The Martian

The Martian surprised me by not being about atmosphere and philosophizing, but about people and the joy of telling a positive story. It also offers a pool of inspirational ideas for emerging film editors. Matt Damon is great and Jeff Daniels got a good role after a long time. It is a pity that the movie has a weaker climax, which in the long shadow of Gravity has no chance to impress. If you compare The Martian to Prometheus, however... Ridley is still a champ. He just needs a good script. (10/06/2015)

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)

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 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)