The Martian

[thesalmonofdoubt]

So - watched this for "Cheap Arse Tuesdays" at my local cinema.
Knew the movie was getting a good wrap and do like Matt Damon, but aside from that and a 40k view of the plot, knew absolutely nothing at all about the movie.

Tech Notes:

Watched on a normal sized cinema screen in 2D cos, weirdly, there were no 3d sessions at night and I'm not all that driven to watch movies in 3d unless there is something specifically fantastically 3d about the movie in question.

The plot

Team of people go to mars on a 30 "sol" manned mission to explore. Huge storm hits and creates a need to GTF out . Everyone GTF out except Matt who's stranded presumed dead with no immediate way to communicate with the crew or NASA to tell them otherwise.
Stuff happens... Movie finishes .. all other details would be spoilers.

Verdict:

Amazingly damn enjoyable moderately light fare especially when contrasted against say "Gravity" or "Interstellar" which is what I kinda went in thinking it would be kinda like. Its really nothing like either... Its kinda like the love child of say "Gravity" and "Castaway sans Wilson" .. but also different enough to not suffer comparisons well. People are seem to be desperate to compare it to Guardians (cos there is 70's music in the sound track) but those people are off their heads. Its nothing at all in loom, feel or story like Guardians.

Matt - is awesome. Easy role to screw up completely given he has like 90% of the screen time with absolutely no one else to bounce off in terms of dialogue of action. There's an element of comedy in there but its all low key natural dialogue stuff as opposed to making the movie intentionally a comedy for the sake of it.

Over all - highly recommend it to all and sundry - 8/10

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

I would've kept the beard & name change though.

I also loved Kristen Wiig not knowing the signicance of Elrond and her stupefication at every guy knowing how it related to the mission. If I remember right, Sean Bean was the first to answer her as to the meaning of it, making it even more epicly meta.

[Anakin McFly]

The Elrond thing was great. One does not simply walk into Mars.

Loved the movie.