I can't help but wonder if it'll do well with those who've never read the book.
I can easily imagine 50% skipping the film because they imagine it's full of alien/mcguffin herp-n-derp like Mission to Mars, (crying hologram alien... really?) or Red Planet (dormant Mars oxygen farting insects awakened by trace algae/bacteria on Earth probes, plus malfunctioning killer milsurp robot hunting everyone...)
And I can just as easily imagine the other 50% who wants a popcorn film full of aliens and mcguffins being disappointed as well.
---Spoilers---
And explaining that the rescue will take another YEAR even if the crew mutinies and makes another loop around the sun for Mars may be difficult for some of the audience to understand, being far too brainwashed by several decades of seeing "space Immelmans" on screen etc.
I can see why Damon is cast as the lead, his default acting persona is the intense worry punctuated by "aw shucks" sarcastic humor which is actually pretty good for the way Watney was written. Plus the probable mathematics done by risk averse studios who probably needed a best selling book AND a top billing actor(s) to be willing to greenlight the project. I would like to see relative unknowns get cast based soley on acting merit... but it is what it is. I don't think Star Wars IV ANH could get made today, even with vastly cheaper/easier CGI if it was completely new in terms of invention and story/characters.
Stuff that's good: If it follows the book even somewhat, it should be a pretty hard-SF near-term realistic tech depiction of space travel. I see NASA emblems everywhere, and the VAB in several scenes, so no desire to PC it up with some more touchy-feely International Space Agency... The only foreigner is a white male German...
Other minor concerns, the ship is too big and too roomy, big windows, wasted floorspace, tables, chairs, stools etc.. large empty-ish hallways. The level of sacrifice besides safety and time the crew is making to go back for Watney won't be very clear. The crew would have spent the extra year, and the original mission of course, in something more akin to the clutter of the ISS if they're lucky. Even if you have a rotating section. Then spending days in some space the size of a phone booth for shielding if/when the sun got feisty with a CME.
