![]() ![]() They adjust timelines, and readjust them. They create mirror sites, replicate his actions, try out possible hacks. Scott assembles an enviable supporting cast - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Mackenzie Davis, Kristen Wiig, and Donald Glover on the ground Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Sebastian Stan, and Aksel Hennie in the air - all of them playing very smart people who will work on the problem and, hell or high water, will solve it. Your mileage may vary, but this viewer gets a particular charge out of fiction preoccupied with the very simple task of dramatizing people doing their jobs who are particularly good at them. And thus the space organization must pull an “eh, not so much” following a public tragedy and state funeral, and figure out how to get this guy home.Īnd it takes some figuring. For reasons frankly never quite explained to my satisfaction, communication with NASA isn’t possible, until a satellite watcher takes note of unexplained movements on the red planet. So there’s your exposition and explanation it also allows welcome shots of humor, via dialogue like, “I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I am the greatest botanist on this planet.”įor much of the first act, The Martian seems to follow the mold of the Zemeckis film - and then it begins to break away. And Damon doesn’t need a volleyball, as the film wisely has Watney keep filing video logs of the mission, ostensibly to document it but presumably to give himself “someone” to talk to. You’re up there with him, and hopefully pulling for him, not unlike Tom Hanks on the desert island in Cast Away. So the casting of Damon in this role is key, not only because he’s credibly smart enough to play a botanist/astronaut/ MacGyver in space, but because usually, his neighborhood-guy likability puts you on his side. In the wrong hands, a line like that - and, frankly, a movie like this - could sink like a stone. There’s one way to stay alive: “I’m gonna have to science the shit outta this.” “Yeah.” And that seems to be that he casually sits down to watch his life tick away, before the turnaround comes. Even if he can establish contact, it’ll take four years to get another crew up there, far less than the oxygen and food on hand. After dragging himself to their base and performing a bit of sweaty self-surgery, he survives - though the duration of that survival is up for grabs. But he’s not he wakes up disoriented, inured, and basically out of oxygen. ![]() He plays Mark Watney, left behind during a manned mission to Mars that goes awry, his commander (Jessica Chastain) and crew assuming he’s dead. It’s tough because the success of the movie he’s ostensibly promoting, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, rests so fully on our engagement with, and admiration of, the actor. That said, the ill-timed PR crash-and-burn campaign currently befalling Matt Damon is particularly unfortunate, and not only because he seemed like such a reasonable and thoughtful guy, before he started white-splaining diversity and advising gay actors to closet it up. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating you’re not just inviting unnecessary peripherals into your viewing experience, but you may very well end up missing some fine films for no good reason. Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat: you can’t judge an actor’s work by the stupid shit they say off-screen.
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