The Martian        
                                      1 1/2 subjective stars * 

Despite being a cosmology and scifi fan,  I didn't rush out to this one.  Ridley Scott bummed me out last time with Prometheus (see earlier review) and I've come to accept that he's only as good as his material. This film hews fairly closely to the book its based on.

The Martian is realist scifi, no aliens, no time travel, but lots of armchair physics.  And that's its beauty;  Matt Damon's astronaut Mark Watney has to deal with the quotidian demands of a very long stay on Mars.  Where to get water? Food?  How to deal with the lack of atmosphere? Lack of heat? Things break and things blow up. Bring the Duct Tape might as well be the subtitle.

Along with the layman friendly science, I appreciated the way Scott handled the obvious theme.   Being marooned on Mars, years away from Earth,  magnifies Watney's loneliness and our sense of it exponentially.  It plays out in stages.  He's stoic and consumed with the need to survive, frustrated with setbacks and eventually accepts that he's likely to perish before any rescue attempt.  Scott and his writers do a good job of keeping this understated and sometimes funny.  

Mars is rendered beautifully and the film is shot with grandeur, but not grandiosity.  I didn't see it in 3D, but someone did recommend that to me.

Hey wait, this is big budget, The Martian's gotta have some attempted heroics, fake CNN reports and ginned up suspense. Cliches in 2 1/2 hour film?  Yes, got some,  but I think Scott does a good job of having his cake and eating it too.