Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, for all of its admirable technical craft, was something of an ambitious mess. It wanted to be a hard sci-fi film but also wrestle with heady metaphysical ideas, and the results were hugely divisive. The Martian by contrast is an example of a film that knows its limits, and while it could easily have taken a similar left-turn into the fantastical, it grounds itself and remains tethered to some degree of scientific plausibility. Interstellar wanted to make us as a species look up at the stars again and wonder what was out there, but really, Scott's film has done a far more successful job of that. With its focus on the collective human effort of attempting to bring Watney home and demonstrating how far we as a species have come, it's a far more hopeful and heartfelt advertisement for the space program, steering clear of silliness and narrative bloat. Though it may be a far more straight-forward story, it achieves it goals far more convincingly, and makes us think of space not as a confusing headache but a wondrous expanse to be explored.