Starts off promising but loses it to "Gravity" envy

Rating: 5/10 (24 October 2015)

This movie starts off well. It handles the story of the botanist/astronaut stranded on Mars well, and Damon does a credible job. He is thoughtful and methodical in his approach to survival, and the movie avoids standard survival movie clichés.
Unfortunately the last 1/3 (after the resupply rocket blows up) is as annoying as the first 2/3 is good. The blatant pandering to Chinese censors is perhaps forgivable, as is the overall demographic pandering in the casting, but the idea that a team of highly disciplined and trained NASA astronauts would go off on a rogue mission to save a colleague is laughable, as is the dumbed-down demonstration of a gravitational slingshot by an eccentric young orbital mechanic.
By the time the cartoonish Gravity-imitating climax arrived (or did it remind me of the awful Bond space opera Moonraker?), I was shaking my head in disgust. All that preparation, and the astronauts needed to resort to sugar bombs and punctured spacesuits?
A disappointment.