The Martian

The Martian surprised me by not being about atmosphere and philosophizing, but about people and the joy of telling a positive story. It also offers a pool of inspirational ideas for emerging film editors. Matt Damon is great and Jeff Daniels got a good role after a long time. It is a pity that the movie has a weaker climax, which in the long shadow of Gravity has no chance to impress. If you compare The Martian to Prometheus, however... Ridley is still a champ. He just needs a good script. (10/06/2015)

Ridley Scott is paradoxically considered a great auteur and a guarantee of quality (this cult is clearly connected with the overabundance of director’s cuts in his filmography), but at the same time he simply personifies what every director should be, i.e. a person who squeezes all of the potential out of every bit of material and ensures its effective transfer to the screen. After a number of futile screenplays and pointless projects, he finally got his hands on something proper and the result is outstanding. (12/27/2015)

Best Ridley since 1982. The master finally left behind his megalomania and unique sense of over combining anything potentially impressive and filmed a technically brilliant, moderate yet emotionally nourishing celebration of humanity as a tenacious community that overcomes all problems with cynical humor and potato growing. Damon is the heart and soul of the film, which falls into model sentiment in a terrestrial storyline, but thanks to an unquenchable storehouse of optimism and catchphrases on Mars, keeps the viewer in an uncompromising bind, which it will use in the last quarter of the weightless finale. Ridley Scott quotes himself nonchalantly when he lets the freezing echoes of Alien be heard at the beginning, then turns the man battling the inhospitable cosmos into something completely opposite - in a feel good movie that triumphs over all its mistakes and loss of concentration with the immeasurable enthusiasm and intelligence that is still quite rare with pure "entertainment". Humanity will rise from shit. Je suis Martian. P.S. I suggest that it be voted that the Master has already found the Lost Paradise and can retire. (09/25/2015)

This seemingly unfilmable collection of technical details and sarcastic monologues became surprisingly easy to adapt in Drew Goddard's hands. Albeit at the cost of simplifying or even completely omitting Mark's struggles with producing air, water, or stone inscriptions, meaning that his fate in the first half is not really something to worry about. However, in the end, where after all the disasters and crises the source material merely struggled, the effort to rescue the main protagonist turns into a strongly graduated symbiosis of all involved. The main triumphs are surprisingly not the great Matt Damon, but Sean Bean perfectly cast as Mitch and especially the entire crew of the Hermes, led by Jessica Chastain. (10/15/2015)

Matt Damon needs to be rescued. Again… So the bestseller Handbook of Young Martians written by Bear Grylls finally got a blockbuster film adaptation. And this adaptation is so successful that it rectifies most of the weak points of the original (especially the repetitiveness of the first half). In any case, advertising of NASA through the fate of the botanical MacGyver, who starts to like Abba, sand, red, taste of potato and solitude, is fun, stylish and what is nice is that it is relaxed and humanistic in a feel good style that is rather unusual in terms of survival films (let alone sci-fi blockbusters). It is as unusual as refreshing and surprisingly fitting. (10/06/2015)