Is Gravity The Best Film Of 2013?

Let’s be honest, Cuaron's Gravity is great but not that great. It’s not as great as people, critics and academies are making out. It can’t be the best film of the year. 

The plot is bare, Sandra goes up to space and then a sequence of accidents happen, which kill off all of her team, leading to her arrival back at Earth after struggling with commanding spacecraft and her abilities.

Its frailty is exposed by its cowardly tendency of using space debris and asteroid belts as propellers for the story. Every time the protagonist finds a safe haven it is destroyed in another tense escape sequence. Disaster is this films bad guy, overdone to the point of undeniable personification. You know it: the thing that keeps coming back, even when it shouldn’t be able to.

If a space station or satellite has floated safely above the atmosphere for 30 years and the main character boards onto it, why should we believe that it would get destroyed by space rocks less than 5 minutes afterwards, especially if that had already happened twice before in the previous hour.

It’s undeniably unlikely. If there was a big batch of high speed debris up there and due, our space stations would have certainly known about it and Sandra and her team wouldn’t have been working that day.

It is the most amazing and masterfully made (not in terms of artistry, despite some beautiful shots, but in terms of technicality) movie of the year, but the best film? I’m not sure it categorizes with the others…..