Soulless, boring, uninspired, and predictable

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2015)

I'm not going to go into all of the implausible science in the film; that's been well-covered by every other review here.
In many years I have never seen a movie receive such undeserving critical praise. It is clear from the reviews here that many people found this film to be the boring and slow slog that I did.
Simply put: this movie doesn't matter. Matt Damon stars as another marooned astronaut, the second time in two years he's played such a role. The difference is, of course, that his character in Interstellar is far more interesting and has more depth than the astronaut he plays in The Martian.
Every single character is cookie cutter. Every single line of dialogue is written as it were for a TV character, meant for an unsophisticated audience that mentally fist-pumps when they're exposed to such gripping dialogue as, 'I'm gonna have to science the sh*t out of this" and "let's go get our boy". Delivered as flatly as it does here through actors like Damon (barely passable) and Jeff Daniels (wholly insufferable and cringe-inducing), it makes you want to slap your hands to your ears to make the pain stop.
After 2 hours goes by and you realize that the most interesting and exciting part of this movie occurs is its first 4 minutes irritation sets in. I don't know whether to blame Andy Weir or Drew Goddard, but putting a self-aggrandizing clown at the center of a movie about being alone in an alien world completely saps all electricity and tension from the proceedings.
So yeah, while things like putting a tarp over a spaceship bothers me, that's not what makes me think this movie is trash; instead, it's the way it uses hackneyed "feel good" human moments to prick a thousand holes in a balloon of tension it should have been building.
What a waste of time. How did the critics screw this up so bad? AVOID!