A return to form for Ridley Scott?

Rating: 8/10 (20 October 2015)

Minor/Vague Spoilers
Ever since Sir Ridley Scott broke through with his feature film debut, Alien (1979) he has been a force in the film industry with other major successes in Blade Runner (1982), Thelma & Louise (1991), and Black Hawk Down (2001) just to name a few. Most people, myself included, would say that he has been in a bit of a slump with a few of his previous movies including, Prometheus (2012), The Counselor (2013), and Exodus: Gods & Kings (2014). So, because of that I was really hoping that his latest film, The Martian, would be a return to form for Ridley Scott.
The advertising for this movie was everywhere; anytime I went to the cinemas a trailer for this film would play which was preceded by Matt Damon introducing it. When I saw the trailers the first thought that came to my head was that it could be "Cast Away on Mars" mixed with Apollo 13. There was also a tiny bit of similarities to Interstellar 2 for obvious reasons when looking at Matt Damon's character as well as Jessica Chastain also starring in the film. While the small parallels were there, they disappeared quickly once I got over that novelty.
The film, which is based on Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, is about astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) who is mistakenly presumed dead and left behind on Mars after a storm, who then has to try and fight to survive and signal Earth to come and rescue him.
This movie brings a lot of comedic moments that I wasn't really expecting just based on the premise of the film. It was very well done, mostly by Damon and even Donald Glover in a smaller role. Damon's character is very much an optimist when the situation would probably call for anything but that emotion. Damon takes what the writers of the film created and plays the character extremely well and had me laughing much more than I thought.
All of the supporting cast, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, and Chiwetel Ejiofor really make, what could have otherwise been just pointless secondary characters, necessary and they add to the overall story that make the stakes even higher because of how well they all play to the situation that is presented in the film.
Halfway through this film I came to the conclusion that the trailer didn't give away as much as I thought when going into this movie as I was a little afraid that I might have already seen half of what the story had to tell.
The way the film is shot could only be described as beautiful and breathtaking. It really captures the landscape and there are no flaws that I could see in anything that we saw on Mars. Scott made what could have been just a simple, desolate landscape come to life. This also adds to the fact that it could be somewhat believable that this may have been a real story, even though it isn't.
Something that my friend said to me as we were walking out of the theatre was that there wasn't a real bad guy that a traditional Hollywood movie would have. I really didn't notice this as I was watching and couldn't have agreed with him more once I thought back on the story. This makes the film much more impressive because it didn't have to rely on the use one of the biggest Hollywood tropes and make it extremely suspenseful and enjoyable.
The only problem that I had with the film was that sometimes when they were explaining the science behind what they were about to implement they did it a few too many times. They had the people on Earth explain and discuss how they would pick Watney up on their way past Mars and then it would immediately switch over to Watney and he would once again explain the scene we just saw.
Overall, this was a very strong return to form for Ridley Scott where everything, acting, writing, and cinematography comes together and is wrapped up in a neat little package that is meant for the big screen.