solid entertainment but nothing really exceptional

Rating: 6/10 (17 October 2015)

The audience wasn't bored despite the running time, and Matt Damon does a really good job of holding everybody in just the right amount of tension, but the whole thing is too calculated and manipulative and, like most of Ridley Scott's output, looks like an advertisement. In this case, it's a big propaganda advertisement for the American and Chinese space programs and for various corporations that get prominent screen space -- who wants to bet me that the big "Forever 21" logo that looms over half the screen towards the film's climax looks just as stupid as the the bit TDK neon sign at the end of "Blade Runner"?
It was one of those movies I walked out of with a good feeling, but the bad taste spreads the longer that it sits in my stomach. It's almost too cute, how Matt Damon's character makes these witty statements every 10 minutes or so, and the disco music and all of it. "I will survive!" The world is sure ready to put a lot of effort into saving a single white man sitting on some damn planet he has no business being on in the first place. He even brags about being the first colonizer! This movie will really be hilarious to watch in 2040, I'm telling you!
But it wasn't too bad to watch in 2015 with a nice date and a good crowd of people either. Hard to hate it, but impossible for me to love it. Every time I was hoping for a good idea, it delivered sentiment or sardonic wit. At first I was into the way the movie raised intelligence and science up as virtues. But when Matt Damon gets up at the end to deliver a soliloquy about how science can deliver human beings from any problem..... you have to wonder why we can't spend some small part of the energy that we would spend to bring an astronaut home from Mars to, I dunno, save a child from slavery in a mine or a textile factory in the "third world." And, yeah, I'm pretty sure Matt Damon wonders the same thing.