94% on Rotten Tomatoes
Astronaut Mark Watney is left presumed dead on Mars after a storm forces his crew to leave the uninhabitable Red Planet. The only thing: he's not actually dead.
It takes four years for another manned mission to Mars to rescue him, so Watney needs to figure out a way to turn a space hub, designed to last the crew 30 days, into a sustainable home, lasting long enough for him to be rescued.
I was super super excited for this film. The premise is intriguing, the cast is amazing, and the science looked legitimate.
I was so grateful that this ended up being quite good! At last, Ridley Scott is back to form!
Seriously, I was quite worried for Ridley Scott.
Instead of a Prometheus sequel? Thank God!
There were some really great visual shots in the film, which really hammered in how lonely it was for Watney to try to live on an unlivable planet.
Matt Damon as Watney was also amazing. The film had an ensemble cast, but he really pulled the weight of the film. The rest of the cast didn't really need to be there as they didn't do much, but their performances were still great, so I guess you can't really fault it. I guess as well it might be reflective of the theme of the movie (great actors coming together for one film to reflect humanity coming together for one man)? Or that might be a bit of a stretch...
Watney's character is so great. I think it's really easy to have a full on drama when it comes to stories like these. A man is literally stranded on a planet where nothing grows; he is completely alone in unfamiliar territory. It's so easy to take the depression route and go with someone going completely insane and giving up, but Watney's character is so funny and optimistic even in this terrible situation. It's really refreshing.
And while doing this is really risky, I think the film had the perfect balance between humour and drama. The film knows how to make us laugh, but it also knows how to keep us on the edge of our seats.
When I saw the trailer, it looked quite serious, but YouTube commenters were saying that the book was quite funny (with a lot of it being just poop jokes apparently). I expected the film would be sort of funny as well to reflect the novel, but I was still so surprised at just how funny the film was, and how that didn't detract from the seriousness of the film.
There is some great science in the film as well. According to IMDb, NASA was actually consulted so that they would accurately portray space and space travel in the film. Because of this, the mission to Mars in the film actually reflects the missions that NASA is currently planning for the future, with the spacesuits and technology being based on fact, but only modified to "look cool" on screen. Another surprising thing is that apparently to portray NASA in the film, you need to fulfill certain requirements (such as taking the matter of space travel seriously and how NASA handles space issues), and to do this, the writers had to actually add 50 pages of the script to please NASA.
Neil Degrasse Tyson was even a part of this promotional video for The Martian back in August:
So in the end, I think this was a great film about space travel, survival, and the human condition. It was a great watch in the cinemas, with some amazing visual imagery of the Martian terrain, and it had the perfect balance between humour and drama. I think this is a film that everyone would enjoy, from kids to adults, from space nerds to your average Joe. Obviously, understanding a bit more about space would help, but I think they did an okay job at explaining things (even though sometimes I was a bit confused).
A few side notes:
-IMDb says: The writer of the novel, Andy Weir, first published his book for free on his own site as a blog for fun. Then people asked him to put it in a downloadable form, then people asked him to put it on Amazon for Kindle download which he did at the then min price of $0.99.
Man, what a good guy.
A few side notes that sort of contain ~SPOILERS~:
And just for funsies:
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