It was a feel-good movie, remembering the old can-do culture. (From all reports I've heard NASA is a pretty sclerotic bureaucracy these days.) See the movie if you haven't.
Some scenes pushed willing suspension of disbelief quite a bit, though. The outsider with the solution was too silly, his solution didn't require supercomputer access(*) (and you don't get access that way anyhow--servers are monitored and somebody trying to crack one would get some attention), and the solution wasn't a solution, as the plot eventually showed. You have to know about a vast number of moving parts in that kind of system--more than any one person can keep track of--and so you have to run it by many dozens of engineers who know what you can keep and what you can discard--and what you could discard if it weren't joined at the hip to something you need. The devil is in the details. I've worked on big experiments for years. Changes need buy-in from people who know the details. Wonderful improvements don't happen because there isn't the power, or the bandwidth, or 6mm extra room, or because somehow a little bit of epoxy got squeezed through a crack into a cooling tube.
And the mixed sex but unpaired team sent to Mars is the kind of nonsense 'new' NASA would come up with. And, despite the famous scene in Marooned, unfortunately you can't speed up work concentrated in a tiny area--when you put more people in each other's way, they work slower.
And the connectors... Ever rummaged in a box of connectors looking for the kind you need? And the Iron Man...
Never mind. Fun movie.
(*) Unless you are running thousands of possible configurations in parallel. And for that you need the details only the engineers know.
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