In The Martian, Matt Damon exhausts his quota of parts in which he is abandoned in alien planets, having suffered the exact same fate in last year's Interstellar (Chris Nolan).
The Martian is the 23th feature film directed by Ridley Scott, of Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) fame, in case you didn’t know. The first and maybe foremost of the flashy/glamour directors to transition from TV advertising/pop clips to the big screen in the late 70s/early 80s, Scott has switched from sci-fi to neo-noir to biblical epics with big budgets and uneven results. Seldom boring, the main purpose of his films (like those of his generational brethren, e.g. Adrian Lyne, Russell Mulcahy or Scott's deceased brother Tony) seems to be to épater le bourgeois.
Watching The Martian, one is adequately epaté. It tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) left for dead in Mars after a sandstorm hits his starship and his shipmates flee the premises, and of the subsequent stretches of ingeniousness he with Houston Ground Control (after discovering Mark didn’t die) assistance goes to to survive against ridiculous odds while a rescue mission is hurriedly prepared (with the help of the Chinese space program; in case you didn’t notice, Chinese actors, cameos and digressions, sometimes, as in this case, blatantly shoehorned, are to be seen increasingly in big budget Hollywood films; that's because China is now the world's second largest movie market, and Hollywood is bending over backwards to package product to maximize box office here, including, depressingly, through self-censorship; although I must note references to democracy, freedom etc in the last Hunger Games instalment were shown here uncensored, at least in the English version). But to come back to the film under review after an inordinately long parenthesis, The Martian is like Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719) meets Galaxy (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) meets Interstellar, sort of.
Ridley Scott (or his films) is to be credited with most of the standard look of contemporary Sci Fi cinema. After the triad 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1967)/Alien/Blade Runner, Sci Fi films have generally looked much the same (the Star Trek franchise excepted, as it has to stay at least half-true to mid 60s pointy-eared hi-tech/psychedelia, and occasional incursions into a more Euro graphic novel inspired style like the one attempted in David Lynch's 1984Dune not nearly enough to break the mainstream mold). Fittingly, considering its authorship, The Martian follows tradition graphically as it tries to match Gravity in spectacle and Interstellar in drama, accomplishing the former but not the latter. The portrayal of Mark´s survival techniques in Mars during the 1st hour or so, especially, is enthralling, especially for fans of hard Sci Fi, whom the silver screen generally ignores, but the fact that we learn 2 3rds through that after all there were provisions already in Mars to prepare for a future planned mission, conveniently prolonging our hero's life expectancy in time for the cheerfully preposterous final rescue, (which includes a “convertible spaceship”, say no more here) slightly belie the dramatic tone, which purports to be adventurous but serious.
But let it be acknowledged that an evening's entertainment to top most and more than par for the course for its author The Martian certainly is, and no more or less.