5. Ryan Stone's Back-Story Is Cheap and Pointless
My sympathy for Miss Stone has already been documented as stretched, to say the least. It would take something spectacular to endear her to me and sustain it. Unfortunately, the fact that she lost her daughter really doesn't cut the mustard. I'm not being heartless here I think losing a child is one of the most sorrowful and harrowing things that could ever happen to anyone, and it would be disrespectful to suggest that it's not, whatever the context. But it's also disrespectful to take such a story and deliver it in a manner which is neither profitable to the understanding the piece is trying to generate nor to the story it is developing. To be honest, it's a cheap trick which shouldn't belong in the film. Stone's memory of her daughter has little bearing on the plot and her efforts to survive the ordeal and reach Earth, and I can't think of how it could possibly help us to understand the human psyche amid life-threatening circumstances in space.