This will be a dissent, though not a particularly angry one. Just about everyone seems to love The Martian, Ridley Scott’s new film about an astronaut marooned on the Red Planet, and there is, indeed, a great deal to enjoy about it. But it’s also somewhat overpraised; it starts very strong, but in a reversal of the usual way of this kind of lost-in-space movie, it actually loses energy and interest as our hero’s deliverance approaches.
We begin in the middle of a Mars mission, with the astronauts already safely landed on the Martian surface, bantering as they excavate red dirt around their spacecraft. Then, suddenly, a dust storm looms, there’s a scramble for the rocket, and one of the party — Mark Watney, the botanist, played by Matt Damon — gets hit by a flying piece of equipment and carried off into the darkness. The rest of the crew can’t find him, the ship has to take off, and after it leaps to safety we see the head of NASA (Jeff Daniels) informing a crowd of journalists that Watney didn’t make it, that he died on Mars.
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