With Damon front and center for so much of the movie, Watney is someone we want to spend time with while he’s on Mars, which is sort of antithetical to his desires. We aren’t just hoping he will survive - geez, you’d have to be pretty hardhearted not to, no matter what actor was in the role. That’s a talented bunch, and if its members are not always given enough to do, Damon’s good-natured, optimistic performance makes up for the loss.īecause, ultimately, it comes back to him. The supporting cast includes Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Sean Bean, Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The script, by Drew Goddard and based on the book by Andy Weir, is surprisingly funny, even though the stakes are never less than life or death.ĭamon is terrific, but this by no means is a one-man show.
Scott directed “Blade Runner” and “Alien,” so you might think he’s going for something similarly heavy here. Buckling down to get started, he utters a line that every teacher should love: “I’m going to have to science the (expletive) out of this.” (Noted scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson has proclaimed on Twitter that it’s his favorite line in the trailer.) He speaks into a camera for a video diary, in case he dies and the next crew will know what happened.
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The balance of the film is spent with Watney - a botanist, handily enough, so he has a leg up in the food-growing department - figuring out how to stay alive and let everyone else know he is, so they can bring him home. You don’t have to be as smart as an astronaut to know that this isn’t good. The next mission to Mars is scheduled to arrive in four years - and no one knows he’s alive. He has enough rations to last 400 days (or “sols,” in NASA terminology). A big storm hits, so big they have to evacuate the planet, but not before Mark Watney (Matt Damon, born to it) gets clobbered by an antenna and is left for dead.Įxcept, he’s not dead, although he might as well be. The film begins with a crew of astronauts on Mars. It probably won’t prevent backward-thinking politicians from continuing to cut critical funding that helps support more of that dang ol’ book learnin,’ but we can always hope.
“The Martian,” Ridley Scott’s enormously entertaining movie about an astronaut stranded on Mars, celebrates science in a way that makes it exciting and useful - life-saving, even. Remember Tom Hanks (playing real-life astronaut Jim Lovell) working out the insanely complex math in “Apollo 13” in seconds to avert disaster? Or, a little less believably, Sandra Bullock relearning and remembering how to fly various spacecraft in “Gravity?” Movies that feature astronauts often go to great lengths to remind us that the men and women who travel into space aren’t just brave, they’re also really smart. It’s nice to imagine people doing the same with “The Martian,” except that every single person in the perpetual line is a science teacher. When “Star Wars” came out in 1977, there were stories of people watching the movie, leaving the theater and getting back in line to see it again.