Ridiculous story. Growing potatoes on Mars?

Rating: 2/10 (6 October 2015)

This movie opens with a group of persons in space suits collecting rocks in desert-like terrain that purportedly is Mars. Apparently this is a scientific mission. Then a hurricane like wind storm blows and the mission has to be aborted, quickly. One of the crew is struck with flying debris and is left behind. He is presumed (erroneously and without confirmation) to have died. The crew member's death is reported to NASA, which is in charge of the mission. NASA accepts the report as final and announces that the crew member had died. The crew member is given an elaborate funeral. Then, by sheer accident, a NASA technician monitoring a satellite orbiting Mars discovers that the crew member is alive and is actually moving about on the surface. What is NASA supposed to do? Attempt a recovery which could put the rest of crew at risk? A NASA mission has left one of their own on Mars to die. He was abandoned. The moral, legal and political implications are obvious. This build up offers almost unlimited dramatic potential. At this point the movie tanks, badly. Instead of tapping into the dramatic potential to further increase the tension, the movie becomes formalistic, predictable and boring. The abandoned crew man remains affable, still a team player. That he was left behind by his comrades as dead generates at most slight annoyance. Instead of being overwhelmed with despair and engulfed by terror, which would have been exceedingly dramatic, he is listening to disco music, and, even more amazingly, growing food under conditions that defy all known science. Much of this is amusing, but only because it is so unrealistic and contrived as to generate unintended laughter. On earth the NASA administrator, played by Jeff Daniels who gives the only solid performance in the movie (which is why the movie is rated a 2 instead of "awful"), does not want to order a rescue mission. Thus he becomes the "heavy" or the "bad guy" when actually the real "bad guy" is the commander of the mission who stupidly, and without any corroborating evidence, presumes that her crew member was killed and instead of telling the truth, that the crew member was missing, then compounds the lie and the political fallout by passing it on to her superiors who later are forced to eat their words when the truth finally emerges. Such a scenario, if depicted with sufficient dramatic power, would have been a pivotal point in the story. Instead, the commander's poor judgment is never fully explained, her irresponsibility and lack of common sense glossed over. True, the commander is shown having pangs of guilt, but she remains quiet until such time that she is informed of her error, which by that point is anticlimactic. Then the rest of the movie is about her wanting to go back to Mars to save her crew man, the same man she abandoned. Ridiculous. She goofed, big time, and nobody demands that she account for her decision, not the one to leave a crew member behind, but to officially report him as dead. From that point on, the story devolves into just another formalistic potboiler with lots of overblown special effects that do nothing to make up for the huge holes in the plot, the inane dialogue, the wholesale jettisoning of scientific plausibility (Growing potatoes on Mars? Hurricane force winds on a planet with an atmosphere that is practically a vacuum? Terrain that looks surprisingly like Monument Valley? De-compressing an entire space craft without it completely crumbling? The crewman not bleeding to death after being impaled in the abdomen by a long sharp piece of metal?) or the spotty acting. As for the last item, sometimes a great actor can take mediocre material and raise it to a higher artistic level. Suffice it to say, in this movie that does not happen. Damon cannot save this movie nor does he seem to make an effort to try. No great dramatic scenes. No sense of crisis. No recriminations. No nothing.