It's a visual marvel, from the landscape of Mars to the spacecrafts, I definitely wasn't expecting a level at Gravity levels of visual effects impressiveness

But I was pretty bored. Part of it was probably I watched it in suboptimal conditions on a small screen and I was feeling tired, but something was missing. I could only make it halfway through the Weir novel because the writing was too much from a clearcut amateur for me to take, in a way the film almost goes too much in the other direction. This is just so POLISHED, between the visuals, always having the right piece of dialog, music, etc. that it almost feels too neat and tidy. What Watney does to survive frequently comes off as easy. One moment he has no food and is seemingly doomed, but because he's a botanist, it takes what feels like a minute of hurdle-less montage before he has steady crops. Multiple trips across the face of Mars come and go without much danger. Short of one hair burning explosion turning hydrogen into oxygen goes almost exactly as planned. Getting to key pieces of equipment such as the Pathfinder or a radioactive heater is quick work. The Hermes crew has to decide whether to pay the huge individual price of risking their own life, spend a year and a half more of it in best case scenario, and commit career suicide and for a few possibly go to jail to save Mark Watney, and yet the decision plays as if it's not a difficult one at all, for them it's a no brainer to go for Mark. And so forth. The film had the humour and old school Hollywood sentimentality of one that would embrace entertaining its audience instead of getting stuffy with existential dread, but lacked something in the elemental, emotional core to actually do it. Its Hollywood blockbuster-isms are more like a style choice on the surface but for me in an empty way.

^

QFT

this makes Gravity look like 2001.