The Martian Review

The adaptation's cleverest move is the log camera. A survival story about one man alone has an exposition problem, and by letting Watney talk to a lens in the sardonic register of a working engineer, Drew Goddard turns the necessary math into the entertainment rather than the obstacle to it. Damon is ideally cast, since the charm never slips into self pity, and the film's argument is that competence and patience are heroic on their own terms. Scott shoots Wadi Rum for Mars with a clean sunlit calm that reads as a deliberate rebuke of the genre's usual murk, and the ground crew is stacked deep enough that Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig can carry whole scenes about scheduling.

The disco needle drops are a running joke with a real payoff. Where it softens is the ending, which sands down the book's grimness and hands us an improvised flourish the preceding two hours had taught us to distrust. Nothing here is deep. It is, however, a large studio picture that treats knowing how to do your job as a virtue, and audiences met it gladly.