7. Ryan Stone Is Frustratingly Useless
In film, tension is so painstakingly difficult to build, and yet so horrifyingly easy to lose. Losing it once is unfortunate (Oscar Wilde might agree), but to lose it time and time again is total carelessness, and carelessness reaches another level when it comes to Ryan Stone. Bullock doesn't do anything wrong in her acting, but her character does pretty much everything wrong. When she takes her time returning to the ship during the first shower, we can forgive her: she panicked and she'll be a bit more switched on next time. But later she nonchalantly floats past a fire on board the International Space Station and knocks herself out trying to extinguish it. Cuarón even acknowledges her incompetence when she almost lets one of her tools float away when trying to detach her Soyuz capsule from being entangled with the ISS. Building tension through repeated idiocy simply doesn't work. I feel tense when I want a character to defeat the difficult situation they're in: Captain Phillips did it brilliantly because Tom Hanks' character did nothing wrong. As for Ryan Stone, I just began to think she deserved to float away and suffocate.