a great movie!

Rating: 9/10 (15 June 2018)

Congratulations to Ridley Scott, this was a great one!
I love good science fiction movies, but they are so hard to find. In most "science fiction" the "science" is thin at best and an excuse for special effects or some absurd action.
The Martian is different and it really is a great one! When it started out with this unrealistically strong sandstorm I was ready to bury my hopes, but then it got better and better by the minute. there was one more inaccuracy that was initially a bit off-putting - the non-martian gravity, but apart from that the science was sound. And better yet, it was the core of the action. Getting stranded on a distant planet is challenging :-) and the challenges in the movie felt like they were the real thing. How to survive? How to get food? How to take off? How to reach earth? All these are tricky to figure out and it is a blast to watch a bunch of smart, friendly and cooperating people figure them out - always with that smirk that old-timers know from the heroes of the Apollo days. Yes, they've got the right stuff and they need plenty of it to "bring him home".
Apart from this technical side, there is something even more wonderful about this movie. Through the extremely intelligent choice of (sometimes very bad) music and little hints here and there it has a curious "retro" feeling. It almost makes you feel like this is an alternative reality, playing out sometime in the last decade of the previous century, in a world where after the moon landings we did not stop but just made the logical next move to go to mars. And somehow this feels so right and so upbeat, it is a joy to watch.
In any case, the Martian is a joy to watch from beginning to end. After all, whan did you last see a movie that let kept you excited with the intricacies of celestial mechanics?