Apollo 13 was better

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2016)

Good, but not as good as Apollo 13. Matt Damon did a good job of capturing the trade-off between Astronaut Stoic and Botanist Geek. The cinematography was beautiful, but that's normal for Ridley Scott movies. The "sciencing" by Watney was interesting, but was really more engineering than science. I did appreciate his dependence on duct tape. My greatest concern was with the storytelling. The pacing seemed off at times, and I found that scenes that should have presumably been quite suspenseful, weren't. I also thought the scene where the goofy young astrophysicist explained a double slingshot manoeuvre to the head of NASA was quite ridiculous.