Interesting idea, made-for-TV script.

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2015)

What an exciting beginning - a horrific storm approaches on Mars, arriving much sooner than expected, and thwarting mission plans, somewhat, in collecting soil samples. Even more horrific, is the sight of an astronaut being struck and knocked aside by something resembling a manhole cover.
The Mars landscape is quite fetching: miles...oops, kilometers of reddish iron-rich soil, dotted with weathered boulders, and having what appears to be mountains in the background. The rest of the movie displays variations on that same theme - boring, boring and nothing whatsoever going on. Apparently, the storms on Mars are very few and far between.
Unfortunately, after the first scenes, setting up the basic situation of the story, the film script appears more suited to a network situation comedy than to a story about a castaway astronaut and the effort to retrieve him. All of the characters seemed like a bunch of shallow wise-crackers, except in the (very) few and brief moments of mild concern for the stranded astronaut's dilemma.
One would think that abandonment on another planet would be a tense and precarious situation. Hardly. Everyone was so cleverly cute, one wondered if anyone was worried at all. "We are NASA. We are all so smart, we can fix anything." (Not an actual quote.)
This was a very boring film, overall, and would have been better placed on Lifetime or the Disney Channel. I will give the film two stars, one for Matt Damon's very realistic portrayal of an injured man, and one for the storm.