The tale of Robinson Crusoe in space seems natural, because nowhere on Earth evokes desolation, hopelessness and maybe hope more than the black unknown of the cosmos. But then, after Sandra Bullock is set adrift alone in the dark orbit of Gravity, after Matthew McConaughey gets his share of metaphysical brooding in space, what's left for Matt Damon and his director Ridley Scott to ponder about?
With or without water on Mars, The Martian opts for the safe mode of human triumphalism. The film is racked with clichés, but largely because of Damon's presence as a compact ball of energy and optimism, The Martian ends up a passably impressive tale of survival, fired with a curious mix of thrill and humour. Moving away from the sombre existentialism of Gravity and Interstellar and veering closer to the gutsy never-say-never of Cast Away, Scott and his screenwriter Drew Goddard (working from the hit novel by Andrew Weir) alternates between hard facts and light jest, between the need to explain science in plausible manners and the simple excitement (and not entirely plausible) of making an interplanetary adventure. It's also quite funny, in a nerdy way, with the soundtrack consisting of 1980s disco and scientists as a group of cool wunderkinds. Plus you have Kristen Wiig playing a Nasa publicist, perched between cute-kooky and science-serious.
This is not an action film; it's a survival manual for a waterless planet. Damon plays Mark Watney, a botanist on a Mars expedition. When a storm hits their camp, the crew are thrown in panic and hurry to evacuate and in the ensuing confusion Watney is left behind after all his friends, led by Captain Melissa (Jessica Chastain), have made a long journey back to Earth. From there, the film alternates between scenes of Watney stranded on the alien planet as he tries to "science his way" to survive in the inhospitable environment (including growing potatoes) and back in the Nasa headquarters where the executives (Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor) as well as top scientists come together to find a way to bring Watney home -- or at least to send supplies to him -- in what has become a great rescue mission that finally expands to include the Chinese space agency.
In most films set in space (or good films) from Solaris, Space Odyssey to Gravity, cinema proves a conduit that lets us glimpse the unknown wonder -- the beauty and nightmare of the last frontier. Sometimes, it means the limits of our psychical understanding are the beginning of our spiritual exploration. But Scott is such a visceral director, a filmmaker who cares about the body more than the soul, that The Martian is eventually less about space, or about Mars, than about the human will -- down to the most basic question of a man's daily subsistence. The film looks inside, rather than outside and while that's not the idealistic way to regard the cosmos, it serves as a solid backbone for a story.
It's Damon who keeps all the screws in place -- we wait for the film to cut back to him, away from the necessary yet bureaucratic exposition at the Nasa HQ. Although Damon's Mark Watney claims to have maxxed out his scientific knowledge in order to stay alive (the film's best joke comes at the credit, when you actually hear I Will Survive), the character comes across less like a scientific genius who has outsmarted the red planet and more like a dogged contestant in Survivor or Amazing Race, or a home-school handyman who can assemble nifty tools from scrap metal. Watney also talks to the camera a lot -- or into the video log of the expedition -- and while his banter may reduce the gravity of mankind's space disaster, it also reveals something else: that to be lost in space is bad, but not that bad.
