The before landing part of the movie itself is so boring and uneventful that authors decided to cut it into pieces and shuffle them into hard-to-follow non-linear mess, which forces you to pay at least some attention to all those things not happening there. It is hard to imagine that flight to Jupiter will be that boring - there might be flybys, awesome views of Jupiter approaching, there might be interesting problems to be solved, there might be interesting scientific sub-missions to be worked on during flight and the crew should be a group of interesting people who discuss interesting things on the long journey. All that would have sparked interest in science in the viewer, as well as interest in the heroes and what happens to them. That does not happen at all, I did not learn anything and did not get interested in what happens with those 1-D cardboard characters aboard.
Movie itself is without expensive stunning special effects. Which I thought to be a good thing, as I expected this to be offset by incredible attention to detail and realism. Needless to say, this was also a disappointment and there are many disturbing details in the movie - a footage of departing command module was clearly a stock footage of a launcher with dual payload capsule. How would astronauts get in? How would they get out if the mission was postponed? In another shot, there is an entry-level consumer camera being unpacked by one astronaut, where in reality, nobody would pay the fuel cost to get a 500 USD digital camera with crappy set lens to orbit and then to a gazillion dollar space mission. They really could have looked at DSLRs used aboard ISS and borrowed some of that high-end stuff for that one scene. Then one astronauts talks to mission control, and they tell him: "Hey, we see here that valve X is damaged", and the astronauts goes: "Yeah, way ahead of you, Joe is already fixing it", at which point some female astronaut says: "Yeah, and don't forget to tell them that this panel is fried". That is not how this works at all, that is not how you fix or communicate problems in space.
The only interesting event during the flight did not really strike me as if that the best of the best are going out to repair something. More like slightly drunk overly confident guys wiggling stuff around, applying brute force immediately and recklessly. Which does blow back in a weird round-about way that does not make much sense ... but why wouldn't there be crucial communications RF boards outside of the ship and full of hydrazine as well, *sigh*. The ensuing problem solving is also not what I'd expect from best of astronauts, it's just a plot ploy with zero effort at realistic portrayal of characters or space flight.
The after-landing part is more of people continuing to behave unprofessionally and recklessly, combined with efforts to create suspense by cameras having bad reception and pointing everywhere else than where the action is. At that point I was not interested in what happens to characters and wished for this movie to end.
The movie is neither eye nor brain candy. I can see how the crew did not have money to make the movie visually stunning but I fail to understand how they did not have time to make it realistic and interesting, which both could have been done almost for free.
