Wrong Stars

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2013)

Overall, I thought this was a pretty good movie, but I found myself far more engaged by the character portrayal and acting performance given by George Clooney as Matt Kowalski than I was by Sandra Bullock's performance as Ryan Stone. Some of this is due to some lame-brained thinking by the writers, the rest is Sandra's fault.
**Spoiler Follows** To start with, 'Ryan Stone' is unprepared for her mission. Back in my day, I was a member of an aircrew, and Emergency Procedures were drilled into us to the point where you could have wakened one of us from a sound sleep and we would have recited the right thing to do from rote, and when something really happened during a flight we didn't hesitate in our responses. Ryan questions, then delays acting on the clear instructions from Mission Control and from her team-mates aboard the Space Station. While one could quibble as to what the effects of those delayed actions might have in the way the emergency played out, no one who ever went thorough that sort of training would question that someone who exhibited the attitude that she did would have washed out in training, well before ever going aboard the ISS.
Beyond that, Sandra's performance was stiff and generally not conducive to encouraging me to feel sympathetic to her plight.
On the other hand, George Clooney as Matt Kowalski was great. If you listen to and watch old footage of the conversations between Mission Control and the astronauts that they had to deal with, Matt's/George's 'voice' rings true. The combination of relaxed professionalism, humor and 'the drawl' that so many of them learned, is perfectly captured by George Clooney, and I found it easy to fall into the belief that he had trained right alongside the likes of Chuck Yeager, Wally Schirra and John Glenn.
The technical effects were superb, I saw the film in 3D and the debris flying into my face made me flinch more than a few times. The spectacle of the Earth slowly gliding beneath the camera, along with the effort to convey the silence you'd encounter when atmosphere is absent also added to the atmosphere, making it easy for me to believe that I was right there with the action.
I was somewhat disappointed in the bad science that allowed them to move from station to station, pretty much completely violating all the laws of orbital physics, but I'll chalk that one up to artistic license. Without that license, the movie would have been nothing more than a rewrite of Tom Godwin's great SciFi short story "The Cold Equations".
**Spoiler Follows** My one thought as I left the theater was "Really? You HAD to kill off the one character I believed in, and let the other live?"