The Martian (2015)

I saw an interview with Matt Damon where the interviewer declares that there are no 'chases' ala Hollywood in this movie, no bad language and no romance, and with Martian in the title it was bound to be sci-fi. I decided there and then I would not die curious to know what this movie could be like.
I went along and watched it in 2D, because as I have told myself before, 3D only distracts from the dialogue and and story. I wanted to make sure that some of those weightier questions of astronomical theory and fact being proposed and discussed did not escape my feeble understanding of astrophysics.

Arizona Desert

As it turned out I didn't have to know much of anything to understand the plot, which was established early on when the hero Mark (Matt Damon) gets left behind thought to be dead after a Martian storm leads the crew at the station to abort it's mission and take off back home to Earth.
From then on the story is all about how Mark makes contact and whether NASA will try to save him and how they will go about it. Well no, there is more. We see the hero an ex-botanist manage to grow potatos on Mars, something Ive never tried on Earth. We see heroic gestures by  the earthbound crew volunteering to perform almost certain hare-Kari doing a highly risky operation sling-shooting around planets to try to link up with a space floating Mark after having shot up off Mars on a rocket. We see the new America friend China (eat your heart out Russia) provide vital spaceship assistance. We get treated to all the politically correct role players, women in charge of spaceships. We see also a brash young black man solving rocket science problems, and a rotundity challenged Chinese American sweat profusely.
Many scenes included heavy-going techie talk though thankfully stubbed short to keep the audience from walking. I like techie talk but only when I can follow it so this time I was left wishing I'd gone to the 3D version. So yes I got a bit bored. I began to think myself very odd that I cant like this Sci-fi film even when I asked to see a film without some of the usual Hollywood ingredients such as romance and chasing baddies. I was hoping to enjoy the mystery of seeing a remote alien planet - I suppose they are all alien - but alas it was a bit like watching a doc on the Arizona desert, and there was no-one looking remotely like Walter White from Breaking Bad on it!...but that's not relevant and I'm so hard to please.
It is also unfortunate that the recent discovery of evidence of water in Mars couldn't have been foreseen by the author of the book because at least then they could have had something solid to deal with here. The marooned astronaut could have accidentally discovered a tree seed lodged in his shoe and decided to grow a tree by the rivulet near his potato plantation. No telling where that could have led to.