The Martian

Plot synopsis:
At the landing site of the shuttle Ares III, Acidalia Planitia, Mars, at a time in the near future, the crew of the Hermes — including Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon), IT guru Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara), pilot Rick Martinez (Michael Peña), flight surgeon Chris Beck (Sebastian Stan), and navigator and chemist Alex Vogel (Aksel Hennie) — are gathering samples before re-entering their living facility, the HAB.The crew learns that a storm is approaching. The storm's intensity and high winds lead Commander Lewis to order a mission abort. Watney argues for waiting it out and brings up the rear as the crew heads toward the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle), the ship that will take them back to the orbiting Hermes, in their suits. Heavy winds and sand gusts surround them. A satellite dish breaks off and strikes Watney, knocking him out of sight of the rest of the crew. Lewis tries to guide the others to find Watney, but visibility is very poor and the storm is way too strong for them. They head back into the MAV without Watney and lift off. The pilot, Martinez, is barely able to keep the rocket from tipping over.Back on Earth, NASA Director Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) holds a press conference to announce that while the Hermes crew succeeded in leaving Mars, Mark Watney was lost, and he is declared dead.Watney wakes up on Mars on what is Sol 21 (mission day 21) after the storm has passed. His oxygen is depleting rapidly, so he makes his way back to the habitat station. He's been impaled by part of an antenna, which still protrudes from his abdomen — the combination of the antenna and his own blood sealed the suit just enough to keep most of his air from leaking out. Watney pulls the antenna out, uses forceps to fish out a piece that broke off in the wound, then staples the wound shut.He sits down to make a video log, where he outlines the situation: he's alive, but he can't contact Earth or Hermes; it'll be four years before the next manned mission is launched; and with the food supply in the habitat meant for him and the other five crew members, he has almost a year's worth of food, or a little longer if he rations. Therefore, Watney determines that he has to grow three years' worth of food on a planet where nothing grows. Luckily for him, he's a botanist.At NASA in Houston, Texas, Sanders has just returned from a memorial service for Mark Watney, where he spoke about Watney's dedication to exploration. Mars Mission Director Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) talks to Sanders about getting satellite time to locate Watney's body. Sanders refuses on the grounds that the satellite feeds are public and broadcasting pictures of Watney's corpse would be a political and budgetary disaster for NASA. Later, engineer Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) meets with Kapoor after she discovers evidence of activity in satellite photos of the Ares III site (low-resolution images apparently taken in a routine fly-by): the solar panels have been cleaned and the rover has moved. They bring in Sanders and Director of Media Relations Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig) to show them that Watney is still alive.A few sols (Martian days) later, inside the habitat, Watney has planted potatoes using Martian soil and vacuum-sealed packets of the crew's feces as fertilizer (to his disgust). Needing more water for the potato crop, he burns off hydrazine rocket fuel — a byproduct of the reaction is water. On his first attempt to ignite the hydrazine, he causes a moderate explosion, singeing his clothing and hair. Watney notes that this explosive tendency is the reason that NASA does not use pure hydrogen. As he continues to work on his food supply, he keeps going with the video logs and decides to use a rover to make it to the Schiaparelli crater that will be the landing site for Ares IV in four years. Since the battery-powered rover can't cover the whole distance, he modifies it, adding solar cells and an extra battery. To conserve battery power, the pod of plutonium used to get the crew to Mars in their original spacecraft serves as a heat source in the cabin.Watney uses the rover to find a Pathfinder probe that stopped transmitting in 1997; he hopes to use it to get in touch with NASA. He digs the old probe out of the sand, spreads its solar panels to charge the batteries, and discovers that it still works.Using hand-written signs for the Pathfinder's camera, he is able to send a message to NASA confirming that he is alive. Kapoor is able to receive the message because he and colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), who built the Pathfinders, have pulled another Pathfinder out of storage, rounded up the engineers who worked on it, and got it working again. They manage to communicate with Watney, first by panning the Mars Pathfinder's camera to point at 'yes' or 'no' signs when Watney asks if his signal is being received, and then by panning around a hexadecimal clock that Watney has scratched out on the ground around his Pathfinder. NASA uses this system to tell him how to hack the rover's operating system so it can transmit text back to Earth. When Watney, finally able to type his messages chat-style, asks how the Hermes crew took the news that he wasn't dead, Kapoor regretfully tells him that the crew hasn't been told. Watney responds with obscenities (which are broadcast all over the world).Watney's story becomes a worldwide sensation. His communications with NASA are logged, and at the request of PR Director Annie Montrose he uses the Pathfinder's camera to take a spacesuited selfie (in a two-thumbs-up Fonzie pose) which Montrose doesn't like because she can't see his face.Meanwhile, the crew aboard Hermes has spent the last couple of months quietly flying back toward Earth while keeping in touch with their loved ones. The flight director of Ares III, Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean), contacts the crew and informs them that Watney is alive, and that NASA has kept it from them for the last two months so as to not distract them from their mission. The news only makes them angry and guilt-ridden, but Henderson tells them that Watney has stressed repeatedly that it wasn't their fault and they had reason to believe that he was dead.The folks at NASA determine that they can reach Watney by Sol 868. The food he's growing plus the rations in the hab will run out in a bit over 900 days. Sanders frets that the margin of error is too small.Back on Mars, things begin to go bad for Watney when the habitat's worn-out airlock explosively decompresses, throwing the airlock some distance while he's inside it and causing his helmet to crack and leak. He uses duct tape to seal the cracks and stumbles back to the habitat to discover his potato crop frozen and dead. With less food, he now figures he can last only a little more than 300 Sols, or slightly longer if he rations.NASA and JPL work overtime and quickly launch a probe to resupply Watney. To make their launch window they bypass routine inspections, and moments after launching, the probe explodes. Meanwhile in China, two directors from the Chinese National Space Administration, Zhu Tao (Chen Shu) and Guo Ming (Eddy Ko), witness the explosion and discuss helping NASA by offering their classified booster rocket technology to launch a supply craft. Guo Ming asks Zhu Tao why NASA has not already asked for their help and Zhu Tao reminds him that it is a top secret program that NASA would not have any knowledge of. They decide that in the interests of international scientific co-operation, they will contact NASA and offer their booster rocket.Rich Purnell (Donald Glover) an eccentric and absent-minded, but brilliant astrodynamicist, devises a plan to accelerate the returning Hermes around Earth, gaining a gravitational boost and sending it back to Mars to get Watney. The Chinese rocket will resupply the Hermes for its extended voyage. Sanders vetoes this plan because it risks the lives of the five Hermes crewmembers and will extend their mission by hundreds of days, but Henderson secretly sends the plan and Purnell's course calculations to the crew. The crew talks it over; they understand that the surreptitious arrival of the plan means that NASA brass have rejected the idea. They assume that if they go back to Mars, the two military members, Lewis and Martinez, will be court-martialed for mutiny and the three civilians will never be allowed to fly another mission. Lewis calls for a unanimous vote, and they all agree to go back for Watney. Johanssen hacks the Hermes computers to prevent NASA from taking control and they change course, sending a cryptic message to Houston: "Rich Purnell is a steely-eyed missile man."Sanders is angry with Henderson, who he assumes sent the plan to Hermes. Henderson doesn't deny, but will not confirm his actions either. Sanders explains that his priority is for NASA to keep flying, but Congress is very sensitive to public opinion and the bad publicity that would result if Purnell's plan failed would likely reduce NASA's budget for years to come. He asks for Henderson's resignation when the mission is over. Then he's forced to announce that NASA is sending Hermes back to Mars to rescue Watney.Seven months pass on Mars. Watney has lost a lot of weight, has grown a lot of facial hair, and his teeth are rotting. He's started losing hope in his survival and rescue. He records a video log asking Commander Lewis to let his parents know of his fate. He packs up the rover and leaves the Ares III site — having spent 461 sols there — and heads for the Ares IV MAV, which was dropped on Mars well head of the Ares IV mission. It's a 3200-kilometer drive across a trackless and inhospitable Martian landscape. He stops every day for 13 hours to sleep and re-charge the rover's batteries with solar panels. During his excursion, he reasons that Mars is legally international waters — that is, it's subject to the law of the sea because it can't be claimed by any country on Earth. As he has not gotten explicit permission from NASA to take the MAV, and cannot get permission until after taking off, commandeering the MAV will make him a space pirate. He would like to be called Captain Blondbeard.After the Hermes has swung around Earth and collected the supplies, they travel back to Mars. NASA and the rest of the world watch with anticipation; with 12 minutes' delay, no one on Earth can help by radio. Watney has to shed 5000 kg of weight from the MAV to make it light enough to reach Hermes' orbit. He jettisons most of the seats, all the navigation and control systems, and replaces the nose-cone airlock with a tarp.Martinez, flying the MAV by remote control, launches Watney into orbit. The MAV comes up too low to reach the Hermes spaceship. The crew uses a quickly-made sugar and oxygen explosive to blow the front hatch and cause escaping air to slow the huge ship down so they can match speeds and still get to Watney. Lewis herself decides to use the EVA MMA suit with a tether to reach Watney, but she can't get close enough. Watney punctures the finger of his glove to propel himself toward Lewis with the escaping air jet. ("Like Ironman!" he says gleefully.) He has very little control, so he misses her. However, he runs into the tether, which his momentum causes to wind around himself and Lewis, and the crew is able to reel them in. Lewis announces to NASA that they have Watney, and people all over the world cheer. (Crowds have gathered in Houston, Times Square, Beijing, and elsewhere, anxiously waiting to hear whether the rescue worked.) The crew hugs Watney and jokes about the stench resulting from his lack of showering for many months.Back on Earth about one year later, Watney begins Day 1 as an instructor to aspiring astronauts. He tells them of his struggle on Mars, confirming that he did in fact grow food using his own shit. He tells them that if things should go south for them, they can either accept their fate or start solving problems, because that's how you survive — by overcoming one problem after another.During the closing credits, we see the characters years later as they watch the launch of Ares V, in which Martinez is the commander. Kapoor, Montrose, Park, and Sanders watch from NASA along with Guo Ming & Zhu Tau. Henderson is retired and golfing with his son. Lewis watches at home with her husband, while Vogel is at home with his family. Beck and Johanssen have gotten married and watch from the hospital with their new baby.

Tags: humor

Review:
Technically it looks great and it impressive how convincing the surface of Mars looks.In the end we get to the fist-pumping mission control scenes that we all knew were coming, but along the way the film is slickly packaged and entertaining as a result; even if the oft-mentioned scientific validity of it all is not something it ever seems concerned with itself..
The Martian is a new Ridley Scott classic, featuring his best work in years, the best performance I've ever seen from Matt Damon, an outstanding supporting cast, a surprisingly funny screenplay from Daredevil creator Drew Goddard, and a great narrative that ties the film together beautifully.
The Martian is a science fiction film starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott.
Not since Interstellar have I seen a sci-fi movie this thought-provoking or cleverly written.After an intense sandstorm devastates a manned mission to Mars, the crew are forced to abandon the desolate planet and astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead and left stranded.
Matt Damon is perfectly cast as the wisecracking, yet intelligent astronaut Mark Watney and his positive attitude toward his survival is what keeps us invested in the story.
Watney has to defy the odds in order to survive.Ridley Scott is responsible for so many wonderful films, and for many The Martian will sit among them.This is a beautifully made film, it looks incredible, I love the realisation of Mars's surface, truly brilliant, wasn't going to be otherwise with the budget they had.
It has been such a long time since I have been left with that wonderful sense of satisfaction after investing two hours in a really good movie, and this did it 100%I am usually left highly disappointed after watching this genre of film, so I wasn't expecting much.
Something like Gravity I thought, great special affects, dramatic scenes, and an average storyline, but The Martian was a whole different calibre of film and was perfectly constructed from start to finish.
Probably one of the best aspects of the film, is that the mood of the movie is quite optimistic, considering that the situation of being stuck on mars, is quite a scary one, that requires a lot of panic.
Exceptional sci-fi drama from Ridley Scott about an astronaut (Matt Damon) stranded on Mars and the efforts made to rescue him.
Stranded many light years from his home planet, Mark is forced to use his survival training (including fertilising faeces for food!) in order to survive, before managing to contact Earth and bring news of his survival to NASA president Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), who desperately works on Earth with scientist Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to get him home, while re-assuring a frantic public.Having made his name in a landmark sci-fi classic many decades ago, Ridley Scott returns to the genre for a film where the only alien appears to be in human form.
The director oversteps any meaningful character development, and plunges us straight into a story that serves as a lengthier rendition of 2013's Gravity, with elements of Tom Hanks's Cast Away chucked in for good measure.For a film stretching at nearly two and a half hours, it really needed not just an interesting story, but an effective screenplay to match it.
While the 'one man stranded in space' plot still has some life in it, Scott seems overly preoccupied with stuffing Damon's Watson character full of insightful technical jargon and waffle, to reassure us he's highly intelligent and 'NASA's finest', to the point of disconnection.
instead i watched a very dull,predictable and very safe movie,Matt Damon,i really love as an actor but he never got to me,i simply was not taken by his acting,it just did not come across,the surrounding characters were so predictable,the young and beautiful captain,another young chick and a science head...the happy Latino...a German...oh please give me a break,who wrote this,and sorry to say but the name Ridley Scott seems to disappoint me more and more the last years.The scene where his garden gets blown away i saw coming from a mile,the science well,that was nicely done for a 10year your kid,but for me it looked like a Sunday afternoon cable movie,safe and predictable.There were so many things they could have done differently,also the music did nothing good for it.the photography could have been done so much better...i am very disappointed..
'Apollo 13', for example, is a riveting film, but mainly because of its raw material: in 1971, a manned space mission suffered from an explosion and the astronauts were stranded, thousands of miles from help; amazingly, they managed to fix their stricken craft and make it home alive.'The Martian' is a fictional story, but is in some ways Apollo 13-redux.
Simply because the screenwriters wrote it that way.Yet in spite of its faults, the film's basic set up draws you in, and by the (admittedly melodramatic) rescue scenes, one can't help but watch on the edge of one's seat; and keeping an audience interested for over two hours is not such an easy thing to do.
Perhaps the fact that in the real world we've basically given up on manned space travel adds to the appeal: this may be a futuristic story, but at the same time, it also feels like a tale of something we used to do, to boldly go beyond the limits of our planet to see what we might find..
Matt Damon in the title role steals the show using much of wit to his role, avoiding sentimentality, and above all, tries something different than the desolation portrayed by Tom Hanks in Cast Away or Leonardo Di Caprio in "The Revenant." His role is pretty fun filled and amusing; a memorable performance he has given in recent years after 'The Departed." A superb narration, brilliant camera work, and a nice performance definitely make it a smart and entertaining movie of the year though the subject and treatment might not feel a regular Oscar worthy material.Rating: 2.5 stars out of 4.
With Ridley Scott's new film "The Martian" we have an almost identical plot, albeit without the alien involvement.Matt Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney who after a freak Martian storm is left for dead by his colleagues in the NASA crew of the "Hermes" (led by the excellent Jessica Chastain).
By chance, his presence is detected by NASA and the action switches to the NASA team – principally NASA Director Jeff Daniels, Mars mission director Chiwetel Ejiofor, PR lady Kirsten Wiig, JPL specialist Benedict Wong and "Hermes" flight director Sean Bean – and their struggle to save him given the logistical impossibilities involved.I loved this film.
(There's a nice nod and a wink to Bean's involvement in Lord of the Rings as well, which made me chuckle).The film also looks marvelous, with the Mars sets and special effects being spectacular, the Mars spacecraft being beautifully realized, and some very impressive long-duration zero-gravity scenes aboard the "Hermes" that boggle the mind.In retrospect, the film's success might be deemed to be assured given it is an amalgam of some notable film classics of recent times: the spectacle of "Interstellar"; the intrigue of "Moon"; the vacuum-based-perils of "Gravity"; the hopelessness of "Castaway" and the 'world holds its breath' tension of "Apollo 13".
A key factor in maintaining the tension for the running time is that this is a Ridley Scott film: whilst other directors might insist on a 'Hollywood' ending, with Scott at the helm you can never be sure which way the story might twist in the final reel.(And I'm not letting on here).Unlike last year's "Gravity", and the no-doubt accurate but mind-boggling "Interstellar", the science all holds up pretty well (although I did have serious reservations about the robustness of polythene sheeting and duct-tape replacing a door at one point).Harry Gregson-Willams' score apes Jerry Goldsmith's "Alien" a bit in places, but works well and is massively and joyfully supported by a wide range of disco classics, neatly incorporated into the plot.Go see this film, ideally at the cinema and in 3D: I doubt you will be disappointed.
It's a long movie, which manages to keep you on full alert the whole 2.5 hours.The 3D effects are nicely done: the scenes look razor-sharp and realistic: the Martian scenes make one really believe that you're on Mars, the space equipment is also very believable and the camera work is very good.The only thing I found missing was that there was no story at all about the family of the astronaut..
And while everyone does a great job in the movie, the man whose shoulders the film truly rests on is Matt Damon, and he excels in every scene he is in.
The entire cast excels at bringing the audience a fascinating trip not only of the inner-workings of NASA, but of a man's journey of survival as he is left on Mars."I admit it's fatally dangerous, but I'd get to fly around like Iron Man".
In the story, written by Drew Goddard and based on the 2011 novel by Andy Weir, science is the redeemed and the redeemer, the hero and the heroine, the beginning and the end.Shot in 3-D, the film's fictional aspect is established almost immediately when we find out that NASA is actually engaged in space exploration rather than tallying up its budget deficit.
Eventually, Watney finds a way to talk to NASA by using communications devices from the Pathfinder probe, dormant since 1997, but the film provides little insight into Watney's character and he seems to be emotionally unaffected by his plight, telling lame jokes as if he was planting potatoes in his back yard.The more interesting story takes place at Houston's Johnson Space Center where plans are underway to send a probe to Mars to resupply Watney so he can last another several years on the planet, then return to the spacecraft carrying colleagues Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean), Rick Martinez (Michael Peña), Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara), Chris Beck (Sebastian Stan) and Alex Vogel (Aksel Hennie).
As if Matt Damon's inherently vapid acting weren't bad enough, the makers of this film were so overtly focused on presenting an idyllic reality where no character behaves in any offensive way, to anybody, they produced an un-suspenseful, uninteresting, boring, vapid turd of a story.
Another day I read that the average IQ of the human population is falling....A rating of 8 for "The Martian" is proof of that.The Martian is a real bore fest, an uninspired politically correct film filled with the habitual clichés about scientists, race and everything else.I can even ignore the stupid things they showed in the movie (e.g, why remove the roof of a perfectly airtight, functioning Mars rover?) after all not everyone has a PhD in physics or engineering...
During a storm in Mars, the astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is hit by an antenna and presumed dead by his captain and crew that cannot find him.
It will over four years for another manned mission to rescue him, but NASA headquarters, comprised of Sanders and assistants like Vincent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Annie (Kristen Wiig), is determined to bring him back home in a timely fashion.Headquarters is also struggling with the idea of telling the surviving members of the Ares III mission that Watney is alive, which ignites a fiery ethical side to the film's story.
Scott's visual effects and grandscale directing usually never fail, but when these become the focus and human characters and the little touches (the science, the cause-and-effect relationships, and the narrative interest) become secondary or gravely shortchanged, then there's a real issue with his films on a macro level."The Martian," even with its nearly two and a half hour runtime, remains consistently interesting because it's a generally optimistic film, surprisingly enough.
Then there's the roundtable of rich performances here; aside from Damon, who does solid work being the only actor on-screen in his scenes for his sheer honesty mixed with vulnerability, Daniels and Ejiofor work off of each other incredibly well together here.Consider the scene following Ares III's escape from Mars during the storm, when Watney is still presumed dead; the two consult one another about what to do with Watney's remains whilst subsequently trying to find a way to turn it into a more positive, caring PR display by sending another mission out to recover his corpse.
This is a perfect scene in the way that it shows the way corporations and organizations balance humanity while considering their bottom-line, and who better to play figures in those pivotal positions of power than Daniels, who's work on "The Newsroom" has gone on to be acclaimed, and Ejiofor, who, much like David Oyelowo, will likely win an Oscar in the next ten years.Aside from a reliance on montages instead of actual exposition, "The Martian"'s biggest problem as a film is the fact that we simply do not get enough time with Watney alone.
We needed more scenes with Watney ostensibly helpless, trying to farm, or simply trying to get by on what little he has to surround himself and the film doesn't do that."The Martian" also makes fairly strong use of its 3D elements, using it as a tool of immersion rather than a gimmick that works to add a surcharge to already high movie ticket prices.
Consider the storm scene, which completely floods the screen with indiscernible debris and disarray; the scene is only emphasized with the benefit of 3D and makes the experience that much more horrifying, being that, like the characters, we can barely see a thing.Above all, this is a film destined to please a crowd; in addition, it also keeps its pathos down considerably, doesn't do a whole lot of pandering to a crowd anxious to see action, and never loses sight of its deeply human and remarkable story.
I don't know what this movie was supposed to be exactly, an experiment with how boring a one- man survival thing can become or something like that, but it didn't even get CLOSE to what a good movie "cast away" is.
The character development was atrocious - never going into any detail other than their position and title.Matt Damon should not have been casted as Watney as well, the joking and serious side shown in the novel didn't feel authentic in his performance.
The casting was bad, Matt Damon has made a few decent movies but he is no Christian bale, he has very little variance in his character, i mean being stuck out there on another planet you would expect someone to be freaking out,but instead happy clappy Damon is saying he is going to 'science it'.
The film excelled -- was perhaps groundbreaking -- in its look and feel of being in space."The Martian" presents itself as science that could really happen, almost a documentary of this guy's life on Mars.
The scientists who says some foolish things by TV, the another science guy who is making choice between food or his ideas every time, the crew which shows theirs heroism at a very low level, all this will make me not to watch this "masterpiece" again.And just Matt Damon is trying to pull the movie from the abyss.
In the end, you feel like you spend more time watching this movie than Matt Damon spends marooned on Mars.
The premise of the film sees astronaut mark watney stranded on Mars after his crew think he is dead, he has to survive and try to find a way off Mars.
The Martian is a 2015 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and stars Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain and Jeff Daniels.
Set in 2036, The Martian centres on the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut presumed dead and abandoned on Mars after a violent storm separates him from his crew, forcing him to survive for up to four years on the surface of Mars with limited food rations and contact to Earth.
I had some reluctance about sitting down to watch "The Martian" because it is a movie starring Matt Damon.
In my opinion, there are far better movies that revolve around the Red Planet compared to "The Martian".While Matt Damon had the majority of the screen time, then there was a handful of good casts to assist him as well.
-The Martian is a 2015 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon.
As such, at times it almost feels like you've seen the movie before--Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain get lost in space, we get it.Still, the reality is that as much as I want to nitpick at this movie, I just can't really throw anything out there that really greatly takes away from the film.
Many times during this film, I legitimately believed that Mark Watney was a real, living person that was actually stranded on Mars for many months alone.
Many times during this film, I legitimately believed that Mark Watney was a real, living person that was actually stranded on Mars for many months alone.
Matt Damon is incredible in this movie with out a doubt the best performance in a Ridley Scott movie since Russell Crowe in Gladiator and in my opinion should have took home the Oscar for this movie he's amazing with the comedy and the emotion the little moments where his armour starts to crack no you think he wants to give up but he never does, that's what makes Mark Watney such a great protagonist he's easy to get behind and never bores the audience.
Fascinating and enthralling tale of resourcefulness, ingenuity and survival.After a massive storm forces his crew to leave the planet, an astronaut, Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), is marooned on Mars, and presumed dead.
"The Martian" is a Sci-Fi movie in which we watch a manned mission to Mars trying to explore and study it.
We get to see how process works in a crisis, and that's always character-building and interesting (when written well) in a movie; that it's at this level of A-list makes The Martian a special film, and one of Scott's best..