Ridley Scott has made some great films. Alien, Blade Runner, even Gladiator, and to some extent, Thelma and Louise. He has also made some duds, like Prometheus, Hannibal, G. I. Jane, and Alien: Covenant. Then some "Meh" films like Someone to Watch Over Me, Legend, American Gangster, and Black Rain.

In other words, he has gone from amazing to awful in his career. The Martian is somewhere in between.

The good things were the visuals, the concept, and the execution, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone since Scott made over 2000 video commercials before even doing his first feature film, so he had plenty of practice to create amazing believable visuals. Matt Damon also did a good job, although I am not a huge fan of him in real life, he can deliver good compelling performances.

Now to the bad things and there are plenty of them. The cast. They got the look of actors that could be Instagram influencers to play NASA astronauts. Sorry, real astronauts don't look like this. They aren't photogenic models from magazines. They look like everyday people. Also, I have a huge issue with forcing a certain diverse cast, which doesn't reflect reality for the sake of meeting certain social or political agendas. There is a fine line between what feels phony and genuine. Alien had a diverse cast, and even though Scott cast Weaver because she was a woman, the cast felt like they could real people in that situation. Here, none of the cast, even Damon, felt like real people that would have been astronauts.

Astronauts are usually, without exception, nerds, so they look like nerds, not the top most beautiful people from Hollywood Reporter. And we don't need comic relief from Kristen Wiig. There are actors that have the actor look and then there are some that look like the regular person you see work at Home Depot. Stop casting the former all the time. But Scott has been guilty of this for a while now. His last two alien movies have cast that look like top social media influencers.

You could literally find every Hollywood stereotype in this film.

The movie took place in 2035 so the commander, Jessica Chastain, who was born in 1977 in real life, before she would have been old to listen to disco, in the film she would have been born in the 90s, which means she would have grown up in the 2000s, an era way after disco, they wanted me to believe that she only brought disco music with her, despite the fact that iPods that came out in 2001 contained the ability to hold up to several hundred songs, and iPhones can hold 1000s of songs in 2021, somehow in 2035, she could only bring a few songs of disco. She had no other taste than disco. Why is this an issue? Because it's indicative of the small things they can't even get right or truthful that impact the overall movie.

The writing was also not very good. For example, when they find out Damon is left on Mars alive, the conversation sounded like a 2005 ultra-hip convo with phrases like "my bad." There is just no chance in hell people from NASA would speak that way. It's irritating because the writer assumed the viewers are too dumb to notice such obvious blunders. Another issue is having Damon explain everything to us, i.e. The obstacles and the plot. SHOW, don't tell should be the rule. Viewers are much smarter than any writer will give them credit for so they over-explain everything or explains things that we could just see with our own eyes.

Also, there was something off with the technology in the film. I don't think they are going to be using regular laptops in 2035 the way things are moving.

The worst part of the film is it actually got worse over time and more implausible. And of course, they had to have the woke hip black guy who didn't even know who the director of NASA was while his quirky obligatory live demonstration of how he alone could save Damon. Cut to the crew's speech and their decision to go get Damon. We've seen this scene in a million films. Try something new, please. Tired of the carefully composed calm director of NASA so follows the orthodox protocols and is fought by the inside rebels. Then, of course, China came to the rescue so they could sell more tickets in China.

This film should have stayed on Damon alone trying to overcome his dilemma, instead of the whole world coming to the rescue while singing kumbaya.

So it's by no means a perfect nor awful film. It's a below okay film with dumb unnecessary flaws. Is it worth watching? Yes, but don't expect a Scott masterpiece like Alien and Blade Runner. It's more like "American Gangster" which was a movie with flaws that you watch once.