A truly great original movie

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2015)

A really interesting movie, which I was worried about because of the necessary lack of dialog when watching one person battling the odds all alone.
A couple of shortcomings were the weird downplayed interaction when he first makes any kind of contact with other people. When he first has a conversation with his crew who he's not spoken to for over a year, you get the impression that you must have missed something and perhaps they had been talking the day before or something.
I think he made an agreement with the director that he didn't want an Oscar winning emotional bit but this seemed to go too far in the other direction, so what you get is a completely unbelievable conversations of a human whose not spoken to another human for over a year just talking as though you spoke yesterday.
The other issue for me was Sean Beans slightly strange performance. He seemed to be going for a real person and was playing his character sort of techy dysfunctional anti social and nervous - but no one else in the NASA role did. Jeff Daniels only seems to have one acting style, so while he was just being a NASA version of NewsRooms Will McAvoy, Sean was probably being a more realistic version of a NASA chief nerd. Also it seemed a bit weird that Sean Beans character saves the day but is fired.