Refreshingly grounded, surprisingly funny and endearingly geeky, Scott’s The Martian is a film with its heart firmly rooted in the “science” of science-fiction. Matt Damon charms and impresses as Mark Watney, a decidedly mediocre astronaut whose expertise in botany does little to inspire his peers. Mistakenly left for dead on Mars after a fierce storm, Mark has a limited amount of supplies – and a possible four years ahead of him before anyone comes to rescue him.
Scott’s movie quickly becomes a metaphor for the American Dream: it’s a film about an underdog working his ass off, and in so doing, inspiring everyone around him. (Not literally around him – they’re 140 million miles away.) Mark’s journey on Mars isn’t filled with the endless, explosion-tacular disasters of Gravity or Interstellar – it’s instead a realistic portrayal of a man planning and thinking and trying and failing. It’s a story about survival, pure and simple.
Or maybe not so simple. Scott delights in showing us the science of what Mark has to do, keeping it realistically but not impenetrably complicated. His celebration of science and knowledge is both inspirational and aspirational, clearly aiming to reignite the passion, idealism and excitement regarding science and space travel that’s too often eclipsed by fantasy or sheer terror. Scott’s characters, even those on Earth, are anxious, cynical and isolated – but Mark’s quest reminds them of the huge potential held not just by the cosmos, but by ourselves.
The theme of planning and plotting sometimes spills into the writing, and The Martian’s emotional cues and Big Message can feel manipulatively plotted. But sometimes celebrating humanity and ingenuity calls for a side order of cheese.