Imagine if it was a smart man who survived + a stupid female who doesn't

Well there was a lot really... bear with me. First thing, the destruction of the satellite would not have caused this little roving gang of debris that runs around attacking things in orbit every 90 minutes. What they are portraying is basically a cloud of debris that is completely stationary in orbit and the hubble, shuttle, I.S.S., chinese station, all of it... passes through this debris on it's orbital path. It doesn't work like that, the laws of physics and reality have to be altered for this scenario to even take place. It's basically a sharknado. The only way to justify this poor writing is that some unimaginably powerful being has changed reality to place these astronauts in a test. It's basically Q *beep* with Picard. I can go into a lot of detail on what is wrong with this whole debris scenario if you want, but this post is going to be long enough without it.

Next, the sharknado of debris strikes the shuttle and sends Bullock spiraling off into the distance so quickly that she is out of visual range of the shuttle in moments. She was already irretrievable at that point. Clooney's MMU is simply not capable of catching up to her and retrieving her. The MMU has enough delta-v to get up to about 40 mph before running out of propellant, and that's at a velocity change of 80 feet per second... it's not a quick method of travel. Then, to shed that speed, you have to do a burn in the opposite direction for the same amount of time... remember that in orbit, they were already traveling at 16,000 mph when in orbit with the Hubble, and a fully fueled MMU could change that speed to 15,960 or 16,040 mph in six hours. Clooney manages to chase down Bullock, without even knowing which direction she went, in five or ten minutes, or however long it was. The time part is important there because the whole movie is timed on the sharknado's 90 minute orbital time. Once again, something has changed the laws of physics and reality to allow this to happen.

Next, the Hubble and I.S.S. have very different orbits. The Hubble orbits around 100 miles higher than the I.S.S. and over 1000 miles per hour slower at 16,000 mph, it's also on a 25 degree inclination difference, which means they don't even travel in the same direction. This means that there are two points in their orbit where both objects really are about 100 miles apart, but because of the difference in inclination and the fact that the I.S.S. is traveling so much faster that every second they move miles apart in seconds. At this point, the MMU now has double the payload as it's now transporting two astronauts, and that's just one more problem here, but it doesn't even matter. In order to travel from one object to another in orbit, they would first have to change the inclination to match... 25 degrees doesn't sound like a lot, but it actually takes a huge amount of fuel to achieve, so much in fact that we don't do that... we launch vehicles directly into the same inclination rather than do it in orbit. Since we're moving from the Hubble to the I.S.S., we also have to accelerate from 16,000 mph to 17,000 mph, and change altitude by a hundred miles just to get into the same orbit, then do a rendezvous. The MMU is not even close to being capable of all that... however it happens anyway in this movie because again, reality and physics have changed.

The previous scenario is the same as a later one so I'll lump it in now, Bullock uses the landing thrusters of the Soyuz capsule and a fire extinguisher to do another orbital rendezvous with another space station, which is falling into the atmosphere for no good reason. Never going to happen, impossible without divine intervention. These things take precise calculations with no margin for error... not just "aim for the second star on the right and go straight on till morning". All these objects are in motion, they're not stationary, and you don't just leap out of spaceship and Wall-E your way to another one. This isn't a cartoon, but it might as well have been one.

Clooney's character is used to rescue her a few times, but then starts becoming a crutch, so to test her further, God, I mean, the writer decides to kill Clooney with a situation that wouldn't happen. The whole floating away from the station while caught on the cable is wrong... they would have reached the limit of the cable and the tension would have brought them back towards the station. The only way Clooney would have really been drifting away is if the station were spinning and causing centrifugal force... it was not. He did not need to die, gravity wasn't going to make him die, centrifugal force wasn't going to make him die, but some other invisible force pulls him away just to put Bullock's character into a situation where no other person is there to help her.

Skipping over some bits, like going fetal in the space station, surviving a fire in a pure oxygen environment, she hops in a Soyuz, has visions where she's visited by a ghost that tells her that she needs to survive, then she regains her faith, or at least belief in God as shown when she talks to someone on the ground and asks for him to pray for her when she dies. This part is important because it's established earlier that she had basically lost her faith with the death of her child and had just been going through the motions of life.

She survives being in the upper atmosphere in just a space suit while the space station itself is being torn apart, then rides it down in a fireball, essentially being reborn from the ashes and emerging from the life giving water.

To me there are TWO scenarios that explain this movie. First is that the accident really does happen to the shuttle and her entire impossible rescue is nothing more than the final thoughts of her oxygen starved brain in the final moments of her life. Second, God decided that he had lost one of his little creatures when Bullock's child died, and throws her into scenario after scenario to test her faith, and as a reward for believing in him again, saves her from it all. So much of this movie is allegory for rebirth, resurrect, and faith and all that, that divine intervention really is a legitimate explanation for it all.