as if movies are real

well, isn't it what you're doing here ? It's not called documentary right ? It's far worse to make a so called documentary that is actually full of inaccuracies and untold extrapolation for sensationalism (I know a bunch of them). Here you may say people are deceived. But if they can't make the difference between a movie and a lesson, well that's there problem and the education system's problem I guess, not the fracking movie.. What about people following random youtubers advice ? should we judge them too ?

Same as Rhysy, I work in radioastronomy and loved the movie, I didn't judge it like it was a scientific article, because it wasn't. There are some things I found not credible or not coherent, but it didn't ruin the overall pleasure of being told a story. Anyway, it's a fracking movie ! Go read the book, a very nice piece of scientific extrapolation, the description of a completely different alien life form is particularly well made.

Now some movies you like, some you don't, nothing new here. I also loved contact, which is full of bullshit too by the way. If you ask my parents, the very subject of alien encounter is ridiculous, we all have a different level and different ways of suspending disbelief. I tend to think this does not automatically make us all retards..

Well the martian also got a bunch of harsh critics on the scientific credibility. I hear your pain on increased silliness, I tend to share it but more on the story telling side, movies are just poorly made on average, because a high budget means lots of spectators needed so everything is made "average" which is artistically a catastrophy. That said, I found hail mary was rather a breath of fresh(er) air in a sea of mediocre spectacles. I mean for once it was a novel story, not a n-th episode of the mary-verse, but still based on existing and solid book material, that counts a lot, and they did not do a bad work at adaptation, which is a very hard exercise.

Anyway, there is no sense in convincing you it is actually good, but the funniest part of the movie is always the intense discussion when exiting the theater :P

Yeah I must say the goofballs style annoyed me at the beginning, then I played along. Also I can certify labs are full of goofballs, and worse (especially the not funny ones). On the alien part, read the book or just take a look at the wikipedia page, the description of the life form is really fascinating I find. Unfortunately they didn't took time to develop that in the movie, but that would have been quite complicated given the story line I guess, so emotion was prioritized.

To conclude and definitely disqualify my judgement : I just loved Armageddon :P
For frack sake I even loved independence day, that tells you how bad I like aliens..
And despite my liking, something that goes your way : I saw it in a cinema, the marketing campaign had been much intense. At the end of the movie, I thought "yay, they're doing alien invasion films again, I like it". And then I heard the audience applauding the stuff, like it was a great piece of art or something. That really punched me in the face, like all you need is bombarding people with propaganda... But as said, we were craving for SF movies at the time, that may explain part of it maybe.