My favourite Martian

As our closest planetary neighbour Mars exerts a fascination over us that can be seen by the response to the recent news that there might be running water on what has previously been characterised as an arid wasteland. To be honest some of that running water might have come in handy for Matt Damon as Mark Watney in Ridley Scott’s handsomely mounted epic The Martian.

Actually, running water or not, Damon manages to make a pretty decent fist of things when he is marooned on Mars. He was struck by flying debris in a Martian sandstorm which threatened the lives of his fellow crew members. Presuming him dead, they took off without him. However a combination of circumstance and biology meant that he survived and woke up a short time later to find himself alone and stranded on Mars.

The premise of the film, as in Andy Weir’s excellent book, is twofold; how does he survive for four years until the next Mars mission, and how does he let NASA know that he is still alive? The solutions to both issues are clever and compelling as Damon makes good on his promise to ‘science the shit’ out of his situation. As indeed he does.

One of the triumphs of Weir’s book was how he made a compelling narrative out of what was essentially a series of very hard sums and lectures on propagation – Watney, by good luck, is the mission botanist. The book is, for the most part, an internal monologue which can be notoriously tricky to film.

Screenwriter Drew Goddard has done an excellent job in constructing a script which drives the narrative without too many exposition dumps. The advent of video diaries is a Godsend to contemporary screenwriters since it allows Goddard to have Damon effectively narrate his way through the film.

It helps that the action is spread between Watney on Mars, the remainder of his former crewmates on their way back to earth, and the NASA executives who are simultaneously trying to find a way to bring him home and avoid a PR disaster.

Again there is a lot of hard science in these scenes but a sprinkling of stardust in the shape of Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kirsten Wiig and an improbably cast Sean Bean make it easier to digest. The film has had a huge amount of cooperation from NASA, which is not surprising considering how well the space agency comes out of it. However there has to be more than science, the film has to have a human core which is where Damon comes in.

There are few more likable screen presences than Damon and I struggle to think of anyone who would have been quite as successful. He has an everyman quality which this role needs; Mark Watney is an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances who has to fall back on his ingenuity, his imagination, and the appliance of science. The secret here is I think that we would all like to by Mark Watney but we know we don’t really stand a chance.

Ridley Scott keeps the action moving along at a fair clip and his regular collaborators Dariusz Wolksi and Pietro Scalia contribute craft skills of the highest order. Wolski’s cinematography is simply stunning – if Mars doesn’t look like this then it should – and Scalia’s editing juggles all the component parts into a smooth and gripping narrative. We know- or at least we hope – that Damon will be rescued but Scalia’s cutting injects appropriate tension into the proceedings.

Apart from one or two slight missteps The Martian is great fun; it’s an old fashioned grown-up adventure with a master filmmaker at the helm. This is really what Hollywood filmmaking should be all about but so frequently isn’t.