★★★½
At the beginning of The Martian, Ridley Scott's fertile and industrious interplanetary adventure, a NASA team on a mission to Mars has to flee the planet's surface when a destructive storm breaks. The commander, Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), tries to walk her crew through the otherworldly swirl of rock and sand, but when one astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), is injured and shows no vital signs, they leave him behind, presumed dead.
Watney, of course, is alive, although when he come to, battered and bleeding, there's already an automated voice warning him "oxygen level critical". As it turns out, that's the least of his problems. The botanist, sent to collect samples, is stranded 11 months' space flight from Earth, with the next mission not due for four years. He has a temporary base, minimal supplies, and an environment that can kill him either terrifyingly fast or cruelly slow.
It's worth pointing out at this point that The Martian is not just the best Ridley Scott film in a long time, but also the most upbeat and entertaining. An update of Robinson Crusoe with empty red expanses instead of sandy beaches, it avoids the strained Biblical portents of 2014's Exodus: Gods and Kings or the untethered machinations of The Counselor, a 2013 film that ended on the jolly note of Brad Pitt being decapitated.
As stranded astronaut Mark Watney, Matt Damon is alone on screen for much of The Martian.
Strip away the setting and scale, and some of Scott's best films have been tales of survival, such as his 1979 breakthrough Alien or 2000 hit Gladiator. Scott responds to the stories of those forced to act decisively at the very limits of their world, such as the female best friends on the run in 1991's Thelma & Louise, and here his always assured production values get behind a purposeful story.
It helps immeasurably that he got the casting right. Damon, when he chooses to, has an everyday durability and sceptical sense of self-deprecation. He's alone on screen for almost the entire movie, speaking to the video log he's keeping, and the actor demonstrates how mordant humour and self-belief are as much a part of staying alive as technical knowledge and scientific innovation.
"I'm going to science the shit out of this," promises Watney, and while there are moments of doubt and reminders of abandonment, The Martian has a yen for constructive problem solving and unauthorised tinkering. Andy Weir's 2011 novel was heavy on technical detail, and screenwriter Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, World War Z) has kept a fair and humorous degree of that: Watney literally smoulders as he recounts one failed experiment to create water through chemistry.
The story ramps up to take in NASA's belated response to Watney's survival, with the agency's director, Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), having to balance humanitarian and institutional needs while overseeing a dedicated mission controller (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a PR spin doctor trying to control expectations (Kristen Wiig, tamped down). The superheroes in this film design payloads on a tight schedule and master slingshot orbits as astrodynamicists.
The Martian reminds us that life beyond our own planet is incredibly tenuous.
Scott skips confidently from science labs to the cabin of the Mars rover, adding in the returning crew, who are naturally beset by guilt at stranding Watney. Unsurprisingly, the icebreaker is played by Michael Pena, who as in Ant-Man, gives his character, pilot Rick Martinez, a warm irreverence that emphasises human bonds without undue melodrama. It's telling that Scott eschews Watney's family for his colleagues – professionalism beyond the usual boundaries is a virtue here.
In 2012's Prometheus, also the story of a space mission, albeit to a not-so-dead planet, the further the film went on, the less sense it made, but The Martian gets Scott back to his understanding of seemingly chaotic systems and the people who can make sense of them. The film's tight assurance makes the lengthy running time move quickly, and while the drama is funnelled down to an obvious conclusion, the storytelling skill is pleasing.
Ridley Scott's picture, like Neal Stephenson's recent outer space survival novel Seveneves, also reminds us that life beyond our own planet is an incredibly tenuous experience where the building blocks of daily survival, such as air and water, are not a given. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar tried to stress a similar belief in preserving our own environment, but it became bogged down at that strange point where spirituality meets quantum physics. The Martian, true to itself, simply gets the job done.