Just got back from the theater. Thoughts:
The good:
-Absolutely stunning visual effects; worth the admission price alone.
-Newtonian physics! Newtonian physics everywhere! The whole film should be called
Dances with Physics... and Space Junk.
-Love the way they handle sound in space. Everything is muted as it should be, but you hear all the internal noise the astronauts would be hearing when in direct contact with things, such as when they are working on the Hubble. Airlock cycling effect is nice, too.
-Excellent cinematography. Particularly the inside-the-helmet views.
-Altogether it really felt like you were there in space along with the astronauts. Very immersive, very
real.
The bad: Be aware these may be mild spoilers.
-The treatment of orbital mechanics is absolute trash.
The movie pretends that the Hubble, the Shuttle, the ISS, and Tiangong 1 (Chinese Space Station), are all in practically identical orbits. To be fair, it had to be that way for the movie to work, but it really annoyed me.
-There is no treatment of orbital drift. In the film the ISS and Tiangong 1 stay something like 100 kilometers from one another throughout several orbits, but orbital mechanics in general does not work that way; they would drift from one another depending on relative inclination and altitude. This effect also prevents the film's method of transferring to a distant vessel by pointing straight at it and firing the thrusters. Anyone who has tried to rendezvous two ships in KSP or Orbiter knows what I'm talking about here.
-The debris field which ultimately gets the movie's plot going was created by Russia's intentional destruction of one of their satellites, because it was a classified spy satellite they didn't want known about or something. Blowing up a satellite in LEO is probably the most stupid thing a country could decide to do, worse than having someone find out about whatever activities you were doing with a classified satellite. (Newsflash: many countries operate secret spy satellites; it's pretty much taken for granted and many of them are actively tracked even by amateurs.) But hey, it is Russia after all, and they're crazy.
-The debris field from the satellite's destruction was not on an orbit that threatened them, but then within what seemed like a couple of minutes it somehow manages to knock out pretty much all of the communications satellites, thus killing comm between the astronauts and Houston. At the same time, debris also gets thrown up into an orbit that crosses theirs. Basically,
Kessler Syndrome, but in the span of five minutes. Yeahno, it would not happen that fast. But at least it makes for a good movie and a great 'holy ****' moment whenever the debris ****storm starts flying past.
-The dialogue and character development were not bad, but still left something to be desired. George's character bothered me for some reason, too; I cared a lot more for Sandra.
Also, George dies and sets the longest spacewalk record. Lol.
All in all, very good movie. Recommended!
