Grace is not an astronaut and struggles to work out what is going on, but he knows this much: it must be something to do with the phenomenon dimming Earth's sun and threatening all life. Just recently he'd been failing to come up with the words to explain this sympathetically to the children in his class.
Slowly his recollection improves but Grace has another problem: he realises he is not alone.
The movie adaptation of Andy Weir's "The Martian" is one of my favourite's so I opted to make a trip out for this. Lord and Miller have done a decent job but it's a bit lacking in surprises, even for somebody who hasn't read the book.
The flashback scenes where Grace is interacting with people before the titular project launches are some of the best of it but again pretty generic global gathering of scientists vs. existential threat fare we've seen many times. Sandra Hüller is compelling as the deadpan project leader contending with Gosling's "shucks I'm just a teacher" self-effacing thing as he becomes critical to the project.
Assumedly cut down from a more complex novel there are bits that seem slightly glossed over and not an enormous amount happens while it still manages to be quite long. Gosling and the puppeteers behind "Rocky" do a very good job of making the inter-species friendship story work but I do wonder how anthropomorphised the latter is relative to the book.
It's hopeful, occasionally funny, sad and beautiful to look at but also too polished smooth to really have much impact 7/10. Mostly it makes me want to read the book.