Alright, but too long

Rating: 6/10 (19 March 2016)

Some young goofs are up on Mars. They are warned that a storm is coming. The resident botanist suggest the wait it out. The commander decides they will escape. So in the middle of the storm they walk to their rocket when one of the guys is it by an antenna and left for dead while the rest fly off to their space station.
Next day the guy, Mark the botanist, wakes up, injured but alright. He checks supplies, knows that the next mission to Mars will be in 4 years, so he starts growing potatoes inside the base using Mars soil and astronaut waste. He has no way to communicate with anyone. So he digs up the Rover from the 90s. Eventually someone at NASA notices that stuff is moving around on Mars and they figure he's alive, but they don't share it with the rest of the crew on the space station. Through the rover he communicates with JPL, which is actually staffed by people who look like they could be scientists and not by a bunch of teens. Meanwhile NASA politicians and scientists think about what to do.
Their plan to send Mark supplies fails. So do some other ideas. Until some other young guy figures out that the space station can meet up with Mark if it changes its path and if he manages to make it to another rocket on Mars and use it fly near the station's orbit. But of course there are many complications along the way. But the space station crew does decide they will go and get him.
I haven't read the book and I'm not concerned whether this movie's science is realistic or not. The movie works for a while, then it stopped working for me. I did appreciate the science but then they ruined it when some astronaut no less tells another to speak in English. Is there some law that mandates writers include that stupid line whenever a character explains something complex? I also enjoyed the politics. The NASA boss and his sidekick are more concerned with appearances and PR than with solving the problem at hand. Casting is a joke. There are perhaps two main actors who looks like they belong at NASA/JPL but several background actors do. For a space movie this one offers few cool space sights, all there is is reddish sand. The resolution reminded me a bit too much of the worst space movie of them all, Gravity.
That said, this movie is probably an excellent family movie, and it is a remarkably healthy movie for Hollywood standards. But even then I can't imagine the kids or anyone else not getting bored at some point. The Martian is about 45 minutes too long, it just doesn't come to an end. It has epic ambitions but the story isn't nearly as spectacular as the filmmakers think it is. I was hoping for some twist, for aliens to appear, something that would propel this movie to excellence. But it never happened.