Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.