The creators, unlike Interstellar and Gravity, carefully avoided illogical twists. All the stretching of technical/physical/biological facts has been performed accurately, without obvious violence done to the plot or elementary logic.
Yet, the author(s) forgot that all movies (or novels, for that matter) is about human conflict. It takes an enormous talent and ingenuity to infuse one-man show with the conflict sufficient to drive complex narrative, such as in the "Life of Pi." A few well-designed jokes as in "Martian" are not enough. While Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain are forever wed to sci-fi, another master actors such as Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and, especially, Kirsten Wiig are being lost as the screen savers with little characterization. In these stock roles it would work better to cast relatively unknown, aspiring starlets such as McKenzie Davis ("Mindy Park").
P.S. Compare descriptions at http://mars2044.blogspot.com/
