Gravity was a better treatment of the hostility and lifelessness of space provoking an existential crisis and emphasizing the meaning of humanity, and didn't have grade-school errors like creatures exploding after a half-second in vacuum, or people crying in zero-g, or standing up and walking on Earth after at least five months in space. The film's version of Mars owed entirely too much to the Wallace building in Blade Runner 2049 with too little reason. And in Alien, there was a logical reason why the distress signal was nonspecific about the distress, as opposed to a sequence where no less than two people are eaten alive by an enraged baboon and neither of them thinks the word "baboon" or even a shriek of agony is worth sending over the radio. Seriously, and people give Prometheus and Covenant grief for how sloppy their characters are in dangerous environments?
Brad Pitt recognized the anger of a man-eating baboon in himself and his father; did Tommy Lee Jones beat him as a kid? Maybe, there's one nearly-suggestive flashback of him seeming angry during Pitt's childhood, but all other indications and that he never showed any human emotion, and was just a vehicle for bloodless philosophical musing and according-to-regulation procedure that the actual movie shows no indication of understanding. In areas like space travel (or air travel, or sea travel, or firefighting, or driving your damn car down the street), procedures and regulations are written in blood, and people who don't respect that end up being ink for the pen. They do not exist because people speaking in staccato pilot-cadence and using words like "nominal" and "affirmative" are super-cool and you can be just as cool by faking it with whatever you remember from other movies. Great, space is a metaphor, but it's also space. The whale is a metaphor in Moby Dick, but it doesn't grow wings and fly over Ahab's ship, because it still needs to function as a whale.
Brad Pitt is completely dedicated to his job and his mission, but covers up a lapse by a pilot that nearly got four people killed, after he already noted that that guy was prone to panic in a far less stressful circumstance. That's not the brotherhood of spacemen or some such half-remembered stock horseshit, it's the first line of an accident investigation report that ends with "no survivors." And, sure enough, Captain Panic gets assigned a suicide mission on which the fate of all life depends because he was there (and apparently no one else was), and he immediately shoots an exposed canister of deadly gas (why is there a canister of deadly gas sitting in the open where it can be shot?), and kills himself and his surviving deputy, after one of his equally-incompetent crewmates gets herself killed by bracing for a planned acceleration neck-first. I can only assume Brad Pitt already sent the tape of his piracy back home so everyone knew that the crew of jittery ferry-drivers they decided to send to murder a legendary space-hero ended up tripping over their own dicks the second something unexpected happened and he didn't just murder them all, given the support crew didn't beat the crap out of him when he landed at the end of the movie.
