More Familiar Than I Expected, It's Still an Excellent Nail-Biter

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2016)

Matt Damon is left for dead during the rushed evacuation of a small-scale Martian expedition. It's like Apollo 13 on steroids, mixed with short dashes of 127 Hours, MacGyver and Survivorman. Much less of a one-man show than I was expecting, which gives the film a little more spirit but also a more conventional structure. I think it would've been a far more interesting, daring picture if we'd seen more personal video journals from space and less debate around a round table at NASA, if just because we've seen the latter film several times already. Damon is excellent, bringing a blend of hopeless desperation and punchy good humor that gives him credence as both a technical expert and a likable, relatable everyday guy. The supporting cast is scattered with some strange choices, though - Kristen Wiig in a dead-serious role and Sean Bean as a kind-hearted supervisor are particularly out of place - which left me enjoying the scenes with Damon alone in the red landscape much more than the rescue effort. Still, the epic moments far outweigh the sub-standard ones, there's a strong sense of humor beneath all the suspense, and the visuals are really pretty incredible. Bonus points for getting so much of the science right, too. I'm conditioned to expect a lot of flaws when I dig deeper into sci-fi like this, but apart from one notable exception (the weather on Mars), the experts looked at this one and said "Yeah, that could actually work." Cool stuff.