The Martian, 7/10: Stars Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney who is stranded alone on Mars after he is separated from the rest of the team. Presuming Watney is dead, the team take off from Mars headed back to earth. NASA realize Watney is still alive and start work on trying to get a plan together to rescue him. The rescue mission will take years so Watney has to figure out how to survive on Mars by reclaiming water, creating oxygen, growing food etc. He also has to cobble together a space craft (MacGuyver like) that will get his ass off Mars and rendezvous with the rescue ship. It was an OK movie. A bit pedestrian at times but watchable.
I thought it was meh.
It could and should have been so much better. It's a great premise, astronaut stranded on Mars and has to survive for months or years using his wits, scientific knowledge, etc. before a rescue mission will take him home.
I found a lot of little things that annoyed me that I probably shouldn't because it's just a movie. Instant communication between Mars and Earth instead of it taking at least several minutes for a radio message to get from Earth to Mars and vice-versa. It was a minor annoyance, but they could have built some drama around having a more realistic communication method with both sides having to wait minutes before they heard from the other. The fact that he just happened to be within driving distance of the Pathfinder rover on a planet with 145 million square kilometres of surface area. The fact that the same rover used a power connector that he was able to hook up to his own hardware to get it powered up and when he hooked it up it was delivered the right voltage and current instead of frying it by overloading it or not being able to deliver enough power, nope, it was just the right amount for some 20+ year old piece of hardware. Matt Damon's character being live on air to the whole world when he told NASA to go fuck themselves (or whatever he said). That was just a bit silly.
I also really didn't like the continual ramping up of the drama. He had to cross X amount of space at speed Y which is just about enough for him to safely make it and be caught by a fellow astronaut in the rescue ship. But then when it gets closer to rescue time it turns out the gap is bigger and he'll be travelling even faster! Oh noes! And then later it turns out that he doesn't get to enough height and speed so he'll have to breach a humungously bigger distance and will be going several times faster than the initially calculated speed which they were initially doubtful would work. But it all still works anyway. It's completely unnecessary.
And of course the rescue mission blows up after launch and the crew on their way back from Mars has to stage a mutiny in order to return to Mars to rescue their colleague. It was all just so contrived to me and could have been done so much better.
Afterward I watched the Martian, I decided to watch one of my favourite films of all time, Apollo 13, which deals with a very similar theme, astronaut mission goes tits up, and the astronauts and mission control have to use their wits, skills and engineering and science knowledge to rescue the crew stranded in space. A true story which was very faithful to the actual events of the Apollo 13 mission, and it absolutely kicked the shit out of the Martian in every way, without resorting to silly histrionics to try and build drama and tension.
