An Intelligent Space Thriller

Rating: 8/10 (5 June 2016)

These stories of isolated individuals -- "Castaway", "Robinson Crusoe," "Jeremiah Johnson" -- can be difficult to pull off. They can turn banal in a hurry. Poor Thoreau couldn't do a satisfactory job. "First, I felled the small fir, then adzed the bark and trimmed the mesophyllum into rabbits for the lallies."
"The Martian" pulls it off with aplomb, helped greatly by a courageously demanding script from screenwriter Drew Goddard. A cornucopia of plaudits to the guy, and to Ridley Scott for doing a fine job with the direction, and to the performers who are all at the top of their game, especially Chiwetel Ejiofor as a member of the team back on planet earth. The climax is about as tense as it gets. The musical score, alas, is generic.
The story is pretty well-known by now. Matt Damon is a botanist, part of an exploratory team on Mars, who gets accidentally left behind. He sets about providing a habitat for himself, much in the manner of a test pilot who has run into troubles. As Chuck Yeager has pointed out, the pilot in distress doesn't panic. He just asks, "What do I do next?" It may sound a little boring but it's not. Damon's Martian doesn't despair. He describes exactly what he's doing to a video recording he intends to leave behind as a record if he dies. We are the video recording device. He's pretty chipper throughout. An experiment goes awry and he presents his injured face to the device and says, "Okay. I blew myself up."
About a third of the movie deals with the team back on earth and with the crew of the Hermes, the space craft that left Damon behind. The commander of the Hermes is Jessica Chastain, whom I admire a great deal. It's not just that she's attractive because she's less like a typical Hollywood glamour queen and more like the pretty women ahead of you in the supermarket checkout line. She has a strong jaw but her pale presence suggests fragility, as if one of her long bones might break if she slipped and fell down. I grovel in wonderment at her nose. It assumes a normal tangent from the plane of her face but at its very tip it forms an impudent little outward projection.
Speaking of tangents, that reminds me. Some viewers might find the dialog a little challenging -- velocity in so many meters per second, escape acceleration, "sols" instead of days, Schroedinger's cats or whatever. It didn't bother me a bit. It all sailed completely over my head in the most satisfying way.