For my taste, The Martian is the best hard sci-fi book and sci-fi movie out there.
On the other hand, I remember enjoying watching the Core. It’s a stupid kind of sci-fi that allows you to suspend your disbelief and have fun. What else can you do with a movie that literally calls the metal the ship is made of unobtanium?
I agree, though. Stupid space-fantasy can be tons of fun. Hard-SF always gets criticised for not being truly hard-SF. Even in the Martian, the adjustments needed to pick him up at the end would mean they're never going to make it back to Earth.
Does it matter? It's still a fun movie. But balancing between fun and scientific accuracy can be hard, and a slip can be jarring.
So how does everybody feel about The Expanse? There's some explicit super-science McGuffins in there, but most of it seems about as accurate as you could hope for, given the setting. Travel takes months. Not entire sure how their engines work, because the Rocinante does change course a lot without carrying insane amounts of fuel, so they do seem to have some sort of fantasy fuel.
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri...
That said there are nice CGI of the black hole, where the consulting part really shines. BTW, there is a "Mindscape podcast" episode [1] with Kip Thorne where he explains what technically accurate parts were kept, and the others where he had to (unhappily) let go.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...