The Martian

Matt Damon portrays an astronaut who faces seemingly insurmountable odds as he tries to find a way to subsist on a hostile planet.

There aren’t very many movies I come out of feeling educated, and The Martian has done just that. The best part about it was that it was enjoyable and didn’t feel like sitting through a lecture either. The usual scientific jargon that comes with space travel movies is broken into layman’ terms, hence making The Martian an easy watch for people of all ages (and small brains). For a movie of this type, lengthier than your standard 90mins, at no point did I feel that any of the scenes dragged on. The film was filled with A-listers led by Matt Damon, who makes a light situation out of being stranded on Mars, impaled through the stomach and having to survive against overwhelming circumstances of being alone and on an inhabitable planet.

There are plenty of cheesy lines in this movie as the plot focuses on Damon talking to himself and remaining incredibly positive despite the odds of his survival progressively diminishing over the course of the movie. The tone of the movie is lighthearted and generally very relaxed. It is definitely a hit or miss movie depending on your mood and I was fortunate to have watched it with very little expectations of this movie and pretty chilled. It was by no means as intense as Gravity and never wanting to set foot outside the Earth’s orbit, nor was it artificial and gritty as Elysium where you wanted to be off the face of Earth at the earliest opportunity available. I cannot stress any further that, under the serious circumstances of the character, this movie about survival was somehow just really easy to watch!

Definitely preferred Interstellar to this though because I prefer Matt McConaughey over Matt Damon, but I would still recommend The Martian to anyone and everyone to watch at least once.