[five-star-rating]Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Sean Bean, Aksel Hennie, Sebastian Stan, Daniel Glover[/five-star-rating]
Visually stunning, intellectually intriguing, and emotionally charged, The Martian is a fiercely appealing story of survival. It’s also director Ridley Scott return to form – jettisoning gravitas for entertainment, injecting heart into his pictures again.
It’s all based on Andy Weir’s wonderful best-selling novel. This is the type of adaptation authors probably pray for – smart, tight, and full of life, energy, tension, and humor.
Damon is Mark Watley, a botanist on a mission to Mars. He, his captain Chastain, and their crew (Peña, Mara, Stan, and Hennie) are having fun teasing each other and doing their work when a vicious storm sweeps up. Forced to abandon their camp, the astronauts flee to the capsule to escape. Unfortunately, Watley gets hit by debris and left on Mars for dead.
Imagine what it’d be like on a planet millions of miles from Earth, having to find a way to survive. Being a botanist, Watley immediately works to secure water and food before he explores different ways to contact NASA.
Films like this exist so we can marvel at the human spirit to thrive, and so we can wonder if we’d have the same fortitude.
Honestly, even with his gift for space stories (Aliens) and survival tales (Gladiator), Scott may not be the most obvious director here. Over a decade of commitment to grim, bombastic films (Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings) means that Scott forgot how to be entertaining. In fact, he really hasn’t directed a film with this much charm since 2003’s The Matchstick Men. In The Martian, he’s not scared of showing a little humor or heart; it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable experience, even when things get harrowing.
One of the really good choices was to hire Drew Goddard to adapt the book. Goddard has a gift for creating gratifying scripts – Cabin in the Woods, Cloverfield, and Brad Pitt’s World War Z. He works well within large ideas to find the comedy and the human appeal. He’s done such a skilled job adapting Weir’s book, I wouldn’t be surprised his he gets nominated for an Oscar.
The characters are also solid. Damon has a committed derring-do – at times grim and sarcastic, then proud of his skills to the point of being egotistical. As the head of NASA, Daniels uses the downhome political savvy he shows in TV’s The Newsroom. Wiig gets the rare chance to be dramatic in a smaller role as NASA’s head of marketing. Chastain, Ejiofor, and all of the other actors – and there’s quite a list of well-knowns – signed up. I am assuming they read the book and then Goddard’s excellent script, knew Scott was on board, and then clamored for the opportunity.
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Finally, this film also isn’t afraid of being smart. There are a lot of science-oriented bits; Scott films them well, allowing to movie to be appropriately intellectual without being bogged down. Of course Scott and his go-to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski do wonders with visuals. Sure, some of The Martian will recall Castaway, Apollo 13, and Gravity. But it belongs up on that pedestal with those amazing films – great flicks about survival, inspiring and totally worth repeated viewing.
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