just saw a pre-screening of "The Martian"

It was fun!   I managed to score a pile of pre-screening tickets for the computer club on campus.  We had about 30-40 students at the show.

The good:  I enjoyed the effects, Matt Damon was very good. 3D was well done and didn't seem gratuitous.  It really felt like I was on Mars.  Seemed like some decent science and reasonably believable.  Good story and good climax, fairly nail-biting.  Some truly beautiful panoramas - they managed to strike a nice balance between Mars being bleak, deadly, and unforgiving, but also spectacularly beautiful at the same time.  Best character - Benedict Wong is the lead rocket scientist; it's a bit part (and not even credited in IMDB!) but he steals every scene he's in.

The bad:  A bit formulaic/predictable.  A few really terrible casting decisions.  Every woman in the movie looked like a supermodel, whereas the men were more diverse/normal-looking.  Script was at times a bit juvenile - the humor was fine, it's just that overall language was more like high school, rather than NASA - more thought could have been put into crafting the dialogue.  I don't remember there being a memorable musical theme - most of the music was older pop hits.  Some missed opportunities for character development.  Rushed, didn't get the sense - at all - that several months had passed.

Overall, I enjoyed it and would happily see it again.

I just saw The Martian again - this time at a regular 3D showing. The reason I am posting a follow-up to my previous post, is that I want to state, for the record, a change that I noticed - an edit in the film. Now, I know this is a minor edit, but it’s the sort of thing that we argue about with respect to Star Wars (did Luke throw the grappling hook twice? Was the Biggs scene ever shown in theaters?). In Star Wars, we assume that 20 years of memory has filled in gaps that weren’t there, and wish we could go back in time to confirm one way or another what we really saw. So, I’m doing this NOW, less than a month after my first viewing (which was a special pre-screening), so that 20 years from now, there will be some evidence of this particular change in case people start arguing over it. So FWIW, here it is (SPOILER ALERT):

In the first showing, when the crew decides to blow out part of their ship in order to slow it down, one of the crew members mentions that doing so will reduce their living space on the return home. In the second showing, there was no such mention.