The Martian

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to pause the movie and think about how I don’t want Matt Damon to stop colonizing Mars. I get that it’s mental to live there for some time, but apart from him doing well in the beginning, he had some really ironic and cynical remarks, which only made the movie better. Now I’m not even surprised that it won Best comedy at the Golden Globes. The award might be as cynical as Mark Watney, but who cares. The Martian is an absolutely amazing, realistic sci-fi movie and its story flows in a completely logical way. All while the story was written for a blog; that’s how far this sort of an enthusiastic expression can go. (02/28/2016)

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)

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)

An adventure film, rather than sci-fi; a crowd pleaser, rather than survival; feel-good, rather than smart. But even with all these dichotomies, I would’ve rated with it with five stars as Ridley Scott garners all the strengths of his old age to put together a technically flawless film that treads from beginning to end, it’s not even for a moment boring and the most tense scenes are reliably gripping. But for me it’s just too safe and user-friendly. 85 % (10/18/2015)

Ridley Scott is back in the game, kicking ass not only with this uncompromisingly intelligent sci-fi survival ride, but also with science, math, physics and chemistry. Matt Damon delivers an Oscar-worthy performance, his ingenuity and skill is eerily precise to the point of slick, and he undergoes an incredible physical and psychological transformation (admittedly I was expecting a deeper psychological breakdown, with hallucinations and psychosis, after all, prolonged solitude messes with a person). I'm also not sure if all the heroic acts in the ending could have been done realistically, but fuck that, it's clever, funny, moving, suspenseful, and by the end the goosebumps are inevitable. What an experience! 9/10 (10/01/2015)