The Martian's Saturated Space Frontier is Far From Cinema's Usual Blank Spaces!

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2016)

Space is an endless stretch of deep, unfeeling, obsidian black that swallows up the curious and adventurous and spits them out without remorse. Space is exhilarating, mystifying, and ultimately terrifying - or at least that's what we've been led to believe by space disaster movies. The Martian throws all of that out the window with a wink and a mischievous grin.
Set in the near future, 'The Martian' opens on Mars, where a team led by Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) is wrapping up a month-long space mission. Soon, a fierce sandstorm catches the astronauts out in the open, and they barely make it to the Martian lander that will return them to the orbiting mother ship. But one of them, botanist Mark Watney (Damon), gets hit by a rogue piece of debris. Believing him dead, Lewis has no choice but to take off without him before the storm makes liftoff impossible.
But Mark isn't dead. He awakens to a beeping alarm in his helmet telling him he's almost out of air. He struggles out of the sand in which he is half buried and discovers that he has been skewered by a shard of wind-blown metal and barely makes it into the now unoccupied housing module. Meanwhile, back on earth, NASA and the rest of the world are mourning Mark's loss; at least until satellite surveillance of Mars shows signs of activity at the outpost. Faced with the incredible possibility that Mark is alive, the best minds on the planet get to work on an ambitious plan to bring him home before his supplies run out.
At this point, The Martian could have become just another grim, white-knuckle-tense space disaster movies. Instead, The Martian does something unexpected. It embraces comedy - balancing knuckle-biting suspense with dollops of humor. It presents Watney as a fairly cocky, genuinely funny, easygoing everyman who just happens to be the only living thing on this entire planet. This big screen adaptation (by Drew Goddard) of Andy Weir's best-seller has just about everything: laughs, thrills, visual splendor and a rousing endorsement of the brotherhood. Ridley Scott directs with nerve and verve, delivering an almost perfect piece of popular filmmaking. Bringing optimism, nerd-itude and a touch of crazy to his character's solo ordeal, Matt Damon is the key to the movie's exuberance. Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift, shouldering the weight of the role with diligent grace. In the face of incredible odds, he ensures Mark Watney remains an endlessly charming protagonist. The rest of the supporting cast also pitches in noteworthy performances.
But the Martian's greatest asset is that it remains relentlessly, hopefully human. It takes all the romance out of Mars, but substitutes in its place science, cooperation and perseverance – a fair bargain that results in an intimate sci-fi epic that is smart, spectacular and stirring.