Director: Ridley Scott
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.0
While testing soil samples on Mars, a storm hits and injures botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon), so the rest of his crew leave the planet and Mark's body behind, thinking he's dead ... but it turns out he's alive (after a bit of self-surgery) and needs to find a way to not only sustain himself (by growing food and making water) but contact NASA for help. There's been a trend of this type of lost-in-space movies of late (Interstellar and Gravity), so there's something obviously familiar about it, but until the tense final escape scene at the very end (spoiler: everyone lives) it's mechanical and lacking in tension (of course there are telegraphed hiccups for Damon's character to contend with, but it never feels like he's in any real danger). Novelist Andy Weir approaches his plot (and cheeky dialogue) like someone with a background in computer programming and engineering: as with Watley's potato dinners, it could have used more spice (a little Old Bay never hurt anybody).
