Human Spirit Triumphs--and Bores

Rating: 3/10 (5 January 2016)

This one really makes me wonder about critic—apparently they're all crazy about this film. I think they're just crazy. This is a sub- ordinary triumph-of-the-human-spirit tale. Here's the plot: An astroteam about to leave Mars for home is beset by a storm so violent that it nearly destroys their rocket. Astronaut Mark Watney is believed killed by flying debris and his body blown away who knows where; the team must leave or die with him. Too late, it's learned that Mark has survived. How to bring him home? The Mars base has food and water for mere months, the next Mars mission is five years away, and the homebound team can't turn back. There ought to be drama by the long ton here, but there isn't. None. The visuals are often pretty good and sometimes better, but they have nothing to support.
There are two overwhelming problems. First, is the gripping space rescue of Apollo 13, which was in addition to the movie Real Life. 'The Martian' is not real life and it ain't real interesting, neither. In the face of Apollo 13, that, you need something better than a fairy tale. Second, this movie is grossly unrealistic. For example, the killer storm has barely scratched the team's base. OK, there's lots of dust and communications with earth are out, but everything else is tickety-boo: lots of tools, a truck with a crane, more solar panels than Solyndra ever dreamt of, yada, yada. Now Mark is a specialist--botanist, in fact--so we can accept that he figures out how to make water from chemicals and dirt from his own feces, and that he uses potatoes from his small food supply to grow a healthy and presumably organic crop. Problem solved! But this happens over and over and over; no challenge too great for our Mark. This botanist patches together a system so he can contact earth; digs up a plutonium- isotope canister to provide extra battery life; finds the escape module left by a previous mission and drives nearly 2000 miles to it in his souped up Mars truck. Does he ever fear? Despair? Give up? (He has no friends or family save his parents, who are mentioned in a throwaway paragraph.) Not our Mark. He just tackles and solves problems one after another, and there are so many of them that the problems themselves become a problem: they're mere busy-work. That is, none of them ever becomes truly critical; we always KNOW they'll be solved. When a second storm destroys his potato crop, Mark should be truly desperate and afraid, but he simply brings out the plastic tarp and duct tape (!!), utterly unfazed (and extremely unconvincing), as if he were assembling Legos. On earth it is not as it is in the heavens. NASA & Co. try to gin up some drama, but their problems too, just melt away. Actually, they're blown away by lots of Macho Management: "But it'll take 6 months!" "You've got 3!" And of course they do it in 3. When the rescue rocket blows up, here comes the Chinese Space Agency with a spare rocket in its pocket. Is there not enough time/fuel/whatever? Enter the team's most junior member; he has a whole new plan on his laptop! In space, where the original team HAS turned around to go back to Mars, there's more Macho Management: "Just work the problem!"
OK, there is some drama when the rescue mission almost loses Mark at the last second, and when the whole business is broadcast live on Jumbotrons all over the entire world. But that's at the end. By then it's too late.