This Martian Feels Off the Trajectory

Rating: 7/10 (2 November 2015)

Having read Andy Weir's masterful novel of the same name, Ridley Scott's 2015 film adaptation of The Martian was something I anticipated viewing with a certain frisson of excitement.
I watched and re-watched the film several times in a theater before deciding on my view of it. Which is simply this, The Martian is a serviceable and not at all exciting space action or science fiction film. One that boasts a (pardon me) stellar cast marooned (again, please) with a ho hum adapted screenplay and directing that recalls (one more time) the droning inexorability of a NASA launch countdown.
In Weir's story, none of the characters, beginning with protagonist Mark Watney, are cocksure about anything.The book hammers home the massive, mind-numbing fact of the distance from Earth to Mars, and how anyone stranded there is more or less done for, by simple virtue of the length of time, measured in years, it would take for any rescuers to (a) leave Earth and (b) arrive anywhere at Mars, much less at the castaway's position. This is a fact of geography and science that Weir's writing uses to create wonderful dramatic tension in the book. The movie, somehow, more or less dispenses with the feel of that terrible fact, the tyranny of distance, and this, along with most of Matt Damon's choices in his monologues and soliloquies during his screen portrayal of Watney, creates the creeping feeling that only grows throughout the film that, "don't worry, everyone, just give another 90 minutes and this will all turn out peachy.'
Damon's portrayal of Watney is too cocksure. Jessica Chastain as the mission commander of the 'Aresnauts' is too cocksure. Sean Bean as the NASA flight director with-a-brogue(?) is too cocksure.
Just take these three characters in the film, and compare them with their counterparts in the closest film facsimile to The Martian, which is Apollo 13, and it begins to dawn like a red sun (oops, again please) that this cast is chiefly concerned with looking awesome, and "delivering the red hell" (yikes, I know) out of the rather limited number of lines everyone gets.
There is in The Martian none of the sweaty shock, the gnawing self- doubt, the glimpses of facial near-terror at the prospect of a delicate human being being millimeters or milliseconds of miscalculation away from the sheer brutality of the black and starry void they have dared to tempt. This is what Hanks, Ed Harris, et al gave us in Apollo 13. Damon, Chastain, and the others give us none of that and too much 'nah, it'be a'ight.'
A director and cast can get away with cocksure triumphalism in a space shoot 'em up or blow 'em up like Armageddon. But in a documentary (Apollo 13) or speculative fictional documentary (The Martian) there is no shooting and bombing, and there are no villains. So there is nothing but the acting to supply drama.
In a film like The Martian, the only possible rocket fuel (oh boy) is human emotion, accurately conveyed.