Which means Stone is flawed and difficult to idealize. Remember how she totally loses her cool at the beginning? While it's understandable—she meets with an unimaginable disaster—she's still mortal enough to panic. She's also evasive, having partly accepted the space mission to escape her problems. There's nothing to venerate, here. She has intimacy issues, she's still grieving the loss of her daughter, and while she clearly excels professionally, her job pacifies emotional turmoil. There's nothing wrong with any of these things; they're just terrifically normal, something many female movie characters are not given permission to be.
Another thing they're rarely allowed to be is plain. Stone is not a conventionally feminine or pretty character, and while Sandra Bullock is a stunner, the styling department went to a lot of trouble to tone her beauty down. She has non-descript short hair, no makeup, and her khaki-colored spandex wardrobe is appropriately practical. At no point is there even so much as a flashback to a more glam version of herself, and she never gets a makeover.
