![]() ![]() Even similarities to Apollo 13 and Gravity are shed as an international cast of characters apply themselves to the long-odds cause of trying to save Watney. (It should ruin no one's admiration or appreciation of this bravura filmmaking to learn that these sequences were filmed in a surreally sere desert in the south of Jordan.)Īs NASA and the world become aware that Watney is making his stand on Mars even as his mission mates hurtle back toward Earth, The Martian broadens away from the kind of solitary struggle depicted by Hanks in Castaway and Robert Redford in All Is Lost. Doing so requires a whole string of work-arounds and some arduous travel around a masterfully depicted martian landscape. Both qualities serve Damon admirably here, as Watney is called both to draw upon his dogged psychic resources to stay alive in situ and to calculate which arduous risks he must take to escape his dire predicament. Perfectly cast as Watney is Matt Damon, who exudes a sharp and knowing but unflashy authenticity similar to that of Tom Hanks, but who also authoritatively embodies the man of action à la Jason Bourne. As he picks himself up off the Martian ground and takes stock of what's been left behind at the mission base on which he might maintain himself in that condition, he quickly realizes he faces daunting odds at an outpost whose travel time from Earth is measured not in days but in months. But astronaut Mark Watney is of course alive and kicking. The group's commander (Jessica Chastain, looking magnificently haunted) opts to save her crew (played by Michael Peña, Kate Mara, and Sebastian Stan) and blast off instead of trying to retrieve their presumably dead compatriot amid the hellish hail of gravel that threatens to topple their escape vehicle on the launchpad. ![]() When the explorers are engulfed in a dust storm and must evacuate from Mars, one astronaut becomes separated from the rest as they make their way to the launch module. A marvelously constructed, flawlessly paced drama about a NASA mission to Mars that goes disastrously awry, the film's animating spirit is a mix of can-do-ism and stick-to-itiveness that carries familiar echoes from sunnier times in our national narrative-albeit leavened with a fashionable frisson of mutinous, antibureaucratic irreverence. Okay, maybe you've heard this one before, but here goes: The Martian is just the movie America needs right now. ![]()
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