This is exactly the sort of film you should see in the cinema. It's full of huge visions of Space and Space Stations and Space Shuttles and what Earth looks like from Space. There's lots of 3D effects and lots of spinning round. I'm not sure it would be enjoyable on TV, and it would be very poor to watch on a little screen on a plane, where it would also be unsuitable as there's a lot of Space crashes.
The plot is fairly simple. It's the crew of a Space Mission coping with an incident and trying to get back home. That's all I'm saying. Much of the story is told visually, and those are the best bits. There is also a fair bit of chatter with mission control to tell the audience what's going on. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock handle the dialogue well, but I do wonder if the movie could be even more striking if they cut out lots of the dialogue and relied even more on the visuals - in the manner of All is Lost (review to come), where Robert Redford's marooned sailor barely says a thing.
It's a fine line to tread in a film making astronauts seem realistic, but also have some human qualities. I've recently read retired astronaut Chris Hadfield's book about being in Space. He's the guy who recorded Space Oddity, and also filmed lots of everyday things in zero gravity like brushing your teeth. I can report that he's actually not a very fun guy, and likes to ruthlessly over-prepare for everything. When he gets in a lift he checks the safety instructions just in case it crashes. When he went to see Elton John he practiced playing Rocket Man over and over just in case Elton recognised him and invited him on stage (he didn't). Reading his book was a lot like reading Lance Armstrong's. These guys are machines.
So I'm not sure the George Clooney character would be regaling Mission Control (Ed Harris) with his hilarious story of New Orleans Carnival, and quipping about Sandra's blue eyes, or are they actually brown. Every second of every minute of a space walk is meticulously planned, and it's at once exciting and very boring. Of course the point of Clooney's clowning is to make it clear what a laid-back veteran he is, and in fairness he does snap into mission-mode quickly when he hears of an emergency. There's only one moment where it's all a bit hard to believe, when Clooney is shooting around on his jet-chair and another guy swings around on a cable shouting "look at me!" and they all chuckle. Sandra is at least trying to do some work, while the other two are really just pissing about in Space.
Some other Space observations - I think the film must be set in the future as it features a lot more Space Stations and technology then we have now. I think sometimes the film-makers forgot the Golden Rule of zero gravity, that you don't weigh anything. So, if for example, someone is hanging on to something for dear life, and someone else is hanging on to them in a classic cliffhanger scenario, the second person doesn't actually weigh anything and wouldn't be pulling the first one down. Also it doesn't need a lot of fuel to move along in 0G, once you get going you just keep going. In fact you need half the fuel to speed up and half the fuel to slow down - they're not very good at the slowing down part. The best Space Physics moment is when Sandra throws away a fire extinguisher in the opposite direction to the way she wants to go.
I liked seeing all the Space detritus floating round. At one point you see a hand gripper tool, which I think they really do use in Space to keep up hand strength in 0G. That's a nice touch. A vodka bottle has a special nozzle to drink from, because just drinking from the bottle normally wouldn't work. Another nice touch. Not so good is when you see a table tennis bat floating along. Table tennis in zero gravity? I don't think that would work very well.
I realise that most of this review has focused on Space, and not much on the film itself. So in conclusion let me say it was a very enjoyable film, gripping from start to finish. Excellent use of CGI for all the Space bits, which could only be done with modern computers (or a budget of hundreds of billions). The film is a very eloquent case for the benefits of CGI in films, which is however nearly totally undermined by a gratuitous and very irritating computer generated frog in the last minute. That's the dark side of CGI, doing stupid stuff just because you can, there was no need for that. Unforgivable.
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