Like countless stories about shipwrecked mariners building signal fires or sending messages in bottles, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) desperately tried to alert the outside world that he’s alive and in need of rescue. But in The Martian, the outside world is more than 50 million miles away. Mark is an astronaut left for dead after his Mars mission is cut short by a mile-high dust storm.
He awakens the next day, half-buried in red sand with a puncture wound to his abdomen, and trudges to base camp. At first he meets his situation with stoic resignation, but this gives way to determination. “I’m not going to die,” he tells himself on the video log he keeps.
With his stock of food, water and oxygen soon to be exhausted, Mark gets to work. Although the patchy screenplay never explains his endless source of breathable air, Mark finds answers to every other necessity. Less like Robinson Crusoe than the Professor from “Gilligan’s Island,” he comes up with Rube Goldberg solutions, ingeniously creating water and planting potatoes from the base’s larder in the Martian soil, fertilizing them with his own excrement. Would potatoes keep on a four-year journey from Earth to Mars? The Martian never lets doubt get in the way of its story.
Somehow (and this is not well explained either), Mission Control learns of Mark’s survival. Rescue attempts ensue with the inevitable setbacks demanded by Hollywood drama. Learning that Mark lives, his crewmates, led by their wan commander (Jessica Chastain), decide with one voice to risk themselves to recover him—even if it means disobeying orders from NASA, an agency visibly struggling under Congress’ penny-pinching ways. Life and death decisions are easily made in The Martian; the supporting characters are stick figures except for Vincent Kapoor, a multi-ethnic NASA scientist played with depth by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Compared with the majestic vision of the Sandra Bullock thriller Gravity, The Martian’s outer space rescue looks like a Buck Rogers cartoon.
Since The Martian is set circa tomorrow, not in the 22nd century, the story also underestimates the difficulty of interplanetary travel. In the near future, astronauts would voyage in much more cramped conditions than seen here, in years of microgravity, leading to muscular atrophy and reduced bone mass. Mark would not be nearly as buff as shown in the film.
Damon is the picture’s consistently watchable element, conveying his character’s pain, anguish, resolve and courage—as well as maintaining a sense of humor necessary for holding onto sanity in daunting circumstances. The Martian’s landscape, shot largely in Jordan, would be impressive even without 3D. Long ago, the film’s director, Ridley Scott, helped set the direction of science-fiction with two films, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). But like his recent, mediocre Prometheus (2012), The Martian is evidence that Scott has surrendered the future to others.
The Martian
2 and a half stars
Matt Damon
Jessica Chastain
Directed by Ridley Scott
Rated PG-13
