Didn't think it was too bad personally, it's got an average rating on Rottern Tomatoes. One of those things where people jump on the hatin' band wagon because of the press.
I saw it and really liked it, thought it was a modern classic! I hadn't seen a good old sci-fi adventure that I liked so much since I was a kid and saw the original Star Wars movies. It made Avatar look like the badly-written derivative cheesefest it really was!
This one had punchy, amusing dialogue, a hilarious premise (spoiler:
dude is super-strong in Mars's lower gravity so the locals think he has superpowers!
), a brilliant cast (Dominic West from The Wire as a power-mad villain, Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad, unrecognisable in a blonde wig and handlebar moustache, and Willem Dafoe as a CGI Martian!), and a properly dark and mysterious central plot about intergalactic all-powerful immortal baddies who move from planet to planet, use it up and then move on when it's a dried-up husk.
Mind you I do love the pulp literature of that era, stuff like Howard and especially Lovecraft with his dark Cthulhuesque horror, and although this had fewer tentacles, screaming, and abject insane horror, it was definitely in that vein with the alien villains I described. If you like your sci-fi to be a straightforward battle of good vs evil starring Cameron's kitsch space-smurfs then you won't like this, there's too many different factions all looking out for themselves, a proper plot that you have to pay attention to rather than being able to doze and only sit up for the action scenes, and a cathartic ending with a sense of loss like all the best epics from Homer to Tolkien. But yeah, hugely underrated movie, a sci-fi adventure with a little bit more to it than your typical blockbuster!
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