"It's not rocket science" ... uhmmm, yeah it is, George.

Rating: 5/10 (8 November 2015)

My complaints aren't just about Clooney's fuel usage, their inertia when going to the ISS, or Bullock's underwear. That's the obvious stuff. What's less obvious is there is little adherence to orbital mechanics in *any* of the film. You can't just point the re-entry vehicle at Earth. You'd have to fire your rockets to decelerate enough to begin losing altitude and so you're slow enough that the friction as you descend into thicker atmosphere safely continues to decelerate you using the heat shield. That is a BIG deal. The atmosphere is otherwise lethal to you, heat shield or not.
Sure, stuff superficially moves basically o.k. and is kind of floaty and equal-but-opposite-reactiony, but most everything else is wrong. It's not just inertia here or a lack of anything pulling Clooney away from the structure there. The latter "heroic disconnect scene" could have been fixed with just rotating the damaged station to give them centrifugal force. Gravity is a negligible effect, since they're already in orbit (i.e going real fast laterally and being high enough to be out of the thick atmosphere so they don't burn up). Rotation is easy enough to do with CGI elements, too, and logical since the ISS was just hit by debris. Just requires some expensive computer time at the FX house re-rendering that scene using the already-built 3D models and textures. In fact, you could leave all the principle scene elements as-is and just revolve the Earth around them in the background slowly. Bingo, stupid physics moment solved.
That's unforgivable, but what's more unforgivable is the just point-and-fire-your-rocket view of orbital physics in getting from one place to another that occurs repeatedly! Even if miraculously all of those stations and the shuttle were nearby and visible with the naked eye, which is completely ludicrous unless they made some point of saying they'd all just rendezvoused recently for some long-planned joint venture with the Hubble telescope (hard even in real life), you'd still never be able to get there in a strait line. Orbital mechanics is all about change in velocity governing altitude and then arc rendezvous paths. If you magically had enough fuel and thrust, you'd have to change your velocity, change your orbital path, and loop around a few times until you meet-up with the other object. Otherwise, you'd end up in front of or behind the object depending on your altitude differential. And that's even if you're lucky enough to just so happen to be going in the same direction before you begin the maneuver, which is just about never.
That's actually what's so dangerous and crazy about orbital mechanics: even in the unlikely event the ISS or Chinese space station could be seen and you had A LOT of leftover fuel after your stupid Abyss-opening-scene-like joyriding (yeehaw!), you wouldn't be able to reach it. That's pretty dramatic, in my opinion. The lack of air and the possibility of space junk causing you to explode into a mess of sparks aren't really the most interesting part of this orbital stuff, in my opinion. Everything is moving fast up there (otherwise you would fall back to Earth) and it takes a lot of energy to change the arrangement, let alone do that in a way that matches with the path of anything else, let alone actually meet-up with it.
There are people making the argument that you can't have a dramatic and captivating movie where all this is accurately portrayed. What about Das Boot, Alive, Men of Honor, K2, Pressure, Everest? They all tried to be realistic about other dangerous environments that cut you off from civilization and safety. I realize the Martian tried this, but that's more obvious, too. He's on another planet. What about the bizarreness of being right there, visible to someone with a telescope, and there's nothing anyone can do to save you? That interests me. I don't think you have to severely compromise physics to have drama and keep people in the seats, rather in the case of an orbital emergency film, the physics is where much the danger comes from.