Space Odyssey Saved

Rating: 9/10 (3 October 2015)

I am going to start out by saying that I was going to avoid this picture until it hit Netflix. Why? Many reasons: let me start with Ridley Scott - one of the worse directors in cinema - ever. Scott has been involved in very few good films - with Alien and Blade Runner being his only two really good movies. Scott has made some of the worse movies to ever hit film: Exodus, Legend (one of the worse movies ever), Prometheus (a joke of a film), Robin Hood (beyond ridiculous), Body of Lies, Matchstick Men, Hannibal, White Squall, 1402 and the ever dreadful Thelma and Louise. With Scott's track record I was very reluctant to spend money on a film with his name on it.
Reason two: Matt Damon. Besides the Bourne series, Damon has made a lot (a huge amount) of bad movies on par with I Bought A Zoo, The Brothers Grimm, Monuments Men, Elysium, etc.
Reason three: Jessica Chastain - in her entire body of work, only The Help was a good film and she was a supporting player.
Reason four: Kristen Wiig - the queen of foul mouthed, bad comedy. Every movie she has made is for low brow, ignorant people.
I went to this movie because I like Sean Bean. I like his screen presence and (with a good script) he has great performances. I also like Chiwentel Ejiofer. Just to see the performances by these two actors was the reason that I went to see this film.
Now folks have been comparing this movie to Interstellar and Gravity. It is not close. Interstellar was a garbage movie with major scientific flaws, big gaps in logic (which can kill a space film) and a terrible story. Gravity was one of the worse hyped-up pieces of garbage ever made - an astronaut who just breathes heavy, cannot function, knows nothing about survival, and in the end falls hundreds of miles to Earth and survives - garbage.
The Martian goes back to what you would believe in a space odyssey: the main character is afraid of dying, but he allows his intelligence and training to help him to survive; there are people who are intelligent and thought provoking at NASA (which a lot of movies make them out to be idiots and heartless); there is a lot of good characterization in the film which give heart to the characters and it makes you care about what happens to them; there is a lack of the dumb - very dumb - acts of God/space/climate that always happen where members of the rescue team will die or that will jeopardize the mission (Mission to Mars, Red Planet, for example); the rescue attempt is presented in a reasonable manner and logical manner utilizing good science; there are a few F-bombs thrown out there, but it is saturated like most of today's movies (because of ignorant screen-writers who do not know what to write); the movie does not do the Game of Thrones routine with mindless sex and nudity every ten minutes (most movies today have to stop the action/story for sex and nudity to appease the clichés present in movie making today); the landscapes, the modules, the ships, etc all look great and they look functional and real.
This is the type of movie I had expected from Scott after Alien and Blade Runner. This is the type of acting I expected from Damon after Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan and the Bourne series. This is what I was hoping Chastain would do after her breakout in The Help.
Overall I give it a 9/10. It is one of the finest space/science fiction films that I have ever seen - on par with The Right Stuff, 2010, Moon and Apollo 13.