If it gets a generation of seventh-graders fired up about science, I'll happily swallow my nitpicks about overcaffeinated pacing and underdeveloped relationships, wah wah wah.įor those who haven't read Weir's wildly clever and original book, it's almost a spoiler to say there are no cowards or backstabbers or greedheads in The Martian, and precious few tortured pragmatists. But even adjusting for flattery, it's an easy film to love - one so suspenseful and funny and just richly, consistently good, you might get mad at it falling a few astronomical units short of great. It's a lifeline.Īdapted intact by geek-TV veteran Drew Goddard from computer programmer Andy Weir's (initially) self-published novel, The Martian avers that humanity's interplanetary ambassadors - the few up there aboard the Hermes and the many supporting them back here on Earth - will be the noblest, most inventive, most courageous of us.
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When someone decodes a secret message in this movie, it isn't a death order. We will solve this daunting problem by working together, it coos. Bright, thematically can-do, fast-paced almost to a fault, and fundamentally optimistic, The Martian is science fiction of the infinitely more comforting Star Trek strain. The Martian resoundingly rejects all that. Crew Expendable, the secret orders in the ship's computer said. Released just a decade after Neil Armstrong's great leap for mankind, Alien imagined our manifest interplanetary destiny as utterly routine - a mercenary endeavor carried out by working stiffs who don't especially like or trust one another, all on the payroll of a powerful corporation that doesn't blink before sacrificing their lives. Set, respectively, in the 22nd century and, um, 2019, this influential pair shared a vision of the future that can be summed up in one word: But the two that'll have their titles chiseled on his tombstone are still his second and third, Alien and Blade Runner. More a visual stylist than an exponent of any particular worldview, Scott made the feminist road movie Thelma and Louise, the Best Picture-winning swords-and-sandals epic Gladiator, and about 20 other features. That's the rough arithmetic behind The Martian, the feel-good (and real good), NASA-condoned, Damon-powered survival adventure flick from director Ridley Scott.
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The filmmaker who did more than any other to bum us all out about space travel now wants us to feel inspired by it again. Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) faces insurmountable odds as he tries to survive on a hostile planet.Īidan Monaghan/Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox