THE MARTIAN: an entertaining Must See

Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN

The space adventure The Martian delivers what the best big Hollywood movies can offer – a great looking movie that convincingly takes us to a place we’ve never been, inhabited by our favorite movie stars at their most appealing.

In The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a member of a scientific expedition to Mars who is (understandingly) left for dead when his team must make an emergency escape from the Red Planet.  The next manned mission to Mars is scheduled to land four years later 1000 miles away and he only has a four months supply of food, so his chances don’t look promising.  But Mark Watney is a character of irrepressible resilience, with a wicked sense of humor, and he immediately embarks on solving the many individual problems that stand between him and survival.  NASA leadership (Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean and more) and his team en route back to Earth (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Pena) all try to help.

Directed masterfully by Ridley Scott, The Martian pops along and there’s never a dull moment.  It helps that the character of Watney is very funny.

I’m not highly scientifically literate, but the science in The Martian seemed to be at least internally consistent.  I do think that – in real life – the NASA team would have immediately come to the solution thought up in the movie by the geek in the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The awesomely desolate Marscapes are fantastic.  It’s all CGI, but you can’t tell – it looks like it is shot on location.

Here’s why The Martian isn’t a great movie:

  • Other than Damon’s Mark Watney, the other characters are types, getting all of their authentic texture from the performances instead of from the writing.
  • Never for a moment does the audience think there’s any chance that The Martian is really going to kill off Matt Damon.

But, overall,  The Martian is so entertaining, it’s a Must See – even for folks that usually pass on science fiction.

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