I would like to believe that if stuck on a planet some 130 million miles away from Earth, I would be as resourceful, adept with my surroundings, and accepting of my situation as astronaut Mark Watney seems to be. After realizing he is alone on Mars, after a mission with his crew goes terribly wrong and he is presumed dead from an accident, Watney awakens to find his crew gone, their supplies in tact, and a desperate need to figure out how to prolong his life on Mars for as long as potentially possible to find a way to get back home.

The Martian, adapted from the wildly popular best-selling novel by Andy Weir, gives us a brilliant performance from Matt Damon as the astronaut left behind, and serves as director Ridley Scott‘s newest science-fiction epic, almost erasing the sting from his polarizing 2013 crime drama The Counselor and his ridiculous Biblical epic from last year, Exodus: Gods And Kings. Quite frankly, for both director and star, this is the best film each have delivered audiences in a long, long time.

At the end of the day, John Carter is made by Disney, and while it is rated PG-13, efforts to temper down the more adult-oriented themes and writings found in the Burroughs source material have steered this project towards at least attempting to score a more family-oriented demographic. Surprisingly, for an Andrew Stanton film, John Carter possesses only a few scant moments of genuine humor and/or earnestness. Those moments of levity are much needed and welcomed because John Carter becomes so enamored with its own Barsoomian/Martian civil war storyline, and so lost within its own universe, that it never bothers to make thoughtful and intriguing connections.

The latest motion-capture film from Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers studio, “Mars Needs Moms” is an ambitious film that provides impressive visual landscapes at the cost of an interesting or even engaging story. “Mars Needs Moms” has most of the components necessary for a good film, but curiously never finds the rhythm it needs to deliver a truly entertaining final product.