Directed by the senile old man, Ridley Scott, with an age estimated around 600 years, The Martian is a hopeful 2015 science-fiction film starring Matt Damon, a hopeful astronaut and scientist that is accidentally left alone on Mars during an enormous storm.
This film focuses more so on the drama and science behind the unfortunate stranding and presumed death of an astronaut on Mars, as he alone begins his attempts at survival, using the various knowledge and resources that travelled all those miles across space with him; and while the occasional hiccup appears, he successfully finds a way around it. This film is what many science-fiction fans would call 'optimistic science-fiction', in a similar style to Star Trek's The Next Generation where problems constantly arise, but one remains optimistic and hopeful towards the future, and that's what they push forward for.
It works for a television series, but for a full-length feature film, it doesn't feel particularly thrilling. Our protagonist very rarely comes across many issues that really test his capabilities in a manner that kept me immersed, hardly questioning whether he would survive or not because it forever felt evident that he'd make it out of any situation with science.
That said, I'm simply cherry-picking here. This is not a bad film, and it is well-worth the watch if you're into humankind's eventual attempts at walking on Mars. It focuses more on the 'realism' of the struggles those first few people will encounter, with loosely-realistic scientific experiments that they could consider to survive those initial few weeks on an alien land where quite literally anything could result in death, even a slight crack in the visor could lead to death; which is a nice substitute to endless action. It pushes the pacing over thrills, but perhaps just a little too much.