Eric Berger, however, loved the film and credits Ridley Scott with capturing the thrill of spaceflight and exploration.
This audience gives top marks, with high praise for the visuals—hardly surprising from the director behind Blade Runner, Alien, Prometheus, Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. Just about, and Scott’s film needed a star of that magnitude to play Mark, so you’ll be glad that it’s Matt’s face on Mars.
The most interesting setup in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi survival epic “The Martian” arrives when NASA space explorer Mark Watney, stranded on bone-dry Mars, decides he must grow his own food. His fellow crew members and Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain) believe he is dead and reluctantly leave him behind as they are forced to make an emergency evacuation. Battered but still alive, he dusts himself off, turns on a video camera, and records his experience. Dozens of movies have featured the planet in some capacity over the years.
So yes, the situation is bleak, but the movie rarely is. NASA administrators—Jeff Daniels plays the head, Chiwetel Ejiofor is director of Mars missions—must figure out their next steps as the world watches.
The premise may be creaky, but a good story stands regardless, and this adaptation of Andrew Weir’s bestseller is clever, gripping and surprisingly funny. What it isn’t, though, is as deep as you might expect.
Writer Drew Goddard’s screenplay stays committed to the idea that viewers can connect the dots of the movie and make sense of all the science.
What’s more, they are adaptable, so it doesn’t take an expert to get them to grow and thrive in harsh conditions like those on the Red Planet.
And that’s fine, to a degree. This time, the plot isn’t really eventful or dramatic, and the film could very easily have plateaued in the stretches between explosions (a lot of things blow up in The Martian).
Yeah! Every movie I do I think, “Okay, what am I learning from this?” Of course, unpredictable accidents are always looming to throw a spanner into the works, as Watney must somehow survive four years—the time it will take for the next crew sent to Mars to arrive. After all, it is science fiction. “I’m going to have to science the s- out of this,” Watney quips, and his subsequent one-foot-in-front-of-the-other efforts to feed himself sustainably, prolong battery life and contact home amount to a refreshing tribute to scientific ingenuity.
“As I get older I’m more aware of it,” she said.
It’s not all ideal.
Damon has joked that, if he became boring in his solo sequences as a high-tech, outer space Robinson Crusoe, filmmaker Scott could juice up the action by cutting back to the crew in the spaceship and to the people back on Earth who are concerned with his fate as the story unfolds. Still, it’s a fairly inspiring piece of work, with a final sequence that’s both tense and impressive. Sure, it may not go as deep as it could have, but it’s emotionally honest and rarely, if ever, sentimental.
