Tediously implausible

Rating: 5/10 (4 April 2016)

The budget for this film was over $100 million. The hours subsequently spent watching it by people who could have been otherwise employed for nearly two and a half hours might have been sufficient to rebuild the Great Wall of China.
Technically 'The Martian' is impressive. An unbelievably huge spacecraft with space that puts the grand hotels of the world in the shade. Real potatoes that germinate when a presumed dead survivor is stranded. Miraculously not dead Mark grows them in Martian dust and human poops. A crew of five in a spacecraft big enough to house a thousand Syrian refugees.
As gentlemen in Dubai are likely to be offered by imported ladies of easy virtue, there is a happy ending. No tension, it was bound to work out well.
Ridley Scott doffs his directorial hat to political correctness. The Commander is a gorgeous woman, as is another of the crew. Persons of what are inaccurately labeled black and yellow skin feature strongly in key back-room roles. We have a Hispanic in the heroic rescue gang.
The dialogue is banal throughout, with plenty of f**ks and s**ts. I don't remember a single ear-catching line. To call the characters two-dimensional is to give them more substance than they deserve.
Well done Matt Damon for nursing your planetary rover over 3,200 kilometers of a path that was forever smooth.
This film is rubbish, all show and no substance.
I liked the closing scene. Mark (Matt Damon), now a retired spaceman, lectures in the middle of a circular venue. Why would anyone talk to an audience, half of whom are behind him? That must have been a Scott Ridley joke to give his cameraman a license to swoop and circulate.
It was obvious from the start that Mark would survive. All the excursions and alarms came to nothing. Clever stuff, but about as gripping as a pair of teflon pliers.