What they got wrong:
These are mostly knowing contrivances made to allow the plot to play out in a non-suicidally-depressing way - which I can kind of give a pass to...
Orbital mechanics: If something's at a lower altitude than you, it's either going faster than you, or in the process of falling out of the sky - that's just how it works. So the distance between the ISS and the Tiang Gong 1 stations (which - my how you've grown, Tiang Gong!) remaining constant is incorrect - even if they're at the same altitude, their orbital inclination and all that jazz would mean they're moving in relation to one another - and all throughout the movie distances seem to remain constant.
In addition, the Hubble Space Telescope is at a far higher orbit than the ISS and Tiang Gong, and I doubt if any suit-mounted EMU jetpack, even an advanced super-efficient one like Kowalski's, could come close to having the power to change orbit from HST to ISS inside (as we must assume) 90 minutes (unless they spent several orbits and survived a handful of storms unscathed... but even then, the power shouldn't be there).
This is excusable because pausing to somehow educate the audience in unintuitive orbital mechanics would be boring and awkward. They should have demo booths playing Kerbal Space Program outside every cinema
.
Distances: Aside from the fact that the distances to objects should have always been in flux (see above), the depicted distances between the ISS, HST, and Tiang Gong made space seem rather neighbourly.
Stone was lucky that those three space installations just happened to be on the same side of the planet that day, let alone within spitting distance.
Stars: This is getting overly picky now, as this is a stylistic thing more than anything else, but cameras, and I think the human eye too, cannot accomodate blindingly-reflective white space craft, wincingly blue Earth, or searing sunlight
while also resolving (comparatively) super-dim stars.
In space, if you can see a bright object like a ship, then your eyes will react to that, and the background will look plain black, the stars getting drowned out.
^Ridiculously minor, that last point.
What they got right:Everything else: The look and feel, the physics of how objects move in zero G, how force is imparted and behaves... captured beautifully - stunningly. The visuals - sumptuous spellbinding... The way the debris shredded out of a ship would expand and disperse... the way the ISS modules burst like balloons made of tissue paper, and how the fire inside expired during the decompression as a blast of short-lived flame.
And... yes. I liked Bullock's acting. It was understated, vulnerable, believably naive but restrained by training. She carried the movie wonderfully - and it was all on her back. If we hadn't been able to stand her, we wouldn't have liked the film.
Cuaròn's incredible camerawork and trademark long takes are abundant and on fine form.
They almost suffer for their ubiquity, compared to his previous film - the incredible Children Of Men. While that also featured countless complex scenes lasting minutes without a cut, it packed a very deliberate punch into one or two key scenes that stick with me to this day.
Gravity is relentless cinematographic virtuosity, but lacks those scenes that stand above the rest, and made you sit up and take notice of it in COM (like the tank assault on the building in the third act).
Overall, I frickin' loved this film. I'm a space-nut, and a science-nut, so to see a film embrace both in such a compelling and successful manner is a thrill.
Gothneo, what were your issues with the motion mechanics? I consider myself well-versed in zero-g physical behaviour, and I cannot fault the film.
Daysleeper, the "Russian Station" was the ISS - International Space Station. Parts of it are Russian, but the rest is American, European, and Japanese.