I am NOT a botanist.

Rating: 4/10 (18 October 2015)

Why can't we send Matt Damon to Mars and leave him for real? The first movie I saw like this was "The Old Man and the Sea", a true classic where our hero (Spencer Tracy) battled the elements and fought for his sense of purpose as a human being. I do agree that the Mars landscape was spectacular. But that's about where the good ends and the bad begins. I never felt any empathy for Watney (Damon). The film never conveys a sense "emergency" on Watney's part because of his constant wise-cracking. When he began his survival plan it seemed like a segment from a "How it's Made" episode with the same dopey music. The likelihood of him having just enough of this and that to keep him alive for that long seemed incredible and too far-fetched for me. The part that really made my eyes roll up was when he dug up some kind of radioactive contraption, threw it in the back of his "rover" and used it as a heater. Really? I wonder what else is playing down the hall of the multiplex.