The Martian

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)

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)

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)

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)