how about the guy that says there is no suspense because we _know_ that there will be another debris storm in 90 minutes. Dude, that is what creates the suspense, are you completely broken as a human being? And all his fellow experts that say the debris incident would be impossible. They did not watch the special features that explains the Kessler syndrome, did they? The only way Cuarón could get us techie types on board is to switch the roles so that Bullock floats off and dies. We don't hate women, but they confuse us and that just adds to the lack of empathy we "on the spectrum" feel for other humans. Better yet, indulge our OCD and replace Bullock with Patrick Stewart. No girls and a Star Trek prequel, that's the ticket.
The criticisms of this movie profoundly increased my respect for Gene Roddenberry. He did not invent Star Trek, he discovered it. The perfect food for the Asperger mind. All the tech types who demand anything in space be science fiction also demand Roddenberry's universe. Girls as minor characters, or fluff-babe sex objects for Kirk. Exploration, not reaction to events--- like playing Dungeons and Dragons. Lots of fighting and war, like a first-person shooter. Make-believe BS, like transporters and glowing wormhole intestines that poop you out in a different galaxy. It has to be an extension of comic book story-telling. Indulge our ADHD with a different episode every week, but pander to our OCD by keeping characters and situations the same.
So my apologies Señor Cuarón, for all us tech types who excoriated your movie. My favorite comment was the guy that said "The director was not emotionality involved." Watch the special features DVD, you blithering buffoon. If you don't want the haters Señor, you will have to make movies that combine Dungeons and Dragons with a first-person shooter. I see many action movies that are already just FPS episodes. Now those have no plot, unlike your films. Perhaps you can make a film that projects to the future where us Asperger types are the Morlocks and you neurotypicals are the Eloi. I would pay to see that vision, for sure.