What was it with the Oscars last year? First Mad Max and now this. Was there a massive shortfall in quality in 2015?

Like Mad Max, The Martian is an entertaining film, but it’s pure fluff. It deserves to make money but it doesn’t deserve to win awards. It’s likeable, it’s well made but it’s completely shallow.

It also suffers terribly in comparison to the recently nominated Gravity. Gravity was also a tale of survival in space, but it had more weight to it. It was more visceral, it had more imagination and a lot more emotion. This, in comparison, is a trifle, even if the fate of the central character is potentially a lot worse than that of Sandra Bullock.

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is one of a group of astronauts exploring Mars. The expedition’s base is hit by a massive dust storm and the commander gives the order to evacuate. During the evacuation Watney is hit by debris and presumed dead.

Only, he’s not.

Watney is now stranded alone on Mars. With his crew beginning the long voyage back to Earth and with another crew not arriving on Mars for another four years, he has to find a way to survive for almost half a decade with a limited amount of supplies. As he says. he’s going to have to ‘science the shit out of it’.

There’s a lot of joy to be had in Watney’s simple, mundane day-to-day routines. The rationing of food, trips outside to gaze at the Martian landscape and the recording of his video diary. But once the movie begins to open up and expands beyond the narrow focus of Watney’s isolation, it becomes less interesting. The struggles of NASA to get their man/men back home safely was much more effectively depicted in Apollo 13.

I don’t think the casting helps that much. Kristen Wiig is completely out of place and Sean Bean stands out like a sore thumb. Why is a man with strong Northern English accent the mission controller at NASA? Plus, every time I see him now I’m waiting for his inevitable death scene.

Jeff Daniels, too, as the NASA administrator fails to convince. But maybe that’s my fault. For me he’ll always be Harry from Dumb and Dumber.

There’s also a serious issue with the tone of this film. One of the running gags is that Mark gets stuck on Mars with nothing but crappy disco tunes to listen to. It’s meant to add levity to the movie but for me it completely robs it of dramatic weight. Fucking ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Love Boat’ and ‘Rock the Boat’ all make an appearance. Still, it could be worse. It could be Kanye West he gets stuck with.

But I feel that this movie should have been stripped back completely. I’d want to remove the rescue mission entirely. I’d want to see everything from Watney’s perspective. His isolation should be palpable and absolute. We should only be relieved of his loneliness when he is. We should see the rescue mission when he sees the rescue mission. For a film where there’s so much at stake, there’s very little sense of jeopardy.

Even when Watney blows up his base and destroys his crop of potatoes, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. And it should. It should be utterly crushing. It should be like that scene in Touching the Void when he falls into the crevasse and is positive that he’s going to die. It’s emotional armageddon. But here it’s a blip. It’s an inconvenience. Because you know that the NASA guys are going to speed up their rescue mission and they’re going to save him at the last moment.

And the actual rescue is preposterous. The movie does a decent job of building up the tension for Watney’s take off from Mars. He has to strip the take off vehicle of all its weight, which includes removing the windows and replacing it with a tarp, but then the final rescue just involves too much action movie nonsense.

Watney’s vehicle and the rescue vehicle are moving at completely different velocities, so a bomb is rigged and exploded, the Captain goes out on a teether to ‘catch’ Watney and he has to stab his spacesuit to provide propulsion so that he can bridge the gap between him and her. It’s really silly and not at all believable.

Kind of like the film itself. It might have a NASA advisor making sure that everything is kind of possibly, just about feasible, but we all know it’s bullshit. Entertaining bullshit. But bullshit. And certainly too facile to be remembered in the long run. There’s more weight and more gravitas in ten seconds of Alien than there is in this.

GoldenEye marks the highpoint in Brosnan’s tenure as Bond. None of the subsequent films were as fun, as well written or as memorable. In fact, they were all disappointingly bland. Until Daniel Craig came along, the franchise regressed rather than moved forward.

But GoldenEye was a welcome return to form in 1995 (although I like the previous film Licence to Kill quite a bit) and it still stands up. The action scenes are superb, the dialogue is pithy and it has quite a few memorable characters, which makes the film stand out even more considering how forgettable most of the characters have been in subsequent films. I mean, who can forget that blonde bloke from Tomorrow Never Dies? Or the nuclear physicist with the large rack in The World is Not Enough? Or the bald geezer out of Die Another Day? They were characters for the ages...

But like I say, GoldenEye is stocked with great characters. Just take Xenia Onatopp. How can you not like a woman who crushes men to death between her thighs? Plus she also has a penchant for fascistic leather military uniforms and a desire to shoot people while moaning like a whore. I dig that. Then there's Alec Trevelyan – a plumy, lecherous, traitorous former MI6 agent who says things like, "You know, James...I was always better." I dig that too. And there's Zukovsky, computer geek Boris and General Ourumov. Out of these, Ourumov has to be my favourite, largely because he has a hip flask and a huge nose. Always a good combination. (I also have to mention that I love how camp his stance is when he 'executes' 006. All I'll say is, ‘I'm a little teapot.’) And Jack Wade is good too. Sure he's a concession to American audiences, but he represents them well – he's an overweight loudmouth.

Even the token totty stand up well. Izabella Scorupco is a fine looking woman, but, get this, she can actually act. And the fact that she can act makes it easy to overlook the fact that she's far too attractive to be a computer programmer. The same can't be said of Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough.

And Judi Dench is a great M and Samantha Bond is a fantastic Moneypenny. Although I have to say that I'm always distracted by Samantha Bond's nose. It’s got a life of its own. Take a look when you watch it next; it bobs up and down like crazy. (I've seen this film too many times…)

The only negative is that Desmond Llewelyn seems to be reading his dialogue from cue cards. He seems to be looking beyond Bond in their scene. I guess he must have had trouble remembering the jargon-heavy lines. But I still find it rather distracting. (Again, I've seen this film far too many times…)

But I guess what most people judge Bond films by, is the action. Well, in that regard, it's more than adequate. The opening stunt has to be the highlight. Stunts are so much more impressive when you're allowed to believe your eyes, when they're actually done for real. And the dam jump is possibly the best stunt I've seen.

After that you have the plane sequence. This bit is silly as hell. Bond rides off a cliff, catches up to a free-falling plane – despite it falling under both the force of gravity and its engines – and pulls it out of its descent. It's ridiculous, but hey, that's Bond. Since when have the laws of physics and plausibility bound this immortal? Better, though, is the tank sequence. It's a novel spin on the obligatory car chase and it's well done – although whoever was responsible for the Perrier product placement should hang their head in shame. But my favourite piece of action, aside from the dam jump, is the fight between Bond and Trevelyan. It's just a good no-frills, no-holds-barred piece of fighting between the two main characters – usually, at the end of a Bond film, Bond has to stop some bomb or some device, or kill loads of faceless henchman or some effete villain. Therefore it's nice just to have a straight up fight end a Bond film. Sure you have a bit of extraneous detail to tie up the plot, but, as ever, it doesn't matter. It's just background noise. But although I like the fight, there's still more silliness. After falling a few hundred feet to a concrete floor, Trevelyan is not only still alive but only has a slightly bloody nose. I'm sure it was a concession to the censors, but it's quite amazing how indestructible movie folk are.

But watching the film back I was quite impressed at how intelligent the film is, certainly compared to subsequent Bond films. There's some good stuff about the end of the Cold War and Russia's transition from communism to capitalism. And the scene between Bond and M intelligently addresses the fears that Bond, as a character, is too dated. Quite rightly the film ensures that it's only the world that changes – Bond remains the same. And there are references to Stalin, the Second Word War and Roman mythology. It may just be a Bond film, but at least it doesn't insult the audience's intelligence. (It's also a nice detail that Bond and Alec meet up in a Soviet graveyard full of communist relics.)

But the film also has an excellent sense of humour. There are some real corkers: "How do you take it?" "Straight up…with a twist", "I like a woman who enjoys pulling rank" and "She always did enjoy a good squeeze."

Add all of this to a fantastic score (which I'm unusual among Bond fans in liking), some excellent miniature work (always better than bad CGI...I'm pointing at you Die Another Day) and a superb Bond in Pierce Brosnan, and you have one of the best films in the series.