(Also, check your email!)

Spoilers kinda as well.

It did really great with having interesting characters, but alas, screen time.

As for the decisions they made, they did get increasingly risky, yes, but I felt like they were making a reasonable progression- they had to weigh their options and calculated risks and the likelihood of failure against leaving him to die there. It's a very, very hard choice, but sometimes people do make those choices. The one that they felt they absolutely couldn't actually say yes to- which would've been slingshotting the crew back to Mars in the off chance of picking him up- they instead gave them the option of deciding whether to do it or not.

The whole Project Elrond thing was amazing and I about died inside because it was Sean Bean's character calling dibs on being Glorfindel, I'm pretty sure.

Artell wasn't entirely impressed by the book himself, but said the movie would be amazing just because of who was directing it and the main actors.

The actors definitely killed it, and if nothing else there are a couple references throughout that make it even greater.

I first read the book in English, then read the first few chapters of the French translation, and unless the translator was particularly stupid*, it definitely seemed like it was hard to translate the book's writing style in another language.

*(Well, there was quite a bit of that too. I mean, Mark Watney really didn't strike me as the kind of person who would use passé simple.)