"In your face, Neil Armstrong!" — The Martian.

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2017)

If it's the goal of great science fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before, Sir Ridley's "The Martian" might be a rare trodden turf, and typically Skeptical of science fiction movies dealing with space travel, yet.
While it's no "Interstellar," spinning off from Andy Weir's everyone-was-reading-it-on-the-bus bestseller, as much as it is a Robinson-Crusoe-in-space, it's a jet-black comedy about laughing in the face of mortality.
This well-crafted film intricately embedded thought-provoking science, real controversial decisions pertaining to space, and futuristic science applications humans have yet to develop.
"Mission Control" monitoring, in the movie, the large TV screens plastered in every angle accurately captured the darkness, timing and adrenaline involved in finding a solution within a 3-5 minute span before potential explosions were to cause deaths.
"You do the math. You solve a problem. Then you solve the next. Then you can come home." Running a mathematical analysis for 560 Sols straight, all by and for a nozzle botanist to stay alive simply on, hey Potatoes! - it takes a skilled team to find real-time solutions.
There's a fictitious scene served to brilliantly re-ignite a real concern echoed in the Space community about launch safety. Rocket launches are risky, and successful rocket science is about proper certifications being met. In the movie, the NASA director orders that the return flight's thrust and weight certifications be skipped in order to save time in returning to Mars. His decision led to excessive vibrations and bending moments within the launch, which exploded the rocket into pieces mid-air. This scenario is real. That's almost bloody accurate!
Chaos Theory is used for more than space travel. It predicts new technology, new weather systems, and even explains how the human brain's neurons fire together in Neuro-plasticity. Though in travel, humans have never been on a spacecraft that has flown to Mars partly because the "gravitational assist" effects on the human body are not fully understood yet.
Don't forget it's been four decades since Sir Ridley Scott first made space travel so uniquely terrifying with "Alien;" here, he and Damon fill the film with fresh, deadpan pleasures, storm that kick- starts the narrative, what lingers are the crew's panicked faces, helmets aglow like Chinese lanterns.
There is not always much adrenal drama: the default mode is problem- solving. But put The Martian next to its peers and it shines. In particular, between its last-man-standing plot and the presence of both Damon and Jessica Chastain, the overlaps with Christopher Nolan's Interstellar are downright curious. And The Martian is nimble everywhere Nolan's film galumphed; it's a movie in which the greatness of the human spirit meets the wonder of gaffer tape. Furthermore, this must be a new frontier to explore, if "The Martian" is put in contrast to Britain's spectacular cinema landmarks: "Moon" to "Gravity" to "Interstellar" it'll look like a 70's disco classic remix album: While it is a great science fiction film that intricately embeds thought-provoking science applications humans have yet to develop, you'd hardly call it a Scott 'Masterpiece' stretching itself, or the boundaries of where an effects blockbuster can take us. It's less a space odyssey than this genre's equivalent of a high-climbing log flume that's also very enjoyable to watch.
"They say that once you grow crops somewhere, you officially Colonised it. So, technically, I Colonised MARS. In your face, Neil Armstrong!"
— Mark Watney a.k.a "The Martian" a.k.a "the Greatest Space Pirate—Botanist" to ever step foot on the "RED Planet: MARS,"
and COLONISE it by growing fresh—POTATOES, harvesting his own S%it!