Not Bad, Not Great Either

Rating: 5/10 (4 March 2016)

The Martian is the heavily-hyped movie based on the novel by Andy Weir about a man who is presumed dead during a storm on Mars and left to survive completely alone on the planet until he can be rescued. Due to the incredibly high amount of praise this movie received and my own interest in the idea itself, I, naturally, had some expectations. Unfortunately they really weren't satisfied all that well.
The plot of The Martian is one that I like, but it's not one that we haven't already seen in 2015. It felt relatively similar to The Revenant, and while both movies are based off of books that I assume came out with a fair amount of time in between, I just think that maybe the timing wasn't super great. Now we've got two critically- acclaimed movies about people being left in a desolate location by their peers to survive on their own. Only The Revenant is more revenge-driven and The Martian is much more light-hearted. Anyways, The Martian's plot was, while a good idea, presented in an extremely predictable way. There was never a single moment of real, genuine tension, because it was blatantly obvious how the movie would end. It was too light-hearted to go in the way that I hoped, which was down a much darker, less fortunate path, and that's just fine. There's nothing particularly wrong with that but it just adds another layer to the already high stack of predictability in this movie. Furthermore, this movie felt like it was introducing certain conflicts for the sake of an extended run time. A lot of the problems that the characters have didn't affect the movie at all. Something happens, it gets fixed almost immediately, and then everything goes back to normal as if nothing ever happened. Maybe it's just me, but I felt like a lot of this movie's conflicts were just filler over actual plot driving- scenes. Nevertheless, I thought that it was paced relatively well, and I only started to get bored more towards the end when I realized that I knew exactly what was going to happen.
The characters were alright as well. None of them are developed particularly well, but then again I didn't even know who most of them were by the end of the movie. I recognized their faces, and I think that that's the important bit. But even Mark Watney himself wasn't super great. Yeah sure, he had his moments. But his character wasn't particularly original. It seemed like the majority of his team was almost an exact replica of him, only they didn't demonstrate as much anger as he did. Which I guess makes Watney a bit more realistic as a character, considering he goes deeper than just humor, but then it only goes down to humor and anger. Other characters, particularly Donald Glover's character, were blatantly built around clichés that have been so used to death that in a movie like this it really doesn't work. Basically I didn't think that the characters were super well- developed, but it's not like I didn't care enough about them not to see where the plot took them. They were averagely well developed at best.
The visuals were pretty good. While it was a lot of the same, that's probably what Mars is like. Just a lot of the same. Nevertheless, it was pretty to look at for sure, and I'm certainly happy that I decided to watch this movie on a television screen over a small computer screen.
Overall The Martian is just a decent movie. It's not great if you ask me, but it's not like it wasn't worth my time. While it was a little overlong, and it certainly did wear out it's welcome by the 2-hour mark, I still think that it was good. The plot is interesting but extremely predictable, the characters are average, and the visuals are great. Will I watch this movie again? I highly doubt it. I think that I'd probably end up hating it if I did that. In the end I'd recommend this movie, as I'm sure that you'll love it more than I did.