I don't think it's just you, I had the exact same experience. It's not that it's a _bad_ movie, per se, but the beginning is very jumpy, and there are so many gratuitous shots that really slow the movie down. The graphics are very impressive for their time, but the pacing and plot left a lot to be desired. In fact, that's exactly how I felt about the new movie (minus the pacing concerns).

It isn't clear to me what the rationale for getting rid of the Space Station would be. As far as I can tell, if you didn't want to pay for shipping people up and down, you could still use it as a platform for scientific instruments. In that case, you would just have to occasionally use orbital corrections to compensate for atmospheric drag. So why deorbit it, ever? Is the cost of a few kilo's of propellant really that high? If you're talking about removing the crew that's one thing, but that's an incredible resource that you'd just be wasting.

So it depends on what your priorities are. If you care about a breadth of features then GIMP.app is what you need. However, if you're more interested in an open source Photoshop-like app then I'd suggest Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/). It has all of the basic photo editing features that PS has, but does lack some key features (such as CYMK support). However, it's fully Cocoa so it's really more integrated with the OS than even Photoshop (which is all Carbon, at least CS3 and CS4 are, supposedly CS5 will be Cocoa). It's great for all of the basic stuff you need if you want a true Mac OS X experience, without having to use X11.