Average in Every Way

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2015)

There is much hype around The Martian. Ridley Scott, Matt Damon and a dynamite supporting cast that features a story about a man trying to survive on Mars armed only with his intellect and will.
When I heard this, I thought the picture would be similar tonally to Cast Away. An unforgiving environment, brutal conditions, desperation and watching a character grow in order to survive his ordeal.
Instead, Damon is cool under fire the entire time. There is never any sense of desperation, change or arc to speak of (at least that is significant). When things go wrong, they're easily fixed and the tone of this picture is inconsistent with its scenario.
Jokes abound. Whether it's from NASA on Earth, Damon's crew that left him behind or Damon himself, they just keep on rolling with what feels like a three jokes a minute standard screenplay formula in a movie about a man trapped on Mars!
It just doesn't work. It's not bad. The performances are fine, Scott's direction is fine, the writing is fine and it's technically fine. But that's about it. No risks or ingenuity, no real heart or emotion. No stakes. It takes about as unique a scenario as you could conjure and makes it flat, predictable and tonally inconsistent.
Humor here and there is fine, but Drew Goddard's effusive use of humor is tiresome and takes you out of the film.
No characters are really developed here and you sort of just wait around for the inevitable conclusion of the picture. Maybe this would have worked better as a short.
With the last two years, two incredible space pictures (especially technically speaking: Gravity and Interstellar) came out and did some bombastic things. Each had fast moving stories, top notch special effects and were unpredictable in their conclusion. They had their main characters grow and place them in diverse scenarios that kept the tension high at all times. There was a sense of danger regardless of their shortcomings (Interstellar's ending and Gravity's Sandra Bullock).
In this film there's none of that. While the solutions Damon's character comes up with are smart, you don't get a dramatic sense of struggle throughout the film. Lack of struggle equals decreased tension.
I'm not sure why this movie is so revered by movie goers and critics. I feel left out. Maybe it was just my expectations and wanting to see the movie I wish it could have been that left me feeling cold. Still, a tensionless film with such a good cast and crew is a terrible thing to waste.
6/10- Average.